A Message to Our Community: The CRA Will Not Be Resuming Operations
Posted June 23, 2026
After nearly three months of deliberate work to find a viable path forward, the California Resiliency Alliance’s (CRA) Board of Directors has made the hard decision to begin winding down the organization. The CRA will not be re-emerging from its Operational Pause.
We want to be direct with our community about why, and what comes next.
What the CRA Set Out to Do — And How It Evolved
Since 2009, the CRA has evolved alongside California’s changing risk landscape. The CRA’s origins trace to the aftermath of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and major California wildfires, when communities across the nation began to recognize the critical interdependencies between public and private sectors — and how poorly equipped existing structures were to bridge them. The Business Executives for National Security (BENS) responded by launching regional public-private partnership councils across the U.S., and the devastating 2007 Southern California wildfires gave these early California efforts new urgency, laying the foundation for what would become the CRA.
In its earliest form, the CRA was oriented around response coordination — helping connect private sector resources with public sector response when disasters struck. Over time, as the state built out its Business Operations Center, the CRA’s focus shifted to a “new” gap where the CRA could add the most distinctive value — upstream: in the planning, analysis, and cross-sector knowledge-sharing that shapes how organizations prepare and plan.
That evolution led the CRA to deliberately reposition itself as a neutral connector and provider of contextualized resilience information — not an alerting authority, not a response coordinator, not a single-hazard advocate. By the time of the operational pause, the CRA had built a nearly decade long body of work helping practitioners across emergency management, business continuity, public health, physical security, and cybersecurity see the broader picture to better support their organizations and communities: surfacing emerging risks, translating complex and fragmented information into usable insights, and bridging the silos that too often leave planners making decisions on incomplete understanding.
Our stakeholder survey earlier this year reflected the value of that positioning: readership across the CRA briefs ran between 80% and 97%, and a strong majority of subscribers reported forwarding CRA materials to colleagues and their own networks — meaning the CRA’s reach extended well beyond its 1,200+ direct subscribers. We are proud of what the organization became. We are also clear-eyed about the gap its absence will leave.
Why We Could Not Find a Path Forward
Financial sustainability
The CRA occupies a genuinely unusual position in the resilience ecosystem — neutral, cross-sector, and focused on planning and decision support rather than response coordination or single-hazard advocacy. That positioning is part of what made the CRA valuable. It is also part of what made it difficult to fund.
The CRA does not fit neatly into existing funding categories. We are not a government agency, a trade association, or a single-sector advocacy organization. We don’t fit the category slots of most philanthropic funders which are usually oriented toward direct service or specific issues. And while our subscriber base is large, a paid subscription model alone — as our survey reaffirmed — is neither sufficient nor consistent with our belief that resilience professionals should have access to trusted, cross-sector information regardless of their organization’s budget.
During the operational pause, we pursued multiple tracks in parallel: seeking to develop a funders consortium, restructuring paid subscription tiers, and engaging potential supporters. Some pledges of funding came in, and we are genuinely grateful for those expressions of confidence. But they were not sufficient to establish a path of financial sustainability.
The broader funding climate has also compounded these structural challenges. Federal funding disruptions, shifting philanthropic priorities, and the increasing financial pressures facing both public agencies and private organizations have made this an exceptionally difficult environment in which to build funding relationships. The CRA sits at a unique nexus, but that same positioning means it does not map cleanly onto the priorities of any single funder. That is a gap in the funding ecosystem as much as it is a CRA challenge.
Operational sustainability
The CRA cannot sustainably continue with a staff of one. The risk and information environment that the CRA exists to navigate has grown significantly more complex making it harder to monitor signals within an ever-noisier information landscape. Producing timely, contextualized briefs across the breadth of topics our subscribers rely on — wildfires, supply chains, infectious disease, infrastructure disruptions, and their cascading intersections — requires more capacity than a single person can sustain at the standard our subscribers deserve. And that does not begin to account for the other half of the CRA’s work: helping bring a cross-sector voice to planning initiatives, exercises, and convenings across California.
Without the ability to add staff, we face an unavoidable and worsening mismatch between what the work demands and what we can deliver. That mismatch is not something the Board is willing to paper over.
A Note to Those Who Tried to Help
To the individuals and organizations who submitted pledges, made introductions, shared our work, or simply reached out to express that the CRA mattered to them — thank you. That support came at a moment when it meant a great deal, and it reflects exactly the kind of cross-sector investment in shared resilience capacity that we always believed was essential. We are sorry we could not make it work.
What Comes Next
The wind-down process will take time to complete, and we will communicate with our stakeholders as key milestones are reached. In the meantime, we are developing a ‘How to Stay Informed’ guide that will share the key resources, feeds, and organizations the CRA has relied on — including connections to entities such as the State Business Operations Center and Regional Fusion Centers — so that subscribers have a practical reference for continuing the work of staying informed and building resilience.
The CRA website and its resources will remain accessible for as long as practically possible during the wind-down period. Questions about the wind-down process can be directed to Monika Stoeffl, via the Contact Us form.
A Final Thought
The risks that made the CRA necessary have not diminished. California’s resilience ecosystem still depends on professionals across sectors who are willing to see the broader picture, examine their assumptions, and plan with greater clarity. It is our hope that perhaps through the CRA’s absence, a new iteration can emerge to continue the work of bridging across the sectors.
It has been a genuine privilege to serve this community. Thank you for being part of it.
Monika Stoeffl and the CRA Board of Directors
