A Planned Pause — and a Look at What’s Next
May 15, 2026 Update
The operational pause is doing what it was designed to do: creating the space to make deliberate decisions rather than reactive ones. The next few months are critical for CRA. We are working with clear eyes about the challenges ahead, and with genuine determination to find a path forward that leads to a stronger, more sustainable organization.
Where the Pause is Taking Us
A deliberate step back to assess and reorient, is not inaction, it is often the most strategic move available. That is what this pause is for CRA, and here is what is coming out of it.
Sharpening Our Focus: The survey results are directly shaping how we are refining CRA’s goals and objectives. We are building on that — tightening our focus on the areas where CRA adds the most distinctive value and where the resilience community has the fewest alternatives.
Building a Sustainable Financial Foundation: CRA’s current funding model is not sufficient to sustain the work long-term, and a paid subscription model alone is not the answer — nor would it be consistent with our belief that resilience professionals should have access to trusted, cross-sector information regardless of their organization’s budget. We are pursuing two parallel tracks. The first is establishing a funders consortium — a group of organizations making multi-year commitments of approximately $50,000 each per year who share the conviction that a well-informed resilience ecosystem benefits everyone. The resilience ecosystem is interdependent: even well-resourced organizations depend on the decisions of smaller jurisdictions, nonprofits, and supply chain partners who may not have equivalent analytical capacity. Investing in that broader ecosystem is risk management, not philanthropy. If your organization — perhaps through its charitable giving arm — might be interested in consortium participation, or if you know of someone that should be in this conversation, please reach out to Monika Stoeffl. The second track is restructuring our paid subscription tiers, streamlining the options and bringing pricing to a range our subscribers identified as more feasible, while keeping the core tier no-cost.
Staff Capacity — The Linchpin: We will be direct: CRA’s current staffing level of one person is not sufficient to sustain our work at the scope and quality our subscribers deserve. Expanding our team is not a long-term aspiration — it is an immediate operational necessity, and it is directly tied to securing the financial foundation we are working to build. In parallel, we are making deliberate choices about our portfolio — assessing each brief and activity against our current capacity, the changing threat landscape, and what our subscribers told us matters most. We will be transparent about any changes as they are finalized. The financial and staffing tracks are linked — which is why we are pursuing both with urgency.
We will be honest: the financial and staffing challenges CRA faces are real, and resolving them is not a certainty. What we can say is that we are pursuing this work with urgency and intention — and that the resilience community’s engagement, whether as a funders consortium member, a paid subscriber, or simply an advocate who shares our work, is part of what makes a sustainable path possible.
New and Recent Resources on the CRA Website
While the pause has affected much of the CRA’s work, some aspects such as prior speaking commitments have continued. We have posted overviews of three recent conference presentations to the CRA website:
Information Supply Chains — presented at the Continuity Insights Conference
Research & Analysis Bootcamp — presented at the California Emergency Services Association (CESA) Conference
The Myth of the Monolithic Private Sector: Strategies for Better Engagement and Collaboration — presented at the California Emergency Services Association (CESA) Conference
As a reminder, we have also posted the 11 discussion 1-pagers examining cross-sector impacts of the upcoming FIFA World Cup. You can read more about the World Cup events in California and access the full collection on our post: FIFA World Cup: Thinking About Cross-Sector Impacts.
Keeping the Learning Going on LinkedIn
Each week during the pause, CRA is sharing an archived mini exercise scenario or knowledge tidbit on our LinkedIn page — practical, thought-provoking content to keep resilience thinking front and center. If you are not already following us, we encourage you to do so and to share the content with your colleagues and networks.
CRA exists because there is a genuine gap in the resilience ecosystem that we are uniquely positioned to fill. Whether we are able to continue filling it depends on what the next few months make possible. We are committed to being transparent with our subscribers as that picture becomes clearer. This process is better when we hear from our community. If you have ideas, feedback, or questions, we want to know. Let us know via the Contact Us page.
April 17, 2026 Update
We are grateful to everyone who completed the CRA Stakeholder Survey — your input has been invaluable, and we want to share what we heard and where it is taking us.
What the Survey Told Us
Engagement with CRA products is strong. Across all briefs and resources, regular readership runs between 80% and 97%, with Other Incident/Situation Updates leading at 97%, followed by Seasonal Wildfire Briefs (89%), Monthly Mini Exercise Scenarios (87%), and County Updates (87%). Clearly, the content is reaching people and being used.
How subscribers use CRA materials is equally telling. The top uses are building personal professional awareness (82%), forwarding or sharing content with colleagues and networks (80%), preparing briefings for leadership (62%), and supporting plans, strategies, and assessments (62%). This tells us CRA is functioning not just as a resource for individuals, but as a trusted source that professionals are actively passing up and across their organizations.
On strategic priorities, subscribers were asked to rank focus areas across two dimensions. In the area of “helping resilience professionals better understand risk and make more informed decisions”, surfacing emerging risks and early warning signals before they appear in formal planning ranked as the top priority, followed by building awareness of how risks, systems, and sectors are interconnected across California. In the area of “connecting professionals across sectors and integrating cross-sector perspectives into planning”, respondents ranked all three focus areas closely, with no single one pulling clearly ahead.
Refining Our Goals and Objectives
The survey results are directly shaping how we are refining CRA’s goals and objectives during the pause. The strong signal around early warning and emerging risk surfaces an important insight: CRA’s value is not just in synthesizing what is known, but in helping practitioners see around corners — identifying what is not yet on the radar of formal planning processes. Alongside this, the near-equal weight subscribers placed on cross-sector connection reinforces that CRA’s neutral, multi-sector positioning is not incidental to our mission — it is central to it. We are working to sharpen our goals and objectives to better reflect both of these priorities, and will share more as that work develops.
A New Funding Structure
The survey also confirmed what we suspected: a paid subscription model alone is not a viable or equitable path forward. More importantly, it would contradict a core CRA value — that professionals responsible for organizational and community resilience should have access to trusted, cross-sector information regardless of their organization’s budget.
With that in mind, we are restructuring our paid subscription tiers, streamlining the options and bringing pricing into a range that better reflects what subscribers identified as feasible. The core subscriber tier will remain no-cost.
We are also working to establish a small funders consortium — a group of organizations who share the conviction that resilience information should not be restricted to pay-to-play systems. Consortium members would make a multi-year commitment in the range of $30,000–$60,000 per year. In return, their support would allow CRA to expand its staff capacity and deepen its ability to serve the broader resilience ecosystem.
The case for a funders consortium rests on a straightforward reality: as critical data and analytical resources increasingly move behind paywalls, organizations with deeper pockets gain disproportionate access to the information that shapes effective planning. Smaller jurisdictions, nonprofits, and businesses without equivalent resources are left planning with less. But the resilience ecosystem is interdependent — even well-resourced organizations rely on the decisions of public agencies, utilities, neighboring jurisdictions, and supply chain partners who may not have the same analytical capacity. Investing in the broader ecosystem is not philanthropy. It is risk management.
CRA occupies a rare position in this space — neutral, cross-sector, and focused on planning and decision support rather than response coordination or single-hazard advocacy. That positioning is increasingly essential as hazard complexity grows. Sustaining it requires a stable, multi-year foundation.
We will have more to share on both the restructured subscription tiers and the funders consortium in the coming weeks. If your organization is interested in learning more about consortium participation, please reach out directly.
March 31, 2026 Update
This week marks an important milestone in the CRA’s planning process: our stakeholder surveys are now live. We are collecting input from CRA subscribers, from professionals who access CRA materials through colleagues and networks, and from practitioners across the resilience and nonprofit funding fields. The surveys cover how CRA materials are being used, which strategic priorities should guide the CRA’s work going forward, and which funding and operational models could support a sustainable future for the organization.
To those who have already taken the time to complete the survey — thank you. Your willingness to engage with the hard questions this survey asks — about strategy, priorities, and sustainability — reflects exactly the kind of community the CRA was built to serve. All surveys close Friday, April 3 at 11:59 PM — if you haven’t completed yours yet, there is still time.
Over the coming week, the CRA team will be reviewing responses as they come in and conducting a fuller analysis following the close of the survey period. Findings will inform both the multi-year strategy currently in development and the CRA’s funding and organizational planning. We’ll share a summary of key themes and takeaways — drawn from aggregated, anonymized responses — with the community as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency throughout this process.
Original Post – March 17, 2026
The California Resiliency Alliance (CRA) exists because the information problems at the heart of resilience failures are real and consequential. When planners and decision-makers work from incomplete pictures—fragmented data, outdated assumptions, limited visibility into how risks cascade across sectors—the plans they build are more brittle than they appear. The CRA’s work is to help close those gaps: making sense of complex risk information, surfacing what’s emerging before it’s fully visible, and connecting people across the sector divides to strengthen overall resilience.
In 2025 alone, that work looked like this:
The CRA published over 100 regular situational awareness briefs spanning supply chain disruptions, infectious disease, cyber threats, and climate-driven hazards — including more than 60 knowledge tidbits helping practitioners understand the science behind the hazards they plan for.
Our monthly mini exercise scenarios brief delivered more than 65 scenarios to planning and continuity professionals across sectors, covering everything from AI-facilitated insider threats to post-wildfire infrastructure failures.
We launched a new monthly Cyber Data Breach Brief to help organizations track emerging exposure patterns across California.
We co-authored 3 additional facilitator guides for the HayWired Earthquake Scenario Toolkit and co-facilitated resilience workshops using the Toolkit, including a session tailored for Los Angeles County’s emergency volunteer organizations.
We contributed cross-sector perspectives to the Los Angeles Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) exercise series and the San Francisco Fleet Week exercise series.
We presented on Information Supply Chains at the California Emergency Services Association Conference — and when the material landed, the Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative invited a repeat presentation for their Emergency Management Working Group.
We engaged with resilience and security communities at the Bay Area UASI Summit, Los Angeles and San Francisco Fleet Week Senior Leaders Seminars, the Sacramento InfraGard Cybersecurity Summit, and the Northern California InfraGard Food and Agriculture Symposium — helping bridge across the sectors.
None of that work happened by accident. It happened because the CRA’s tiny staff of one, showed up consistently, with a clear sense of mission, across a complex and fast-moving risk landscape, for the organizations and communities that depend on that kind of sustained attention.
Today, the CRA itself is navigating a challenge—one we think is worth being direct about.
What’s Happening
Effective March 21, 2026, the CRA has undertaken a three-month operational pause. During this period, we have temporarily suspended publication of our weekly briefs and other regular subscriber content.
The reason is straightforward: the CRA’s current operating model is not financially and operationally sustainable, and continuing at the existing pace while also doing the serious work of addressing that is not realistic. So we have chosen to pause, create the space to think clearly, and build a foundation that can support this work long-term.
This decision reflects months of honest assessment by the CRA’s Board of Directors and a recognition that the organization’s ambitions—and the needs of the communities we serve—require a more durable structure than what currently exists. The pause is not a retreat—it’s an investment in getting this right.
For answers to common questions about the pause, please visit our FAQ page.
What We’ll Be Doing
During the pause, the CRA will focus on several interconnected priorities:
Identifying a sustainable funding and organizational model. This means evaluating revenue strategies, organizational structures, and partnership models that can support the CRA’s mission over the long term—not just sustain current operations, but enable the work to grow.
Understanding how the CRA’s work is used. We will be engaging subscribers, partners, and other stakeholders to learn how CRA materials are being used, where they provide the most value, and where gaps remain. That input will directly shape what comes next.
Refining a multi-year strategy. The CRA has been developing plans to deepen its analytical work, expand its global information network, and build more intentional cross-sector connections across California. The pause creates the time to align those plans with a viable operational model.
Where We’re Headed
The risk landscape the CRA exists to address is not getting simpler. Climate-driven hazards, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and systemic interdependencies are compounding in ways that make cross-sector sense-making more important—not less. The organizations and communities navigating this environment need better tools, better information, and better connections across the sectors that too often plan in isolation.
That is the work the CRA is here to do. The operational pause is our commitment to ensuring we can do it well, and sustain it.
Achieving that vision will require building a stable funding base in the range of several hundred thousand dollars annually — a realistic target for a nonprofit of this scope, but one that requires deliberate and sustained development.
We intend to resume operations after the pause. When we do, we aim to return with a clearer strategic direction, a stronger organizational foundation, and a sharper sense of where the CRA can have the greatest impact.
A Note to Current Subscribers
If you are a current CRA subscriber, you will have received a direct email from us. If you have questions or did not receive that message, please reach our Executive Director, Monika Stoeffl.
If you are aware of foundations, agencies, or organizations that might be interested in supporting the CRA’s mission, we welcome the connection. Please reach out to Monika Stoeffl at mstoeffl [@] CAresiliency.org.
Stay Connected
We will share updates on this website as our planning progresses. Whether you’d like to be notified when we resume, are interested in subscribing, have perspectives to share, or represent an organization interested in supporting or partnering with the CRA — we’d welcome hearing from you. Please get in touch with us.
