Blog | Better Together: Celebrating Regional Resilience Successes
February 2, 2026 | by Annie Bennett
Regional Collaboratives Forum (RCF) celebrates 50th meeting & continued success
These days, the outlook for so much of U.S. climate adaptation policy is in flux. Federal leadership is pulling back critical funding that communities have relied on for resilience work, and in some cases decisionmakers are putting up policy roadblocks to stall or even prevent work to prepare for the impacts of climate change. In this context, it’s worth celebrating resources and institutions that continue to support communities facing droughts that last longer, wildfires that burn larger and longer, and floods that rise higher than ever before.
A few weeks ago, the Regional Collaboratives Forum (RCF), a nationwide network of local climate resilience leaders facilitated by the Georgetown Climate Center in partnership with Farallon Strategies, celebrated its 50th meeting. During that session, participants from across the country shared their proudest achievements from the past year and described their priorities for advancing regional resilience in 2026.
The RCF is not the highest-profile project that GCC facilitates; it’s operated out of the limelight for most of its history. Nevertheless, its longevity is evidence that it serves a unique need in the climate adaptation world, and I’m proud to have been involved in convening these calls from the start. The keys to the Regional Collaboratives Forum’s sustained success can be found right in its name. First, the RCF is unique in its focus on regional cooperation.
Climate threats don’t stop at municipal or county boundaries. With that in mind, more local governments are coming together with their neighbors to explore regional approaches to building climate resilience. In a growing number of regions around the country, local governments and their partners have found that banding together with other nearby towns and cities provides opportunities to do more with fewer resources.
The second word, collaboratives, is really the heart of the RCF’s success. Through collaboration, local elected officials and their staff have built trust with peers and counterparts, fostering more productive relationships. Communities have found effective ways to pool limited resources and rely on shared expertise to achieve more with less. And regional networks have succeeded in crafting regional-scale climate adaptation plans that encourage coordinated approaches to resilience while still respecting local authority over land use planning and decisionmaking.
But organizing and managing and sustaining any cooperative effort, particularly one made up of local governments each with their own priorities, politics, and sometimes competing goals, takes skill, creativity, and experience. So it’s not surprising that the people running these networks — known as regional climate collaboratives (RCCs) — have also found value in sharing their experiences with each other, collaborative-to-collaborative.
That’s where, call after call since 2017, the RCF has really proven its value, providing a place where leaders from all over the country can candidly share the challenges they are facing, and draw insight and inspiration from what others are doing to solve those same issues in other places. The result has been a steady growth in the number and effectiveness of RCCs in all parts of the US. On December’s 50th RCF call, we heard about some really exciting examples.
In the tri-state (Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky) greater Cincinnati region, the Green Umbrella Regional Climate Collaborative launched a new 25 Communities Project, an effort to enlist 25 new local governments in climate adaptation planning. As part of this initiative, the collaborative has organized trainings and workshops and provided consultations to participating communities. Communities also have access to Green Umbrella's Climate Action Fellowship, which places summer fellows in local government offices to support planning and implementation efforts. As a result, the newly engaged communities within the region have begun and advanced climate adaptation planning to various stages — including the creation of new environmental committees within 5 of these local governments.
In Northeast Florida, Resilient First Coast completed its Regional Resilience Action Plan, consisting of 34 actions and 83 sub-actions to be implemented on a regional scale by leveraging the efforts of over 80 partners over the next five years. The collaborative also contributed climate vulnerability assessment data from across the region, which was compiled into a regional Vulnerability Assessment Portal. After data analysis is complete, the collaborative will be able to identify regionally significant trends in climate hazard exposure and vulnerability. This work will better enable communities to identify and propose adaptation projects for inclusion in Florida’s Statewide Flooding and Sea Level Rise Resilience Plan and funding through the Resilient Florida Grant Program.
In Central and Southwest Virginia, the Resilient Virginia Collaborative Alliance (RVCA) is finalizing a roadmap for climate resilience for the region, which will provide a structured framework for coordinated action on resilience by local governments, businesses, and other stakeholders. The RVCA was launched in 2023 in response to a recognition that the vast majority of resilience investments in Virginia to date had concentrated in the coastal areas, leaving the more inland and often rural areas vulnerable and under-resourced. Throughout 2025, the RVCA actively engaged local governments and other stakeholders working within different sectors across the region, which spans 14 Planning District Commissions. In a series of 6 facilitated workshops, RVCA worked with more than 100 participants in-person and virtually to solidify key priorities for advancing social, equity, and climate resilience goals in the region. These priorities are incorporated into the regional roadmap, which is expected to be published in February 2026.
Since the first RCCs emerged, the field has grown significantly — a testament to what can be achieved through collaboration. Collaboratives have weathered significant political and funding shifts at federal and sometimes state and even local levels during this time, providing a stable backbone for regional coordination and local capacity-building. The collaborative concept is nimble: membership, governance, and funding strategies can be adapted depending on how needs, resources, and political realities differ from region to region. This also means that collaboratives can evolve over time to address new challenges, make space for new priorities and partnerships, and adjust the roles they play to fill gaps in regional climate adaptation efforts.
Through the growth in this field and many collaborative evolutions, the Regional Collaboratives Forum has provided a venue for peer learning, camaraderie, and brainstorming around collaborative roles in adaptation. We have seen many collaboratives — both old and new — evolve and learn from the wisdom of the collective field as well as from individual relationships they build through RCF.
In 2025, the Regional Collaboratives Forum offered a critical space for building understanding around regional and local implications of federal policy and funding shifts. Following our milestone 50th meeting, RCF will focus on sharing success stories of replicable regional models that achieve tangible results, like resilience projects on the ground and local policy changes that have been fostered through collaborative action. Regional climate collaboratives continue to demonstrate that together, local governments and their partners can achieve more than they can on their own. I find it inspiring to learn from visionary local leaders each time the RCF gets together. The fact that the RCF continues to draw participation from every corner of the country suggests that those leaders are taking inspiration from each other as well.
Annie Bennett is the Associate Director of Adaptation Programs for GCC.