As an educator, researcher and facilitator, Dr. Alan Bush is committed to supporting students, organizations and cities develop the capacity to make sense of complex conditions & thrive amid uncertainty. Alan’s work on resilience has spanned four continents, and allowed him to work within the social sector, corporations, and in higher education. As an educator, his focus is immersive, community-engaged, project-based courses that allow students to stretch their ambiguity tolerance within a safe-yet-edgy environment. He teaches Planning for Resilient Communities for School of Public Policy in the Urban Planning program, and a range of applied interdisciplinary courses for the Honors College. As a researcher, his work includes an NSF-funded planning grant on resilience to Sea Level Rise in Tampa Bay, and ethnographic field research on indigenous leadership & governance practices for resilience in the Sacred Valley of Peru.
“My journey germinated from growing up in the economically, socially, and ecologically stressed city of Cleveland, where I was inspired to understand the how communities can thrive amid a volatile and uncertain world. Prior to my work in higher education, I worked for over 10 years on projects fostering community resilience. The opportunity to study and work in southern Africa afforded this insight: while the source of disruption for communities can come from the outside, disaster comes from a communities inability to heal. That inability to heal often comes from its internal divisions, silos, fractures, un-examined fears. Resilient communities are ones brave enough to forge relationships across difference. When given the opportunity to build relationships across difference, communities are capable of transforming to respond to emergent challenges and opportunities. I believe that when given the right conditions, individuals and organizations can transform to meet our current challenges. My career has been an exploration in how to create those conditions.
My commitment since has been to help foster resilient communities by fostering relationships: between disparate domains, ideas, communities, institutions. Along the way, this has required me to develop as a project manager, facilitator, researcher, educator, mentor, storyteller. Knowledge is an embodied understanding, the ability to act. Small acts create the relationships, practices, insights, and knowledge that can drive transformation. I have chosen to work within higher education, exploring how best to turn the resources of the university towards supporting transformation. From that vantage point, our leverage for transformation comes from fostering new knowledge through creating the conditions for collaboration.”