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Community Planning Fellowship

In an effort to raise awareness and ensure that hazard mitigation is effectively incorporated into future urban and rural planning, the Federal Emergency Management (FEMA)  started the Community Planning Fellowship in 1999.  Open to graduate planning students, the Fellowship program offers the students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with hazard mitigation as an aspect of planning.   The fellowships are intended to: 

• foster the full integration of hazard mitigation principles into the graduate-level curricula of urban, regional, and environmental planning schools;

• continue to encourage the use and application of planning policies, tools, and techniques in reducing the impact of natural hazards in the United States;

• determine how FEMA can best assist communities, regional organizations, and states in developing and maintaining effective hazard mitigation planning programs;

• and explore how FEMA can best integrate planning principles and approaches into its ongoing mitigation initiatives as well as its post-disaster mitigation and recovery efforts.

The MMC Fellowship Selection Committee is chaired by Board member David Godschalk and the members are Timothy Beatley of the University of Virginia, Board member Dennis Mileti, Board member Charles Thornton, and William Wagoner of the Livingston County Department of Planning in Howell, Michigan.  Ann-Margaret Esnard of Cornell University joined the selection committee starting with the 2005-2006 process.  Timothy Beatley was on sabbatical and did not participate in the 2005-2006 selection. 

Each fellowship recipient is provided with funding sufficient to support one year of field research with a FEMA identified community, and independent study with a faculty advisor in the area of local and state hazard mitigation planning.  The fellowships also involve orientation work in Washington, D.C., with FEMA and other federal agencies and participation in the annual summer Natural Hazards Workshop in Boulder, Colorado.

FEMA Community Fellowship Recipients