Advancing Community Resilience Through Innovative Research

Every Level Counts
The well-being of humanity depends on the health and resilience of all levels of the organization—whether individual, familial, communal, or institutional. Each level plays a critical role in creating the conditions for collective success.

Right-Sized Nesting Enables Resilience
Effective systems require appropriate constraints and balanced relationships among their parts. When levels—such as individuals, families, or communities—are skipped or ignored, inefficiency, conflict, or systemic breakdowns emerge. The right-sized balance ensures trust, cooperation, and adaptability.

Bioregional Economies as the Foundation for Global Resilience
To ensure long-term sustainability, our political and economic systems must evolve beyond extractive, profit-driven practices. By prioritizing locally rooted, equitable, and sustainable structures, bioregional economic networks can build a globally interconnected but locally resilient foundation. These networks emphasize local trade and collaboration while engaging broader markets with greater adaptability.

Main Research Areas

Community & Family Resilience

Hypothesis: A solid family base is crucial, but families can’t go it alone. They need “community-level scaffolding”—think tribes, villages, or something like modern intentional communities. Our research asks:

• How do families sustain themselves better when supported by close-knit communities?
• How do these communities support individuals (who themselves must juggle multiple “sub-personalities”)?
• Can we design new forms of “mini-societies” that bring real resilience and deeper happiness for members?

What We’re Doing: Investigating retention rates, happiness metrics, and conflict resolution in existing and newly formed intentional communities.

Methodology: Surveys, interviews, and observational studies in pilot communities.

Expected Outcomes: Practical guidelines for creating (and sustaining) high-trust, high-happiness family-and-community ecosystems.

Bioregional Economics Field Trials

Hypothesis: Global capitalism is big, but big isn’t always better. We suspect humanity may thrive more sustainably when we build strong, interlinked local economies that still “play nice” with larger structures. Our aim:

Local-First Economies: Encouraging businesses, organizations, and individuals to transact “locally by default,” scaling outward only as needed.

Bioregional Identity: Aligning economic incentives with ecological realities—because your watershed knows no corporate boundary.

Climate & Global Commons: We examine how localizing economies can also tackle global issues like Climate Change, using real feedback loops that outsmart the “tragedy of the commons.”

What We’re Doing: Partnering with local businesses and cooperatives to test “local-first” trading systems, monitor resource flows, and measure ecological impact.

Methodology: Economic modeling, comparative analyses between participating and non-participating regions, and real-time community feedback

Expected Outcomes: Evidence of reduced environmental footprint, stronger local job markets, and frameworks for policy recommendations.

Ideological Mapping & Social Cohesion

Hypothesis: Political differences correlate with personality traits and beliefs, and both Left and Right are affected by their upbringing: sometimes differently, sometimes similarly.

• What are the main ideological subgroups within communities, and how do we measure them quickly and accurately?
• Which collaboration attitudes (or stumbling blocks) appear when people hold drastically different worldviews?
• How can we design effective “bridging” projects that unite diverse groups around shared goals?

What We’re Doing: Conducting large-scale surveys to categorize ideological subgroups; piloting bridging workshops where diverse viewpoints collaborate on local projects.

Methodology: Short-form measurement tool validation, mixed-methods approach (quantitative + qualitative).

Expected Outcomes: Tested strategies for community-based conflict resolution, plus validated quick surveys that organizations can use to diagnose local ideological landscapes.

Theory Development: Modeling and Experiments

Planaria & Emergence

Planaria may seem humble, but they pack a punch in the study of group dynamics. Their regenerative abilities and unique cellular makeup offer a fascinating window into how collective organization—and even “superorganism” behavior—might emerge.

Questions

• How does group “fitness” emerge from smaller subunits—be they cells in Planaria or members of a community?
• Can we induce Planaria to behave like a higher-level “superorganism,” and what does that teach us about integrating families and communities?
• What constraints keep lower-level evolvability (like individual freedoms) intact, while still allowing a new, more powerful group level to evolve?

 What we’re doing: We simulate planarian cell interactions to see how cooperation arises, under what constraints rogue cells might be stopped (akin to free-riders in human groups), and whether new, higher-level “organisms” can form.

Methodology: Computational simulations of Planaria or cell-level cooperation, analyzing conditions for emergent higher-level “superorganisms.”

Expected Outcomes: Clarity on how nested structures can form (and persist) while retaining lower-level adaptability—lessons we apply to human communities, too.

Past Projects and Publications

Developing a Multilevel Selection Framework

Outcome: A foundational paper (Clejan, Congleton, & Lerch, 2022, Evolution) that laid out how group “fitness” emerges and predicts evolutionary dynamics.

Lessons Learned: Cooperation becomes a real game-changer when groups effectively protect and share resources, illustrating the emergence of higher-level organization.

Exploratory Study on Genetics & Openness

Outcome: Preliminary findings (soon to be published) linking Big Five “Openness to Experience” with political behaviors, influenced by both genetics and childhood developmental environments.

Lessons Learned: Cultural, historical, and family contexts mold ideology just as much as our genes.

From local to global, from families to flatworms, our research is always about digging into the sweet spot where collaboration outweighs competition. We test ideas through theory, simulation, and real-world projects—committing ourselves to a vision of communities that are close-knit, sustainable, and resilient.

If you’re ready to nerd out with us, or just want to chat about Planaria, feel free to 

get in touch. – link to the contact us form

We’re excited to partner, learn, and take these ideas from theory to thriving practice.