How Chatham County Built a Resilience Program That Puts People First

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Meet Jackie Jackson 

02:00 Why Chatham County Started a Resilience Program 

05:40 Defining Resilience at the Human Scale 

10:03 Solar, Code Updates, and the Green Island Conservation Project 

14:07 Building EV Charging Infrastructure Along Evacuation Routes 

22:10 Bringing Underserved Communities to the Table 

27:30 How Chatham County Prioritizes Resilience Projects 

30:29 Advice for Other Georgia Policymakers 

37:56 What’s Giving Jackie Hope

What does resilience actually look like at the county level? For coastal Chatham County, it means thinking about everything from solar panels on government buildings to daycare access, because a single shock, like a hurricane closing local daycares, can ripple through an entire community.

In this Georgia Climate Digest interview, host Eriqah Vincent talks with Jackie Jackson, Resilience Program Administrator for Chatham County. Jackie is a Chatham County native and a biologist by training who spent 30 years in environmental and community planning before helping stand up the county’s first resilience program in 2022.

Why Did Chatham County Start a Resilience Program?

Jackie explains how a decade of major storms along the Georgia coast convinced county leaders to move from reacting to each event toward planning ahead of them, and how that shift led to one of the first roles of its kind for a South Georgia county.

What Does Resilience Mean in Chatham County?

Jackie breaks down how her office defines resilience: helping residents handle shocks and stressors, and come out of them better positioned than before. She walks through how that definition reaches well beyond climate alone, into daycare access, living wages, and food security, all the way down to what she calls the human scale.

From Solar to Storm Buffers: Chatham County’s Resilience Initiatives

Jackie walks through how the program has moved on several fronts since 2022, from installing rooftop solar on 14 municipal buildings to updating codes that hadn’t changed since the 1960s, to the county’s 2025 purchase of Green Island, an undeveloped coastal island now protected from development and used as a storm buffer.

Building EV Charging Infrastructure Along Evacuation Routes

Jackie describes how Chatham County approached electric vehicle infrastructure by starting with charging stations rather than a fleet, why the county sited chargers along hurricane evacuation routes, and how a 2024 storm evacuation made the need for that infrastructure clear.

Bringing Underserved Communities to the Table

Jackie shares how her team worked with Gullah Geechee community members and faith-based leaders to gather input on where infrastructure gets built, using maps and direct questions instead of presenting a finished plan, and why building trust mattered more than any single project.

Building a Program on Partnerships, Not Just Budgets

Jackie explains how Chatham County has grown its resilience work largely without a dedicated budget, leaning instead on partnerships with the military at Hunter Army Airfield, local nonprofits, and area universities, and offers her advice to other Georgia policymakers facing the same funding limitations.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Chatham County created a Resilience Program in 2022, and what problem it was built to solve.
• How Jackie’s office defines resilience, and why it goes beyond climate alone.
• How the county has used rooftop solar, code updates, and land conservation to build resilience.
• Why Chatham County sited its first EV charging infrastructure along hurricane evacuation routes.
• How to bring historically underserved communities into resilience planning in a way that builds real trust.
• Practical advice for local governments trying to start resilience work without a dedicated budget.

Continue reading in our companion blog for more on how Chatham County built its resilience program and what other Georgia communities can learn from it.

Download the Interview Transcript

Prefer to read the conversation instead? Download the complete transcript of this interview to explore Jackie Jackson’s insights on building a resilience program that puts people first.