URAG’s methodology has been driven by the reality of our position as an unpaid group of volunteer professionals organizationally limited to working from our home base in the US. This has led to a focus on producing guidelines and training programs to build the capacity of planners in government, academia, and private practice.

Asking volunteers to commit themselves to long-term and high-quality input requires allowing them to focus on the topics that they know best and are most motivated to spend their valuable personal time on. The guidelines topics and organization reflect this reality to some extent.

In developing the guidelines, we have leveraged ourselves by partnering, respecting, and working closely with the Ukrainian people, government, and private firms. More significantly, several members of the URAG team that prepared this guideline are students or former students from Ukraine, now based in the US or Europe, many of whose studies were supported by US State Department educational grant programs, i.e. the Fulbright, Humphrey, and Muskie programs. We used the USD 4,000 grant from the APA Divisions Council Research Grant to pay for the services of two of these Ukrainians, one in the US and one in Ukraine, to conduct research and prepare sections on specific topics.

In addition to our Ukrainian staff, our team included members of APA’s International Division, Sustainable Communities Division, Hazard Mitigation, and Disaster Recovery Division, as well as URAG members representing other organizations, including inputs from the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) and Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for Ukraine. All co-authors and reviewers are listed for each main document section and appendix module.

For very few subtopics in this guideline, where our team had less time to conduct primary research, we used AI for a first pass of literature search, almost exclusively to identify and provide brief summaries of relevant documents that we then carefully reviewed and validated. In any event, the URAG website will solicit review and comment on this guideline, with particular interest in the Ukraine context relevant to each section of the guideline.