Advancing Responsible Growth, Resilience and Sustainability Across South Carolina Communities: A Case Study from the City of Greenwood
What Responsible Growth, Resilience and Sustainability Mean for South Carolina Communities
South Carolina is now the fastest-growing state in the nation. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2025 estimates show the state added nearly 80,000 residents in a single year, a 1.5 percent increase, driven overwhelmingly by people moving in from out-of-state. That growth is not confined to the coast. Upstate manufacturing corridors, Midlands suburbs and small towns across the state are all absorbing new residents, new rooftops, and new demand on roads, water systems and emergency services at a pace few local governments were built to handle.
Responsible growth, resilience and sustainability planning are three ways of answering the same question: how does a community keep pace with growth without passing an unmanageable bill, or an unmanageable risk, to the residents who come after? Responsible growth focuses development where infrastructure already exists, mixes land uses so people can live closer to jobs and services, and preserves the open land and rural character that, once paved over, cannot be recovered. Resilience planning reduces a community's exposure to flooding, extreme weather, and other climate stress, and keeps essential services running when disaster strikes. Sustainability planning further supports these efforts by examining long-term priorities and ensuring that development decisions improve environmental health and human well-being, alongside economic prosperity.
Many South Carolina communities are managing stormwater systems designed decades ago, for a smaller, less-paved footprint and a milder rainfall record than the one now on the books. The South Carolina Office of Resilience was created for exactly this reason, and its statewide resilience planning work reflects a growing recognition, throughout South Carolina, that flooding, heat, and infrastructure strain are no longer isolated events but ongoing conditions local governments must plan around.
Addressing the converging challenges requires planning and deliberate action. Turning these principles into an adopted plan, and an adopted plan into practice, takes technical capacity that many South Carolina communities are stretched too thin to build on their own. That is the gap Sustain SC and Furman University’s Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities work to close, partnering directly with local governments and other community stakeholders to advance responsible growth, resilience and sustainability to match community needs.
Case Study: How Greenwood is Moving from Risk to Readiness
A cross-sector partnership between Sustain SC, Furman University's Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities, and VisionGreenwood.
The Catalyst
The impacts of Hurricane Helene in fall 2024 were deeply felt in the Greenwood community, disrupting daily life and slowing business operations across the county due to power outages and downed, trees obstructing travel and damaging homes. That shared experience became the catalyst for a new kind of collaboration. In the summer of 2025, VisionGreenwood, a local nonprofit, began conversations with community leaders on sustainability and long-term resilience, discussing ideas and listening for how organizations across Greenwood were already addressing these issues. The momentum from those conversations culminated in the establishment of the Greenwood Resilience and Sustainability Council (GRSC), a resiliency planning initiative developed for Greenwood with the potential to inform similar efforts across South Carolina.
Sustain SC as Convener and Connector
Sustain SC, VisionGreenwood and Velux, an international manufacturer whose primary production and administrative facility for North America is located in Greenwood, came together early to shape a strategy for this work, pairing VisionGreenwood and Velux’s local standing with Sustain SC's experience convening cross-sector partnerships across the state. Sustain SC used the moment to bring statewide partners into the room such as the SC Department of Commerce and inviting others like the South Carolina Office of Resilience (SCOR) to present during the working sessions. Giving Greenwood participants a direct line to state-level resilience planning and resources they would not otherwise have easily accessed. It is a good example of a role Sustain SC can play in almost any community it works with: connecting local efforts to the state agencies, technical resources and funding streams that a single city or county often does not have the bandwidth to track down on its own.
As that strategy took shape, Furman University's Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities joined in to add the technical and facilitation expertise needed to move from conversation to identifying priority actions that would prepare Greenwood for resilience challenges to come. From there, the partners divided the work along their respective strengths: Sustain SC, VisionGreenwood and Velux leading relationship-building and stakeholder coordination, and the Shi Institute facilitating workshops and data analysis that would ultimately lead to a roadmap for action.
Much of Sustain SC's contribution happened before a single workshop was held. Sustain SC coordinated with VisionGreenwood and Velux to bring the business community and other stakeholders to the table, which included mapping who held the capacity and interest to move the resilience efforts forward, so the Council could launch with the right mix of voices already in the room.
Furman’s Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities: Translating Insights to Action
To harness the momentum towards tangible action, the Shi Institute led two facilitated workshops, held March 26 and April 30, 2026, designed to move participants from understanding local challenges to specific, actionable initiatives.
In addition to workshop design and facilitation, the Shi Institute conducted an extensive analysis of community plans, reviewing seven existing municipal, county, and community plans, coding 482 distinct actions and 269 concerns against a framework of 50 resilience concerns, including “shocks” (sudden disruptive events) and “stressors” (long-term trends). That inventory was then compared against SCOR's Strategic Statewide Resilience and Risk Reduction Plan to identify where Greenwood's existing plans aligned with state-level priorities, and where gaps remained. Together, the plan review and the two workshops gave the Council a shared, data-grounded picture of where it might catalyze new action and where it could play a supporting role to accelerate resilience actions already planned in their community.
From Analysis to Direction: Two Examples
The plan analysis revealed extreme heat as a gap area in existing community plans. SCOR ranks extreme heat as the top inland hazard facing the region, projecting more than 50 additional days above 95°F annually by 2100, yet it had little representation in the Greenwood plans that were examined. Workshop participants prioritized two responses: 1) identify potential sites for cooling stations and resilience hubs, leveraging existing community assets like faith-based institutions and community centers rather than building new facilities from scratch; and 2) engage local groups to plant trees and expand green space in the neighborhoods carrying the greatest heat burden. Now that heat vulnerability is better understood, and actions prioritized, the work is in the hands of Vision Greenwood, and the newly formed Council, to move these actions from workable initiatives to action.
The Shi Institute’s plan analysis found that economic development concerns showed the opposite dynamic compared to extreme heat. A financial or economic crisis was the most frequently cited concern across all seven plans reviewed. Recognizing that the plans already prioritized diversifying economic development approaches, workshop participants determined that the wise approach for the Council would be to condense duplicative action items, particularly around mixed-use development, and play a supportive role more than a catalytic one. Moving forward, the Council chose not to pursue new action around economic development and instead help align interests, create efficiencies, support existing community priorities.
What This Partnership Demonstrates
Each partner in Greenwood brought something distinct. VisionGreenwood brought local context, relationships, credibility and the initial energy to get leaders talking. Private industry brought urgency and resources. The Shi Institute brought subject matter expertise, research capacity and facilitation expertise, Sustain SC served as the connective tissue that helped all of it work together: building the relationships that got the business community and other stakeholders to the table.
Looking Ahead
The Council's work is still in its early stages, and the phased plan created by the Shi Institute was written to reflect that. In its first phase, the report suggest that the Council form focused Action Teams around its three priority areas and three gap areas, so members can pursue the near-term, high-visibility wins identified in the workshops before more complex, longer-term work begins. As that work matures, particularly once it moves into assessing local vulnerabilities in greater technical depth, the Shi Institute’s report suggests that the Council transition into Asset Teams organized around the community's core pillars: built environment, natural systems, economic development and community and public health. That shift towards asset-based teams will again call for the kind of cross-teams collaboration that has been the hallmark of the early resilience effort in Greenwood.
The Shi Institute’s report to Council also identified opportunities to strengthen the work through additional capacity building. Workshop participants emphasized the need to broaden representation—particularly from city and county staff, utility providers, and underserved communities whose perspectives have not yet been fully reflected in Council discussions. With expanded participation, especially from local government, portions of the GRSC’s findings and recommendations could be incorporated into Greenwood County’s upcoming Comprehensive Plan update. This will be the County’s first comprehensive plan to include a resilience element under South Carolina law, giving the Council a natural entry point to build capacity and ensure its priorities are carried forward into the formal planning process—supporting future resilience work that is inclusive, collaborative, and data‑driven.
Just as important, the partnership itself, a local nonprofit's convening power, a company’s leadership, the Shi Institute’s technical expertise, state agency resources, and Sustain SC's ability to weave it all together, offers a template other South Carolina communities can adapt to their own circumstances.
Bring This Work to More Communities
Greenwood is one community's example of what deliberate, cross-sector planning can look like. It depended on partners coming together: local leadership willing to convene difficult conversations, a technical partner able to turn local knowledge into a rigorous plan, and a convener able to hold the relationships and logistics together for a plan to be put into place. Any South Carolina city, county or regional council can build that same foundation.
Sustain SC and Furman University's Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities are ready to bring this partnership to communities across the state. Together, we convene local government, community members, the business community and other stakeholders around a shared, honest picture of the growth, resilience and sustainability challenges specific to a place, then facilitate the workshops and plan review needed to turn that shared understanding into a clear set of priorities.
The result is not a generic template. It is an action-oriented roadmap of cross-sector, collaborative actions grounded in a community's own plans, data and priorities, built by the people who will be responsible for carrying it out. That roadmap can stand on its own, and it can also directly support the development of a community's comprehensive plan if the right stakeholders come to the table. Since 2020, South Carolina law has required comprehensive plans to include a resilience element, and this same process can inform that element throughout related sections such as land use, economic development, housing and transportation, giving a community a running start that will position the community for long-term thriving.
If your community is ready to start this conversation, Sustain SC and the Shi Institute would welcome the opportunity to begin it with you.