As governments grapple with increased risks associated with more frequent and impactful disasters, climate change, social inequity, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, questions about resilience take on greater urgency. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strive for science to be beneficial to society. In 2012, the National Academies released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps the United States could take towards building disaster resilience. A new program, the Resilient America Program, was created as an outgrowth of that report. Its core mission is to partner with communities across the nation to help decision-makers identify key priorities for their community; tie those priorities to relevant risks; and identify actions that build resilience to those risks. The Resilient America Program is a novel program of the National Academies; it employs a hands-on approach to bring science into decision-making by working directly with decision-makers to test approaches for communicating and managing risk, measuring resilience, building community partnerships, and sharing relevant resilience information.