The problem: In many places, people living at the lower end of the socio-economic pyramid have to deal with socio-economic and environmental challenges. These challenges include inadequate access to finance, unemployment, youth emigration to cities, insufficient access to water for agriculture, high energy costs, and the erosion of cultural identity, all of which impede socio-economic development. As an example, to empower the community in Yazd, Iran and catalyze development in the Yazd region we propose to realize the Yazd Zoroastrian Cultural and Heritage Resort. Business plan: We propose a Community Empowerment through Eco-Design (CEED) framework for stakeholders (federal and local governments, entrepreneurs, community) to use in identifying and deploying policies, monitoring the impact of policy implementation, and adapting policies over time. In CEED we focus on empowering the community. This not only enhances the ownership and acceptance of interventions but also fosters a sense of collective responsibility for the environment and future well-being. One outcome from CEED is a business plan for sustainable resilience. This paper: Our aim, in writing this paper, is to foster dialog in the design community to address open research issues identified in Sect. 4. Hence, in the context of realizing the Yazd Zoroastrian Cultural and Heritage Resort, we provide a conceptual description of the CEED framework and three tools for designing the business model, namely, the Dilemma Triangle, System Dynamics and the compromise Decision Support Problem. The CEED framework, as envisaged, must be generalizable, that is, designers can use the framework to identify and deploy policies, monitor the impact of policy implementation, and adapt policies over time to move towards “Designing a Business Plan for Sustainable Resilience” that leads to research collaboration among faculty in the Systems Realization Laboratory at OU and faculty (particularly in India) who are interested in promoting sustainable socio-economic development.