5 First Steps for a Community Champion

As a Community Champion, you care about where you live and see that it is underprepared for emergencies. You want to start a local emergency preparedness organization that leads the way toward preparedness for you and your fellow community members. Follow our recommended 5 First Steps to get started.

1. Prepare Your Household

This step is part of the foundation of Prepare Your Community, which consists of Household- and Street-Level Readiness.

To prepare your Household, work through each of the 9 Lifelines at the Household Level. Alternatively, you can follow the Prepare in a Year plan, which gives you one readiness activity per month over the course of a year.

2. Work with Neighbors to Ready Your Street

This step is also part of the Foundation of Prepare Your Community.

Reach out to some neighbors to look for interest in implementing the Ready Your Street program on your street. Set up a meeting with all neighbors, distribute the Ready Your Street booklet to everyone, select a Street-Level Meeting Place, create a map of your Street and where utility shutoffs are located, and list each household's human and animal occupants, any special needs, and any emergency-related skills. These skills might include nursing, electrician experience, map-making abilities, or anything that could relate to helping you and your neighbors recover from a disaster.

Find out how to launch the Ready Your Street program here:

3. Make a List of Who You Know in Your Community

This step helps you begin the process of organizing your community. Your list will likely include a wide range of people, from a checker at the grocery store to a doctor to a dog groomer to an Army veteran. The grocery store checker can help connect you to the grocery store owner who might partner with you on post-emergency food distribution. The doctor might be the person who launches your community Medical Reserve Corps. The dog groomer might eventually want to launch your Domestic Animal Care Team. The veteran might know all about logistics and how to organize resources, from supplies to volunteers. You might include a local librarian, a restaurant owner, a neighbor who is a member of a senior center, a teacher, a firefighter, and so on.

Narrow down your list to a manageable number of people for a first meeting. These people will ensure that you don't go on this emergency preparedness journey alone. They will each bring different interests and skills to the table and round out your team.

When you're ready, call a meeting with the group discuss how together you might start a local emergency preparedness organization—your Anytown Prepares.

4. Seek Partnerships with Local Organizations

You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Your most important asset on this journey is people, including people who have already organized around specific causes. The local organizations you might approach include Rotary, the Senior Center, a mountain biking club, the Interfaith Council, the local school district, the Y, a Farmer's Guild. Think about how each of these organizations might play a role in emergency preparedness or partner with your Anytown Prepares organization to address a specific need.

You and your teammates should meet with the leaders of these organizations to see how you might collaborate on increasing your cmmunity's resilience.

5. Encourage Others to Join Ready Your Street

You and your immediate neighbors joined the Ready Your Street program and organized. Now you need to get the next Street over to do the same, and so on and so on. A large number of organized Streets will form the foundation of your Anytown Prepares organization. This foundation will generate informed and resilient citizens. It will produce volunteers for your Anytown Prepares operations.

Celebrate!

If you've followed all our recommendations and accomplished the tasks we set out here, congratulations! Even if you haven't, congratulations are in order if you're taking steps toward preparedness in your community.

What you're doing is so important but it's also very labor intensive. Remember to celebrate your accomplishments. Maybe it's time for a party to acknowledge your fellow volunteers, your partnerships, and the milestones you've reached.

If you've managed to get through all 5 steps, now it's time to move your organization to the next level by taking a deep dive into our other materials and programs. Build more teams, prepare more Disaster Hubs, recruit more volunteers, create more educational programs and materials, tackle more Lifelines, and ready more Streets.

The more you do, the more you will see there is to be done. Remember: You will never achieve complete preparedness. You don't need to. Just keep moving in the right direction, doing the best you can.