5 First Steps for an Elected Official

As an Elected Official, you care about your community and you see that it is underprepared for emergencies. You want to ensure that your local government supports the effort to prepare your community at all levels. 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. Form an Emergency Preparedness Partnership

Your partnership ideally will include your local government, your fire department, any already existing Anytown Prepares emergency readiness organization, and local service organizations like Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, the Interfaith Council, the School District, and the Parks District.

This Partnership will become the foundation of emergency readiness in your community. Read more about Partnerships here:

4. Create a Multiyear Plan for Emergency Response

With your partners, develop a multiyear emergency response plan for the community. Some of your partners, like the School District and Fire Department, may already have their own emergency response plans. In that case, synch up the different plans so that you are all working toward the same goals in the same timeframe without duplicating effort.

5. Launch the Ready Your Street Program

As an elected official, you do not need to be in charge of getting Ready Your Street going in your community. But you can help by recruiting a high-energy Community Champion to lead the effort.

You can help bolster the effort by launching a community proclamation marking the current year as the Year of Emergency Preparedness. This proclamation will raise citizens' awareness of the need and the work going into addressing the need.

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.