Food Resilience Team: Team Development
Depending on your community and its needs, you may decide to create Food Team subteams because there are two very different elements to the food category. One is putting together and storing a food supply for injured people at Disaster Hubs and the other is increasing the community’s resilience through gardens and addressing food insecurity. Both subteams would, however, likely merge for food distribution purposes.
Step 1. Reach out to local farming cooperatives, gardening clubs, and food pantries to recruit volunteers for this team. Also, seek out ex- or active military as they will have experience with building and managing emergency food supplies.
Step 2. Identify a Team Lead.
Step 3. Have volunteers take FEMA IS-100 (An Introduction to the Incident Command System) and IS-700 An Introduction to the National Incident Management System).
Step 4. Launch an education campaign to help community members prepare their households in the food category.
Step 5. Create an emergency food storage supply for each Disaster Hub.
Step 6. Store the emergency food supply in a cool, dry place at each Disaster Hub.
Step 7. Encourage the start of community gardens and P-patches in each neighborhood.
Step 8. Designate a day every year on which you check the emergency food supply at the Hub for soon-to-expire food. Take the soon-to-expire food to your local food bank.
Step 9. Address ongoing food insecurity by supplying your local food bank with fresh food from public farmland, the food forest, and privately owned gardens.
Step 10. Find out if your state has codes that allow for commandeering of assets. Ask your emergency manager or go to the state legislature website and search for keywords like emergency and commandeer. This means that your local government’s emergency manager can take over food stores during extreme scenarios like public emergencies in order to distribute food to people in need. Most larger states don’t have such codes, but they often have some level of activation. Even states that do have these codes, however, will only permit commandeering as a last resort. The problem is that, in a disaster, a lot of food may have expired by the time that last resort determination is made. So, even if commandeering is allowed, which will be managed by your emergency manager, proceed through all the following steps.
Step 11. Identify the local food suppliers in your community. Regardless of whether your state allows for commandeering of assets, you always want to make arrangements with suppliers in advance of an emergency to ensure the process goes smoothly. These suppliers will include restaurants, grocery stores, markets, feed suppliers, community supported farms, food distributors (warehouses), and pet stores.
Step 12. Involve trusted community leaders in the effort. They can serve as ambassadors to the suppliers, helping to explain the mutual benefits of a distribution program.
Step 13. Prioritize the list. The following information gathered for each supplier on the list should help you:
How many other communities they provide for and whether these communities would also be using these resources during an emergency.
How much they have in storage at a time and what types of food they have.
How long their non-perishable food typically lasts and how long a disaster usually lasts in your part of the country.
How far away the store is from the neighborhoods you're trying to protect.
How many generators they have and how powerful they are.
Whether the store is structurally sound and would hold up in a disaster likely in your part of the country.
What variety of food products are being stored.
Step 14. Meet with candidate supplier partners to get a sense of how open they are to cooperation. Invite them to an open house or a presentation in person or online. Use our talking points to help. Establishing relationships at this point is essential to the success of the future agreement, so take your time to make this step effective. Don’t be afraid to reach out. Explain how this arrangement will benefit them as well as the community.
Step 15. Work with local nonprofits to staff the distribution lines. Invite them to emergency training exercises.
Step 16. Work with interested supplier partners and an attorney to begin to draft MOUs. Each MOU will be determined by the partner and their circumstances.
Step 17. Identify potential distribution sites. Churches are often good options because they tend to be adjacent to people’s usual routes. Senior centers are often open to serving as distribution sites. Parking lots are great places to hand out food because they are flat, open, and usually not heavily damaged by a disaster. Stadium parking lots and fields are effective for larger communities.
Step 18. Create rationing protocols. You can prioritize those at high risk (people with disabilities, the elderly, and children), but, as a rule of thumb, you should set up an equal rationing baseline for survival. Once you’ve distributed the baseline survival amount, you can increase the ration equally according to what’s left.
Step 19. Proceed with interested supplier partners to the negotiations stage. Iron out the details of each MOU. Participants in negotiations should include the specific business owners, civic leadership, attorneys, and your preparedness organization.
Step 20. Sign agreements.
Step 21. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for each participating facility. Participants in this developmental stage should include the specific business owners and your preparedness organization.
Step 22. Review and update agreements and SOPs over time as needed.
Step 23. Launch a public farmland program and food forest in the community. Recruit volunteers. Raise money for the effort.
Step 24. Start a gardening education program in your community. Consider partnering with the local library or a local nursery.
Step 25. Develop Standard Operating Procedures for the Food Team.
Step 26. Create an annual plan for the Team and carry out the objectives.
Step 27. Provide annual exercises and training for volunteers.