New Film Highlights the Benefits of “Radically Local” Preparedness

A powerful new short film showcases the preparedness efforts of South Whidbey Prepares, one of Prepare Your Community’s early adopters. The Regenerative Power of Community shows how South Whidbey residents are not only preparing for emergencies but also enhancing their community.

The film opens with residents practicing using GMRS radios (walkie-talkies) to communicate after an imagined earthquake and then shows them holding neighborhood meetings and talking about radio use, emergency signs, and where utility shutoffs are located.

One resident says, “The reason for bringing people together is to focus us on this in a way that’s about community building, more than about how much food do you have put by, or how are we doing on water capture. It’s an invitation to go radically local. Being neighborhood-defined enables me to appreciate the contribution of everybody in the neighborhood. I’m not living out there. I’m living here.”

Another resident says, “If this disaster never happens, the effort that’s been put into this by the people involved is well worth it, just for the health of the neighborhood on a day-to-day basis.”

The organization of the neighborhoods on Whidbey is carried out by 209 “champions,” without hierarchy. One neighbor says, “We don’t have a top-down approach.” Instead, the champions gather periodically in meetings, a significant portion of which are devoted to what a resident describes as “people sitting in a circle and helping each other with whatever obstacle that may have hit their neighborhood.”

In the film, Terra Anderson, one of the founders of South Whidbey Prepares (SWP), says, “We beings of the human sort need contact, and our culture has been moving away from that.” Another resident adds, “I think there are much bigger problems in society right now, and I actually think that maybe our lack of connection at the neighborhood level has something to do with that, is connected to things that are happening at the national level.”

The residents of South Whidbey see their renewed neighborhood connections as meaning they will be resilient “whatever comes, whether it’s weird weather, whether it’s an economic disaster, whether it’s a physical Mother Nature disaster. We are resilient in community, much more so than isolated.”

The film was made by Thriving Communities, an organization that started on Whidbey and is dedicated to helping communities across the nation tell their stories through film, with a particular emphasis on stories about underserved or marginalized communities.

The film launched on Whidbey during the three-day ThrivingFest.

Watch the film here:

Featured image shows a gathering of South Whidbey Prepares.