What is Preparedness?

We’re often viewed as a response organization – and we’ll admit that our primary mission is to deliver care for children and relief for families during disasters. But when we’re not hosting epic camps, we’re doing preparedness.

So what does that actually look like? 

Broadly speaking, FEMA defines preparedness as “a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort to ensure effective coordination during incident response.”

I can hear everyone’s collective eyes glazing over about three words into that definition, and there’s validity to that! Preparedness isn’t exactly newsworthy. Unlike when we head out to respond to a wildfire or hurricane or tornado, there aren’t news cameras or headlines about this work. Most of it is zoom meetings, phone calls and emails. It’s a good day when you get to sign a memorandum of understanding with a partner organization, or finalize an annex in an emergency operations plan.

But preparedness work is vital. Without the crush of emails, without the never-ending stream of zooms, communities across the world would face even more devastating outcomes when disasters hit.

For our part, we focus on getting others in the emergency management ecosystem to expand their preparedness work to include explicit plans to meet the needs of children and families during disasters. We’ve broken that work down into a three-step process where we 1) engage with local organizations, agencies and individuals to assess the specific childcare needs of each community; 2) create a plan that meets those needs; and 3) train volunteers to be an emergency childcare force in times of disaster.

It seems simple enough, but it takes a lot of time and effort to engage individual communities in this way. We spend months and even years working to get plans put together to codify emergency childcare in different jurisdictions.

The results, however, are pretty spectacular. We’ve seen first hand how much more streamlined and impactful responses are in places where we’ve done preparedness work. Camps can get stood up quickly to support children and families, and outcomes for the community are vastly improved.

As the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once said, “failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” We take those words to heart.

With gratitude,
Mikey

P.S. We’ve been working closely with the state of California to ensure every Californian is prepared for earthquakes, floods, and wildfires. You can read more about this program here!