5 First Steps for a First Responder

As a First Responder, you care about your community and you see that it is underprepared for emergencies. You want to recruit community volunteers to help when your own resources are overwhelmed and you want to engage your local government in preparing your community.

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. Champion an Emergency Preparedness Partnership

Working with your chain of command, share the idea of forming an emergency preparedness partnership in your community. The partnership would consist of your department, your local government, and one or more local organizations, possibly including an Anytown Prepares organization. This partnership would ensure that more resources are corrdinated to serve the needs of your community and would reduce duplication of effort.

4. Synch Emergency Preparedness Plans

Each of the partners in your partnership will likely have its own 1- to 3-year strategic plan. Work to ensure that the plans are synched so that you eliminate duplication of effort and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

5. Launch a High-Visibility Preparedness Project

Once you have leadership buy-in on the emergency preparedness partnership, champion a priority project to advance the partnership's goals. Some examples are a Community Emergency Response Team, a Medical Reserve Corps, a Wildfire Education program, or Stop the Bleed classes.

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 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.