Despite rhetoric to the contrary, emergency management thinking often undervalues the role that families and community-based organizations play in preparedness and assumes that disasters produce ‘victims’ too overwhelmed by crisis to contribute to response efforts in a meaningful way.

An alternative viewpoint, which Always Ready subscribes to, emphasizes the importance of communities and local organizations in disaster preparedness and management. Community preparedness and disaster management responds to local problems and needs, capitalizes on local knowledge and expertise, is cost-effective, improves the likelihood of sustainability through genuine ‘ownership’ of projects, strengthens community technical and organizational capacities, and empowers people by enabling them to tackle these and other challenges.

Always Ready works with individual families, neighborhoods, community-based groups, and whole communities to design emergency plans that allow them to reduce the risk of disaster, prepare for disasters most likely to impact them, and build key capacities to respond in the event of a disaster. We use a strategy of “learning by doing” to develop emergency plans to ensure they are internalized and that they truly reflect your family’s, group’s or community’s reality. The planning process involves three central elements:

1. Hazard, vulnerability and asset assessment;
2. Preparation of a core plan and specific contingency plans (as necessary); and
3. Simulation or exercise to test the plan.

The process begins with a participatory (which means you are involved every step of the way) assessment that identifies hazards, vulnerabilities, and assets. We also discuss relevant trends, cycles and shocks that your family or community is likely to experience and familiarize you with resources that you can access to address the priority needs we identify during the planning process.

Once we have helped you come to a clear understanding of where you stand, we develop a plan that builds on your assets (human, physical, social, natural) and lays out a clear set of actions to reduce the highest priority risks. Among its many functions, the completed plan will outline specific responsibilities for family or community members in the event of emergency and clearly delineate actions to be carried out by each person to safeguard your collective well-being. For example, though everybody will share many responsibilities, somebody might be primarily responsible for food while another person is in charge of finding shelter.

With the plan complete, the last step is a controlled exercise to ensure that everybody knows what to do and has the resources and capacity to do it well.