Emergency Preparedness Meeting Ideas: 21 Activities to Engage & Inspire Your Neighborhood Volunteers (Survival Guide Series)

Dear Neighborhood Emergency Response Group Leader, How are you doing in your efforts to build a volunteer team? Struggling? In a slump? Over the past 15+ years I have been in each of those places with my own neighborhood group. But with some help from friends just when it was needed, we’ve kept our group alive and active. After all that effort, it just made sense to put what I’ve learned into a book so it could help other groups. This is the result! Emergency Preparedness Meeting Ideasoffers 21 meeting ideas on a range of topics. Pick one that fits your group’s interests and skills, or the time of the year, or a looming threat. Pick a meeting activity that will be fun, serious or surprising. If you have had CERT training, feel free to add some of that material. Note that these meetings are not part of the CERT curriculum. Rather, they are for regular citizens who may or may not have had any formal training but who care about their families and their neighbors. In any case, each meeting is fully developed. You can find one you like and use it for your very next meeting. Or, perhaps even better, hand it off to someone else on your team and let THAT person use it for your next meeting! Emergency Preparedness Meeting Ideas pulls together all the skills and experience I’ve had in a career as writer, marketer, trainer – and CERT volunteer. Add to that what I’ve learned from the hundreds of meetings I’ve planned or helped plan with professional organizations and my own neighbors. With that as background, I’ve fleshed out each meeting idea with Topic, Goal, Procedure, Materials needed and Comments. Sample checklists and diagrams are augmented with links to additional resources. Plus, there’s a Meeting Planner Page at the end of each activity that makes it easy to organize each meeting -- and to assign volunteer roles. Some of the meeting ideas can be repeated. Most are meant to be customized or expanded upon. Whatever your needs, you can put the workbook to work immediately to plan your very next meeting. (Add it to one of our other Neighborhood Disaster Survival Guides and you will have an entire blueprint for building a neighborhood preparedness group!) These activities are meant to train, to entertain, and to inspire citizen volunteers to simply be as prepared as possible at all times. We subscribe to the belief that “The more we all know the better off we all will be!”