Public Health Responses Without a Reliable Federal Partner

If your community has a really bad day, will help be coming? If it isn’t coming, how can your town work together to survive a pandemic, an earthquake, a flood, a windstorm, or worse?  Each of our panelists will provide three high-impact and actionable methods for recruiting, organizing, and sustaining a corps of volunteers and community nonprofits. We will take your questions about how they work and why they work. We also want you to offer your own lessons learned from your communities. This interactive workshop-style session will advance everyone’s local resilience-building in an age when we must plan for no help coming — except the help we give ourselves.

Our panel members led the three-year VashonBePrepared activation for the pandemic. Our nearly 100% volunteer and nonprofit effort attracted nationwide attention for its effectiveness. We planned for an earthquake or severe weather, but we got a pandemic. Our training on the principles of the Incident Command System got us cracking, and within three weeks we had 80 volunteers at work taking care of our community. Testing. Vaccination. Contact tracing. Saturation public health education. Tens of thousands of meals delivered to homes. Help for residents to file for aid. Helping businesses recover and reopen. Mental health care to get our neighbors through the nightmare. We raised $750,000 dollars for a relief fund in a community of 11,000 people with only average income. We saved our town despite 22% unemployment, with 40% of our local businesses shuttered or going broke. 

For more about this panel, click on the photos.