Linn County Disaster Preparedness for NGOs Workshop

Hosted by the ResilientAmerica Roundtable
of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Location:
Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation
Cedar Rapids Foundation Hall
324 3rd Street SE
Cedar Rapids, IA

There is no cost to attend this workshop.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Resilient America Roundtable in partnership with the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation and United Way of East Central Iowa, invite representatives from nonprofit organizations in Linn County to participate in a disaster preparedness workshop on July 12, 2017 from 9:00am – 3:30pm to be held at the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.

This workshop will be led by SF Card (San Francisco Community Agencies Responding to Disaster), which specializes in providing emergency preparedness programs and services tailored to the non-profit sector and faith-based community. Topics to be addressed during this workshop include:

• Incident Command System training and table-top exercise
• Staff readiness training
• Continuing to meet client needs post disaster
• Ideas on sharing neighborhood resources

Registration is limited to 25 people; all others will be placed on a waiting list. We would appreciate only one individual per organization register for this workshop.

We hope you will join us for this exciting opportunity!

Background on the ResilientAmerica program
 
In 2012, the National Research Council released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13457), about critical issues and strategic steps the United States can take to reduce impacts on the nation’s communities from natural and human-induced disasters. The work of the Resilient America program is founded on four key recommendations identified in the 2012 report that communities can take to build resilience:

• Understand and communicate risk;
• Build or strengthen partnerships with community stakeholders;
• Identify or develop ways to measure resilience;
• Share and get access to information, tools, data, and experts needed to build resilience.

The centerpiece of the ResilientAmerica program is its community pilot program which currently works with stakeholders and decision makers in four communities –Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Charleston, South Carolina; Seattle, Washington; and Tulsa, Oklahoma – to identify key priorities of the community; tie those priorities to risks that the community faces; and identify actions that the community can take to build resilience to those risks.  
 
In Cedar Rapids/Linn County, the Roundtable has been working with stakeholders to support local efforts around flood resilience. As part of this work, the Roundtable recently completed a flood resilience study to better understand the community’s baseline flood resilience; identify the community’s flood resilience strengths, challenges, and priorities; and identify areas where the community could take action to better prepare for the next flood or disaster. The Roundtable is now working with its local partners to implement some of these actions. In particular, there is an opportunity to build disaster preparedness capacity within the nonprofit community in Linn County.