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Community Preparedness Toolkit

Toolkit Overview

The Community Preparedness Toolkit provides step-by-step directions along with useful resources for making your community, safer, more resilient, and better prepared. The Community Preparedness Toolkit can be used to develop a community-based approach to preparedness, such as a Citizen Corps Council. Citizen Corps is FEMA's grassroots strategy to bring together government and community leaders to involve citizens in all-hazards emergency preparedness and resilience. Citizen Corps asks you to embrace the personal responsibility to be prepared; to get training in first aid and emergency skills; and to volunteer to support local emergency responders, disaster relief, and community safety.

Use the navigation menu to the right to click through the steps. Useful resources are provided at the bottom of many pages. If you have questions or feedback, please email citizencorps@dhs.gov.

Community Preparedness: The Facts

Research on preparedness shows that people who believe themselves “prepared” for disasters often aren’t as prepared as they think. Forty percent of survey respondents did not have household plans, 80 percent had not conducted home evacuation drills, and nearly 60 percent did not know their community’s evacuation routes. 

Nearly 20 percent of survey respondents reported having a disability that would affect their capacity to respond to an emergency situation, but shockingly only one out of four of them had made arrangements specific to their disability to help them respond safely in the event of an emergency.

Our nation’s emergency managers, firefighters, law enforcement officers, EMT/paramedics, and other emergency responders do an incredible job of keeping us safe, but they can’t do it alone.   We must all embrace our individual responsibility to be prepared – in doing so, we contribute to the safety and security of the nation as well. 

Becoming more prepared in case of an emergency is easier than you might think.  Whether it’s your home, your neighborhood, your place of business, or your school, you can take a few simple steps to prepare your community. This toolkit gives you the basics for getting started.

 

 

Continue to Getting Started