In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

With the fifth-annual National Preparedness Month now over, I wanted to point out an encouraging statistic regarding corporate and non-profit interest in citizen preparedness both on a national and community level. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s public preparedness efforts have received a good deal of criticism over the past few years. And, in fact, no one has has been more critical (usually constructively) and for longer than I have. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here).

However, it should be acknowledged that educating and engaging the public on emergency preparedness is not an easy task, and there have been definitely positives. One clear plus coming out of the year’s Month was the 3,200 private and non-profit organizations which signed up to be part of the Preparedness Month Coalition and undertook preparedness education activities. That’s up from 1400 last year and 80 in year one. To me, it shows that there is broad (and growing) interest in preparedness among the business and non-profit sectors which the next Administration should build on.

Personally, I would like to see a specific National Preparedness Day established during September to better focus public attention on the topic. Nevertheless, for the past five years National Preparedness Month has been a helpful catalyst for activities in communities around the U.S. Also, as part of the effort this year, Ready.Gov created a blog and solicited contributions from many of the leading folks in the citizen preparedness area. For those interested in the subject, it’s definitely worth checking out the posts.