Emergency Preparedness Basics for Churches

Recently we offered written recommendations to a team responsible to make funding decisions for the next year.

For churches to serve the community following a disaster, they must have a disaster plan, decide what role they will play in a disaster, get free training to understand basic concepts and work with other groups. When disasters happen, once life safety, vital records and property are safe, churches may choose to participate as a one of many stakeholders to serve the community. This reduces duplication of services and helps with cost containment. Churches must be able to remain open or relocate in order to serve effectively.

Form a team and develop a plan. Decide who has authority to activate the plan. Have successors in the event that person can’t serve. A successor amounts to plan B and plan C and does not require a meeting to implement.  There are ready made tip sheets that can guide leaders through developing a plan, but it needs to be unique to your church, parishioners, and community setting.

Identify your churches vulnerabilities.. Begin to address vulnerabilities by prioritizing and funding them in order of importance. Some solutions are free or low cost. Start with nursery through 3^rd grade security, and building access control. Train ushers and greeters to recognize problems and have a policy outlining what to do. We may be able to link this group with a free resource if they need help with that process.

Life safety is most critical. Get your people trained in first aid and take a skills inventory and an equipment inventory-items owned by the church or that individuals are willing to loan to the church to aid in a disaster. Find out what skills equipment you have.

Develop a plan to reunify children with their family following a disaster. There is an excellent free online course through FEMA which results in a pdf certificate. It is an excellent course for youth pastors, Christian education coordinators, or anyone with responsibility for the care of youth or leaders of other programs in the building.

Communication is essential. Many disaster plans fail due to poor communication or a lack of understanding how to coordinate your response with other community groups. Everyone needs to be educated on the plan. They need to know which plan to switch to if plan A fails. For instance, if cell phones don’t work, how will church members communicate? Two good tools are text or twitter. These messages get out when others fail. If the infrastructure is down, only HAM radio will work reliably. All fire stations and emergency management offices have HAM support during disasters.

Humane Work Environments Part 3

Part one and two of this series introduced the concept of a culture of honor. The first recommendation was to use environmental design for optimal wellness. Second, nurture abilities of those with special needs. The next recommendation in this series is to focuses on how succession planning may contribute to a humane environment.

Since 2008 layoffs have become common place. In addition, many companies did not replace employees that changed positions or retired. Therefore workloads often became more oppressive  which leads one to conclude this is not a humane work environment.

Succession planning asks who can fill key positions with little or no notice or ramp up time. It assumes the employee is adequately trained, but is not authorized to step into a roll unless or until the current resource in unavailable to serve. It may be due to a temporary change such as military duty, vacation leave, planned leave or an acute crisis rendering a resource temporarily unable to serve. .

When acute events occur forcing an employee to step down, it can send the management team scrambling for solutions. It is more humane to allow a trained person to step in and continue without disruption than to dump work on employees who are not trained to perform new functions. Succession planning makes it much easier to fill future vacancies, or handle a surge in business. It is not honorable to oppress employees, give them no power over their lives, or perpetuate anxiety caused by poor planning. It is honorable to expect well trained employees to flexibly step in and help out during periods of change. The last topic in this series is on resource management.