Community Emergency Preparedness Workshop at LSI!

Our local bloom, Living Systems Institute, is dedicated to supporting our neighbors in building place-based resilience through participation in the living systems around us. In the context of increasing social disorder and ecological degradation, I decided to invite preparedness professional and expert El Sealey to deliver their powerful, in-depth 4-hour workshop "Bunker Not Required: Community Emergency Preparedness". This workshop addresses how to be prepared for various kinds of emergencies, with an emphasis on those likely to afflict us given our climate/bioregion, such as wildfires.

The workshop provided guidance, tools, discussion, and insights into how to prepare for three bad days, three bad weeks, and even three bad months. The idea and general principle being: the longer amount of time you may be enduring a disaster without accessing outside help, the more crucial community-scale resources become (like cooperation with neighbors, growing and preserving food, etc.) Each participant individually assessed their readiness across 13 different functional categories: shelter, food, power, etc. Then the participants partnered up in regional small groups to discuss community readiness.

Tickets were offered on a sliding scale basis with none turned away. We had 12 attendees. The event took place at the LSI hub.

This event contributed to the resiliency of our community members and neighbors by equipping us with essential plans and readiness, so we can be assets, rather than liabilities, in the case of a local climate or social emergency. Regenerativity in general is about the resilience to be able to creatively adapt and overcome in the context of disasters, so we believe that we effectively extended the "social regenerativity" factor of our community participants through this workshop.

Participants shared creative ideas, knowledge, skills, and resources with one another in crafting their readiness plans. One person offered to provide their go-bag list, another to consult on first aid kits, and yet another on self-defense and getting comfortable using defensive weapons. Folks who tend LSI-style gardens discussed how to make the gardens' soil more food-productive, and how to reach more of our neighbors with the message that these gardens (and the social interactions/networks required of them) support food security on the whole.

The event on Aug. 3rd was 3 hours long, plus an additional 1-2 hour discussion to expand upon the community planning piece that occurred separately. I'm including it all in claiming a total 4 hour length of the workshop.

Here are more images of the event in action: