Mischa Hill, Emergency Planning and Response Officer at Hackney Council, has written a blog about the importance of emergency planning.

Imagine it’s a hot, summer Tuesday morning. You’ve just hopped on the tube to make your way in for a busy day of work – your volunteer roster is full, your weekly support group is meeting at your venue and you’re preparing for a full day of outreach.

Then, without warning, the power goes out, and everything comes to a grinding halt.

What do you do now? How do you get to work? How do you keep supporting your service users?

For community and voluntary groups, the stakes during an emergency are incredibly high. The community you serve often rely on your vital services and, even more so when things go wrong.

Is your organisation prepared?

Take a moment to ask your team:

•   Do you know what you would do if a power outage, flood, or supplier failure hit tomorrow?
•   Do you have an organisation-wide strategy to manage the situation and ensure you can continue to provide your vital services?
•   Do your staff and volunteers know what to do and how to operate?

If the honest answer is “no,” or “we have a rough idea but nothing written down,” you are not alone. For many organisations, emergency planning often falls to the bottom of a very long to-do list.

That is exactly why we are hosting our upcoming workshop: Be prepared: Planning for an emergency.

This workshop is designed to support you with your planning and network with other like-minded groups.

What to expect from the workshop

Be prepared: Planning for an emergency is a free, interactive virtual session designed specifically for community and voluntary groups. You’ll learn the key things that make organisations resilient and have time to discuss and make a start on your plan.

We’ll help you:

•       Prepare and plan for sudden emergencies: We will walk you through the most likely risks in Hackney that your organisation faces so you can understand the impacts these will have on your staff, volunteers and service users.
•       Protect vital services so you can continue operations: We’ll help you identify your “mission-critical” activities and plan what is needed to keep them running.
•       Collaborate and support local organisations during an emergency: Emergencies have no boundaries, they impact across sectors and require an all of society approach to respond. This workshop is a fantastic opportunity to network with other local groups and share the skills and resources you have to contribute to supporting our Hackney community.

Our vision: ready, capable, connected communities

We believe that true community resilience is the capability to anticipate risks, limit their impacts, and adapt, evolve and grow in the face of turbulent change.

This workshop not only aims to help organisations create practical emergency plans, but also to help build capacity, increase connectedness and foster cooperation; the key ingredients to resilience.

Don’t wait for an emergency to realise you need a plan.

Secure your spot at the Be prepared: Planning for an emergency workshop today, to take your organisation’s resilience to the next level.

Mischa Hill, Emergency Planning and Response Officer, Hackney Council