Preparedness Month theme celebrates cultural diversity

National Preparedness Month theme celebrates cultural diversity while highlighting the importance of building resilience for everyone

By Hollie Stark

Outreach Program Manager

What is resilience? How do we define it? And – most importantly – how do we achieve it for our state?

These questions are key as we gear up for National Preparedness Month, a FEMA-led initiative focused on “raising awareness about the importance of preparing for disasters and emergencies that could happen at any time.” In May, we tackled the issue of resilience, responding to a new state requirement. The group of Washington Emergency Management Division employees comprised of the Geohazards and Outreach Program, the Hazard Mitigation Program and our Coastal Resilience Specialist gathered as a newly formed Resilience Unit and brainstormed ideas.

As I sat in a room overlooking the Puget Sound, I thought about my friends and former coworkers in Hawaii who are still recovering from one of the nation’s most deadly wildfires in Lahaina, Maui. The wildfire on Aug. 8, 2023, killed more than 100 people and became a landmark event that will forever shape the way we think about emergency management, from how we do alert and warning to how we prepare for disasters and how we become more resilient in the face of these deadly hazards.

Equitable Resilience

For our newly formed unit, resilience isn’t just a lofty goal, it is a mandate from the state Legislature.

Codified in the Revised Code of Washington, the legislation is a road map of sorts that helps us define resilience and outlines our scope (hint, it is very broad).

So, what is resilience? Well, according to our mandate:

"Resilience means the ability to prepare, mitigate, plan for, withstand, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events and changing conditions, and reorganize in an equitable manner that results in a new and better condition.”

The word that struck me the most when we first read the legislation as a group in May – and the one I feel is just as hard to define as resilience – is equitable. To prepare and mitigate for, respond and recover from disasters in a way that is fair and accessible for all of Washington’s more than 8 million people is no easy task.

It is one that will undoubtedly take not only our team of passionate emergency managers but everyone working together to achieve.

In a recent NBC News story centered on the possibility of a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and subsequent tsunami – what many say has the potential to be the worst disaster in United States history – our director, Robert Ezelle, drove home the idea that in order to survive and recover, we will have to rely on each other.

“It’s going to be neighbors taking care of neighbors,” he said in the article.

Who are our neighbors?

Flash forward to today.

The 2024 theme for September’s National Preparedness Month is “Preparing our Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.”

While this isn’t the first time FEMA has chosen to focus the campaign on a select group of people – past themes have included preparing our Hispanic communities and an entire month focused on preparing our older adults – it does beg the question. Is that equitable?

When I go out into our communities, I often say that preparedness is for everyone, and I stand by that, but that doesn’t mean that everyone prepares the same or has equal access to information, resources, and funding.

In a video posted to YouTube introducing this year’s National Preparedness Month theme, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said that a recent FEMA study indicated that less than 40 percent of those who identify as Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander, believe that preparing can actually help in the event of a disaster.

She added that these communities can face unique barriers when trying to access resources that take their myriad languages, experiences and cultural diversities into consideration.

Watch FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell announce the 2024 National Preparedness Month Theme here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIWIX9dCPHs&t=194s

As we observe National Preparedness Month, I invite everyone to get to know our neighbors in the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in ways that are culturally competent, that celebrate their diverse strengths, and in ways that break down the barriers between them and their ability to prepare for and survive disasters.

Here at the Washington Emergency Management Division, we will be sharing some of our projects that directly touch these populations, offering preparedness tips that truly are for everyone, visiting several of our state’s cities for preparedness expos and continuing to encourage us all to know and love our neighbors so we can truly build resilience that is for everyone.