“In a situation like this there has to be a plan. You can’t make it up on the fly in the middle of a breakdown.”
Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
“Preparedness is not just about having stuff, it’s about reducing the amount of decisions that you’re going to need to make when something is happening.”
No abandonment, No bunkers: preparing for disaster together: Movement Memos Podcast
At SCCAN we’ve been working on how we will manage as an organisation in the context of a crisis similar in scale to the experience of Valencia in 2024 or Germany’s Ahr Valley in 2021. The exam question is something like: what can we do ahead of time to help us continue to operate and support others in the face of an ‘epoch making’ event? We’re calling this work the Valencia Strategy. It’s complex work and not for the faint of heart but, oddly, most of us seem to feel better at the end of the meetings than we did at the start.
As you’ll know contingency planning is extremely hard to find the time for. The thing that’s keeping us on task is the thought that whilst we’re not able to say with any certainty when a crisis will come our way and in what form, it no longer makes sense to assume that it won’t.
How’s it going where you’re working? If your organisation is already well prepared we’d love to hear how it’s going, learn from what you’ve done and share it here. If you’re not off first base then perhaps you too have the prospect of a serious event sitting in the ‘stage left’ of your mind and would find it useful, even reassuring, to bring it into full view and do a bit of planning? As the title of this piece suggests we’re making it up as we go along and thought we’d share how we’re getting on in case it’s useful.
Aims:
- to give ourselves the opportunity to understand what work we need to do ahead of time to establish how we will practically manage, support others and recover in the first working week
- experience and imagine scenarios and how we might feel and respond to them.
- notice and work with our discomfort rather than design it out
- establish a ‘to do’ list and ultimately a plan
- share this work with other organisations
The questions and issues this has thrown up so far:
- How will we know when to ‘call it’, when the moment has arrived and we need to push the button on this plan?
- How will we map which staff are affected and support each other?
- What roles can we determine ahead of time?
- How will we communicate and continue working if communication systems go down?
- What needs to be done in the first four hours, first day, first week?
- What should we be saying to help support members and those we work with?
- Do we need an additional page on the website that we activate as an event unfolds? What about working with local radio etc ahead of time?
- Should we be doing some ‘pre-bunking’ to help folk assess the quality of information that may be circulating?
- What can we learn from others?
- How should we communicate with funders in advance and as an event unfolds?
- Might SCCAN be able and interested in supporting a few staff to practically volunteer in any recovery operation?
- How can we get a budget for this work so that we can equip staff with the means to carry on working if power and/or communications fail?
- What about ‘slow burn’ events that turn into large scale crises?
So far the structure of this work is that have a working group that meets monthly and will conduct a ‘dry run’ in October. We plan to fashion a ‘how to’ guide which we will post on our website. If you have thoughts or plans to you’d be willing for us to include, I’d love to hear from you at rebecca@sccan.scot
Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash