Think for a moment: If your home were facing an imminent threat of flood, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, blizzard, ice storm, or some other disaster:
- On a scale of 1-10, how prepared are you and your family to shelter in place for a few days, without utilities?
- On a scale of 1-10, how prepared are you and your family to flee your home within 10 minutes (or less!), knowing you have what you need to stay away, maybe even never to return?
If you don’t think your answer is a great one, it may not surprise you. You may have been watching the news lately of the disasters around the world and thinking, “We’d be devasted if that happened to our family.” And as you rated your answers, I hope you said somewhere in the back of your mind, “I should do something about this.”
September is National Preparedness Month, but we don’t have to try very hard to see that emergencies and disasters come up year round. So, one month a year, there’s a national effort to have people focus on the approaches that best help protect ourselves and our families in the event of an emergency.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that this is a real passion of mine. I believe that being organized is one of the best ways to help you and your family get through an emergency, and I believe that we need to focus on how to do that at a time when we’re not in peril. We can’t predict everything, and we can’t prevent a lot of things. All we can do is prepare.
So, I decided this year to launch a Clever Girl Organizing Challenge to help those of you out there who could benefit from some tightening up in this important area.
This Challenge is going to be separated into 5 parts, starting September 1, with a new theme each Monday throughout the month. I’ll post about 18-20 posts during the month of September to help you think about how to start making improvements in your own preparations.
Phase 1: Assess Your Risk
Phase 2: Create Your Plan
Phase 3: Gather Your Preparations
Phase 4: Practice and Maintain
Phase 5: Build your Skills
In addition to the posts, I’ll be hosting conversations in the Clever Girl Organizing Challenge Facebook Group to help people talk about where they’re at in their preparations, and encourage people from around the country to share their best practices, ask questions of each other, and support each other as we all make strides in this effort. (Sharing pictures is even better!!) If you’re not already a member, consider joining. And if you are a member, consider changing your newsfeed preferences to “See First”, so you don’t miss out on the conversation!
Not convinced you need to do much? Disaster won’t happen to you?
Take 4 minutes to watch this message from FEMA.
(link working now!)
Encourage your friends and family to join us… be sure to sign up for the mailing list and to share this on Facebook and let’s get everyone closer to being organized, prepared and safe!
Join in the conversation over at the Clever Girl Organizing Challenge Facebook Group to learn from and to teach others as we all take on the Let’s Get Prepared! Challenge!
Reminder: Our goal here is to take steps towards improvement. The content in these posts is designed to inspire thinking, not fear.
Thank you for doing this! I think with all the natural devastation that’s happened recently we all need to take steps and precautions to protect our families. So excited to prep!
Completely agree, Robyn! It’s been hard to watch the news the past few weeks and not be facing some story of devastation. And hurricane season is heating up! Glad you’ll be with us… thanks for coming along!