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Welcome To The Center for Community Disaster Preparedness & Response

Welcome to jimmau.com (a.k.a. The Center for Community Disaster Preparedness & Response)

Our goal here is to promote Community Emergency & Disaster Response Programs (CERPs), EComms, and the health of the Citizen Responder.

What is now simply jimmau.com was originally begun as The Center for Community Disaster Preparedness & Response (CCDP&R) in 1998 as a project to promote Community Emergency Response programs (CERPs) such as CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service).

The internet and websites were not what they are today so the main promotional vehicle for the project at that time was to be an industry like trade magazine known as Amateur Rescuer. But it turned out that I was not very good at publishing a magazine and so with the sale of the company I was a partner in and with a long distance relocation following, the project was at that point basically shelved for some uncertain future date.

Now, some twenty plus years later, with a vocational retirement, the opportunity to take that project off of the shelf once again presents itself.

Many things have changed since those early days. Since 1993, when CERT became a part of FEMA, there are as of 2022 CERT programs in all 50 states and territories consisting of over 2,700 local CERT programs and more than 600,000 people trained. Today, there is even a National CERT Association founded as a non-profit organization in 2019 to assist communities in the establishment of their local CERT program.

While the Center will promote Community Emergency Response programs (e.g. CERT/ARES), the primary focus of the Center will be the physical, mental, and spiritual fitness of the citizen responder who chose to not just take the trainings offered by these programs, but chose to actively participate in their ongoing operations.

One of the tenets of CERT is ‘One helping many’ when professional first responders are overwhelmed during a community wide disaster situation. But it is also recognized that each citizen responder needs to be able to assist them self first before they can help another person, deal with an immediate situation, let alone report to their assigned teams. While there are ample areas wherein a member can assist, the potential physical, mental, as yes even spiritual fitness of the member comes into play.

Going forward, the focus of the Center will not be to assist communities in the establishment and development of a CERT program. The Center will refer those needs to FEMA and The National CERT Association which can “support communication and resource sharing across the CERT community.”

The Center is at present establishing an online presence developing a website and a social media presence on YouTube and Twitter. An effort is also being made to develop a podcast to conduct interview with Team leadership from across the country to discuss their teams formation, training events, and even lessons learned should their team having had to deploy as a result of some sort of community wide disaster event.

I welcome you to join me in this effort to help us all to plan, prepare, respond, and not just survive, but thrive through difficult disaster scenarios, and to ensure the health, safety, wellbeing of our communities nationwide.

Jim Mau