Rogers-Lowell Area News

Community Resilience Coalition Receives Award for Work with Children in Disasters

The Washington County Community Resilience Coalition, a coalition focused on increasing the resilience of children and child-serving institutions in the event of a disaster, was awarded the Northwest Arkansas Individual and Community Preparedness Award by the Arkansas Emergency Management Conference at an awards ceremony on August 30, 2018.

The Washington County Community Resilience Coalition is a local chapter of the Resilient Children / Resilient Communities Initiative. The Coalition is focused on leveraging community partnerships and national networks to increase the resiliency of child-serving institutions and improve the County's ability to meet the unique needs of children in a disaster. At present, 144 people representing 75 organizations are part of the coalition. Over the past three years, the Coalition has been involved in training parents on preparedness, building institutional plans for child-serving intuitions and is developing an annex to the County Emergency Management Plan to capture community-wide roles during an emergency.

In addition to ongoing convening and planning efforts the Coalition has conducted two exercises focused on children in disasters. The first was a tabletop exercise in November of 2016, and a functional exercise with full scale elements in May of 2018. The Coalition has also been active in raising public awareness in distributing preparedness materials at the Naturals baseball games, publishing an op-ed in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and convening a panel for Arkansans Ask, a live call in show on AETN.

The coalition has also been active in promoting their work with policy-makers. This includes hosting a policy event that brought together local, state and national legislators to Washington County, and participation in a Congressional Briefing in April of 2018 on building child-focused community resilience. In addition to the Congressional Briefing, the coalition representatives also met with Senator Boozman, Senator Cotton and Congressman Womack, as well as with officials at the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the White House National Security Council's Resilience Directorate.

"We are honored to be given this award from the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management on behalf of the work that we and our partners have completed over the last three years. As a coalition we have been able to achieve greater results than we would have ever seen solely by ourselves. Having strong partnerships is a priority to our office and successful projects are the result. To be afforded the opportunity to coordinate a national pilot program with players from all levels of government, the public & private sector, early childhood and school age children in order to provide improved safety for all children is exactly what we should devote our time and energy to. Having a private company commit grant funding to this effort allowed our work to produce great results." – John Luther, WCDEM

"It has been a privilege for the Child Care Aware NWA office to partner with the Washington County OEM office to work on this initiative. It is an honor to be recognized by the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management for this award. Our goals when we started the project were creating awareness of the importance of emergency planning, public engagement and forming partnerships with one common goal, serving and protecting children. Through this process we truly have seen the building of our community network from the childcare providers, schools, private businesses to local and state agencies. The foundation has been built and we will continue to work to create a more resilient community in time of a disaster." – Debbie Malone, Childcare Aware

The Washington County Community Resilience Coalition is working not only to expand the efforts within Washington County, but to also ensure that the improved resilience of Washington County is not isolated to their community and benefits all of Arkansas and the nation.

About the Resilient Children Resilient Communities Initiative
The Resilient Children Resilient Communities Initiative has worked for three years to design the RCRC Toolbox. As part of the project, the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Save the Children chose two pilot communities to develop, test and fine-tune this new child-focused disaster planning model. The communities are Washington County, Arkansas and Putnam County, New York. In both locations, the project team established “Community Resilience Coalitions,” which brought emergency management officials together with child-serving institutions, schools, after school programs, social service providers, health care providers, parents, and dozens of other stakeholders to address gaps in the infrastructure that protects children in the event of a major disaster. The team organized local events to educate policymakers and the public about its work, and brought its findings to Washington, D.C., in an effort to influence national policy around disaster planning. More information is available here: https://ncdp.columbia.edu/rcrc.  

About the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute
The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute of Columbia University works to understand and improve the nation’s capacity to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. NCDP focuses on the readiness of governmental and non-governmental systems; the complexities of population recovery; the power of community engagement; and the risks of human vulnerability, with a particular focus on children. Learn more about this initiative: http://ncdp.columbia.edu/rcrc.  

About Save the Children
Save the Children believes every child deserves a future. In the United States and around the world, we give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. We do whatever it takes for children – every day and in times of crisis – transforming their lives and the future we share. Learn more at http://http//www.savethechildren.org.