How to Help Your Community Recover from Disaster

Posted by on October 24, 2010

For those of you who are involved in disaster work, or know others who are, we are very pleased to announce a new free resource manual called, How to Help Your Community Recover from Disaster: A Manual for Planning and Action.

The Manual can be found at:
http://www.scra27.org/resources/disasterresources/scra_manual_final5810pdf

We hope that you and your colleagues may find it useful in your own work.

The development of this Manual began after Hurricane Katrina.  It was part of a large-scale, multi-year, and 20-member collaboration by the Task Force on Disaster, Community Readiness within the Society for  Community Research and Action (SCRA; Division 27 of the American Psychological Association). Fran Norris of Dartmouth Medical School and Brad Olson of National Louis University have been the Co-Chairs.

At its core, the Manual is designed to guide both lay and professional readers through the steps required to understand the potential effects of disaster, organize the community, assess its needs, make an action plan, choose a strategy or strategies for intervention, reach out to various constituencies, track results, and share lessons learned.

We believe this Manual provides practical guidance to natural and potential community leaders about how to help their communities recover from disaster. And we hope it will be a useful resource in efforts to strengthen the capacity of communities to make informed choices, marshal resources, and facilitate post-disaster recovery.

We encourage you to use this Manual freely. Beyond that, our goal is to make the Manual available to the widest possible audience; so we would be very grateful for your help in sharing the Manual with those
who can most benefit from it.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or would like additional information. Send any feedback or suggestions to Brad Olson at bradley.olson@nl.edu