Community Profiles for Disaster Planning & Response
KKG recognizes the value in understanding the complexity and make-up of a community – its populations, social, economic and vulnerable diversities, critical infrastructure, geographic features, assets and partnerships – in disaster planning and response. Community profiling helps to identify potential gaps in response needs and resource capabilities for all hazards and risks. Communities are responsible for coordinating Emergency Support Functions to serve their constituents. The better a community understands the cultural, language, and functional needs characteristics of its members, the more successful the community will be at communicating, evacuating, sheltering and caring for these members when disaster strikes.
Identifying and partnering with a community’s non-governmental organizations, agencies and businesses helps to match needs with services before, during and after a disaster. These resources are identified during the profiling process, and can be successfully incorporated into a community’s plans, trainings and exercises to ensure maximum coordinating and success.
Every community is unique and has an internal complexity within it, the efforts put forth in conducting community profiling for the specific purpose of planning for meeting the needs of the community when providing Emergency Support Functions is an important component of the KKP planning model. KKG has worked with government officials – elected and appointed, to develop and validate community profiles for disaster planning and response for numerous jurisdictions, including Bay AreA UASI, Napa, San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, City of San Jose and City of Santa Rosa.
