Cultural Competency Curriculum for Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Response
A free, online educational program accredited for social workers, disaster mental health workers, first responders (including EMTs and firefighters) and emergency managers.
To learn more about the development process, please visit the Document Archive.
Welcome to Culturally Competency Curriculum for Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Response at HHS OMH’s Think Cultural Health. Each of the programs featured on Think Cultural Health (TCH) are founded on the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (National CLAS Standards).
In April 2013, the National CLAS Standards were re-released after undergoing a two-year enhancement initiative. This program, along with others featured on TCH, is scheduled to be under annual review for accreditation purposes and will be updated to reflect the National CLAS Standards enhancements.
To assist you during this transition, we recommend that you reference this crosswalk (PDF - 115 KB) and fact sheet (PDF - 59 KB) which will assist in understanding the numbering and organization of the re-released National CLAS Standards.
This
presentation will share two practices that brought people together to
bring about increased knowledge and action on emergency preparedness.
First, we will hear about the lessons learned from the Massachusetts
Active Planning project, which brought together local disability
community members with their localities, to work collaboratively, share
resources and expertise about emergency preparedness and response for and
with people with disabilities, ultimately enhancing resilience for the
whole community. Our speakers will focus on a replicable collaborative,
inclusive Community Stakeholder Meeting (CSM) gap analysis process to
address issues of community-wide concern, such as needs assessment,
resident participation in local emergency planning, risk communication,
public preparedness education and creative use of community resources to
address emergency needs, for example in emergency shelters. Our second
set of speakers will describe an effort to get people with disabilities
and other access and functional needs to prepare for emergencies, for
that group to communicate needs to emergency responders, and to encourage
businesses and local civic leaders to plan cooperatively for needs
through periodic community meetings.
Learning
Objectives:
Understand
how to identify key stakeholders in the community and learn
strategies for collaboration.
Learn
how to perform a gap analysis of your local emergency plan using the
Active Planning Workbook and identify priorities and strategies for
plan improvement.
Learn
strategies and practical steps for improving the general state of
emergency preparedness in a community.
Presenter:
Sue Wolf-Fordham and Nancy Shea,
Active Planning Project, University of Massachusetts Medical School
E.K. Shriver Center Emergency Preparedness & Response
Initiative.
Ted Stamp Southwestern Center for Independent Living and Tammy VanOverbeke,
Lyon County Emergency Manager.
Community and family preparedness
internationally.
There are benefits to the use of nuclear energy. If the waste of nuclear energy is deposited
in your back yard how would you feel?
Plan for minor disruptions, and disruptions that persist
until it turns into a disaster.
Review (click) on the ‘Radioactive
Waste’ heading for more information.
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The Power Of Human Resilience After Major Disasters— And The Importance Of Community
Researchers had the unique chance to measure the "happiness" of vulnerable New Orleans residents before and after Hurricane Katrina. The results are uplifting.
Two years before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing 1,800 people and destroying more than 60% of the city’s housing stock, a group of researchers embarked on what was then an average academic study designed to improve the educational performance of about 1,000 low-income parents enrolled at two community colleges in the city.
The storm disrupted the researchers' entire study but proved to have a silver lining: Their initial survey was suddenly incredibly valuable for an entirely different purpose. If the researchers, based at several universities around the country, could get in touch with everyone again, they’d have something relatively rare in social science research: A before and after comparison of how people respond to the worst and most unpredictable kinds of disasters.
The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina ("RISK") Project was born, and the researchers ended up tracking down about 70% of their initial cohort twice: one year after the disaster and again after four years. They conducted the same surveys again, also adding questions about how the hurricane had affected their lives. In the years since these surveys, the RISK project has published dozens of studies that compare the pre- and post-Katrina results on topics ranging from post-traumatic stress, child outcomes, residential mobility, and mental health.
One of the intriguing studies to come out of the work was published recently in theJournal of Happiness Studies. It looked at what you’d expect: The pre- and post-disaster levels of happiness among 491 of the survey participants, all women. It honed in on how they answered the survey question, "If you were to consider your life in general these days, how happy or unhappy would you say you are?"
The results, according Rocio Calvo, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Social Work and the lead researcher on the happiness study, were encouraging and surprising. Even only one year after the storm, almost 89% of women remained in the "somewhat happy" or "very happy" categories, though there was a drop in happiness on average. However, by four years after the storm, almost all of the respondents had gone back to their pre-storm happiness levels. "I think individuals are more resilient than they are given credit for," she says.
This is amazing to think about. These are already vulnerable women who went through major stress because of Katrina—85% of their homes were seriously damaged and almost one-third had lost a family member or close friend. On average, they experienced at least three major stress factors during the storm, such as no medical care for themselves or a loved one or no food to eat.
There was one exception: 38 women who continued to have lower levels of happiness even four years after the storm. They were more likely to be living on their own after the storm and reported consistently lower levels of perceived support from their communities.
"Our research showed that social support, both before and after Hurricane Katrina, was the main factor associated with women's happiness," Calvo says.
Calvo, who also studies happiness in Latino immigrant communities, believes the study underlines the importance of supporting the community fabric in vulnerable populations. Social workers, she says, can’t just come in and dictate how communities should use resources, even if they mean to help. "Communities might be poor and vulnerable, but they may know better than you what works," she says.
