Many Sharing One Goal

After recent disasters, it is becoming increasingly clear that community continuity equals business continuity.  In the past, many businesses have been reluctant to invest in continuity and contigency planning on the false assumption that someone else in the community will pick up the slack or do the hard recovery work to restore life to normal.

Disaster is an equal opportunity leveler except in one case:  where a business might make the extra effort to put plans and training into practice that can insure against catastrophic loss of assets, personnel and/or information.  An ounce of prevention in the case of disaster planning pays huge dividends not only for the business, but also for the community, since the two are inseparable.

Under the leadership of CIPRR, the National Congress For Secure Communities brings together the private and community sector partners who share the view that their recovery depends on their contribution to community recovery, both in preparedness and in recovery planning.  Congress partners include:

*CCROA, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government/Leadership for a Networked World, Fred Friendly Seminars at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

*the Joint Interagency Training Center, the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the National Guard 

*pilot communites such as Galveston, Charleston, Oakland County, Hamilton County and Colorado Springs

*Associate and Partner Chairs of CIPRR that include leading private and public sector experts and innovators

*the NCORP National Task Force and Advisory Committee 

Developing inexpensive yet effective ways to leverage commercial assets, employees and practices is one goal of the Congress.  The other goal is to test these in communities to understand their value and cost while experimenting with different applications that might yield a greater result.