It was great to see a good number of co-op members attend our Joint Co-op Emergency Planning and Resilience Project Launch at Paloma Co-op on Oct 22nd. Clearly, many people are concerned about this issue.
The Joint Co-op Emergency Planning and Resilience Project is an initiative of Paloma, Sitka, Rising Star, Sunrise, Westerdale and Laura Jamieson housing co-ops which have been working together since 2017 to develop a local area joint co-op emergency plan, ensuring greater emergency preparedness and resilience through a uniquely collaborative approach. As an alternative to the established government-based emergency response, our housing cooperatives can leverage their valuable human and physical assets towards an effective community based and mutual aid response to acute and long-term emergencies, including fire, earthquake, climate impacts, economic and social shocks and stressors.
With funding from the Community Housing Transformation Centre, we are able to deepen this work by organizing a series of workshops allowing us to dive into this emergency planning model and with the goal of creating a toolkit that will guide our collaborative emergency planning. We also intend to make this work available to other co-ops and the wider housing sector. Close to 40 co-op members attended our Launch where several interactive stations provided information about our project as well as allowed us to gather emergency planning information. We set up a table of emergency grab and go kit items and learned about what to put into and what not to put into these; we undertook a local community asset mapping exercise and learned of over 50 assets that we could seek out in the event of an emergency, everything from location of water sources i.e. Trout Lake and local breweries to wild blackberry bushes to harvest food, to possible overnight shelter; we gathered an inventory of co-op member skills and learned that we have people with earthquake building assessment training, outdoor survival skills, large group cooking and childcare education; we learned of people’s resilience ideas such as more local food production, climate advocacy work, games for children to learn about these issues and much more….It was a successful sharing and learning event.
