Rising Resilience: Connecting and Evolving in the Disaster Space

Leah Verier-Dunn had the pleasure of sitting down with The Patterson Foundation’s (TPF) president and CEO, Debra Jacobs, to discuss TPF’s Community Preparedness, Recovery, and Resiliency initiative (CPR-R). Debra walks us through the history of TPF’s work in the disaster space and shares why and how it has evolved.

The CPR-R initiative is specifically focused on strengthening CERTs (Community Emergency Response Teams) in our Suncoast Region in an effort to foster widespread participation, making it possible for people in all communities to participate in the preparation for and recovery from disasters. To learn more about CERT training, you can read more about it here.

The Patterson defines Preparedness, Recovery, and Resiliency as follows:

• Preparedness: the process of planning, organizing, and equipping people, organizations, and communities to better respond to and cope with the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
  
  
• Recovery: the process of resuming normal operations, which begins with stabilizing the incident and ends when the community has recovered from the disaster’s impacts. Effective recovery includes communication, coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and adaptation.

• Resiliency: the ability of individuals, organizations, and communities to organize themselves in innovative ways to learn from past disasters and reduce their risks from future ones. It includes the aptness to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from disasters and stressors in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth.

Whether invested in children, education, animals, real estate, tourism, etc., disasters hold no boundaries in how they affect a community. The Patterson Foundation’s commitment to optimizing efforts toward long-term impact in the disaster space is wonderful to learn about through this podcast. 

Watch or listen here.