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FEMA Releases New Exercise Starter Kits to Help Organizations with Preparedness Efforts

FEMA Releases New Exercise Starter Kits to Help Organizations with Preparedness Efforts

Created: Thursday, January 25, 2024 - 14:55
Categories:
Federal & State Resources, Security Preparedness

This week, FEMA released ten new free exercise starter kits, as part of its 2023-2026 National Exercise Program Principals’ Exercise Priorities. As WaterISAC frequently emphasizes, exercises are an important part of a preparedness program, helping organizations build, improve, and validate their incident response and recovery capabilities.

Preparing for and conducting an exercise oftentimes requires a significant amount of time and resources, and FEMA’s exercise starter kits can help with planning, design, scenario development, conduct, and evaluation. The Exercise Starter Kits are designed to provide a set of sample materials and templates that can be customized to create a discussion-based exercise to help organizations validate their plans and policies. Each kit contains a sample exercise facilitator and evaluator guide, sample conduct slides, a sample situation manual, and a customizable placemat. These documents are intended to be used by exercise practitioners and emergency managers at all levels of government and the private sector.

The available exercise starter kits will include the following topics:

  • Climate resilience.
  • Climate adaptation.
  • Complex incident coordination.
  • Large-scale population movement and resettlement.
  • Mitigating social isolation and loneliness.
  • Community preparedness and response to the opioid crisis.
  • Enhancing supply chain resilience.
  • Recovery.
  • Community profile.
  • Reunification.

The new exercise kits are available in the Emergency Management Toolkit section of FEMA’s Preparedness Toolkit website. This online portal provides stakeholders across the community with multiple tools for implementing preparedness and resilience efforts. Access the exercise starter kits here.

FEMA will host a series of webinars to discuss the new kits. All webinars will offer the same content. There is no registration required to attend one of the webinars. Join during one of the times listed below using this Adobe Connect link.

  • Session 1: Thursday, Jan. 25, at 5 p.m. ET. 
  • Session 2: Wednesday, Jan. 31, at noon ET.
  • Session 3: Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 9 a.m. ET.

If you are unable to attend one of the webinars listed above, a recorded version of the webinar will be available on the Preparedness Toolkit HSEEP Webinars page starting February 1.