Leveraging Community to Build Resilience and Fill YOUR Gaps

How do we deliver meaningful community preparedness programs with shrinking funding?
Whether you're a one-person shop or a large urban agency, you can't reach your whole community alone - especially residents who face barriers to information access, language, mobility, transportation, or other functional needs. Recent disasters continue to highlight the importance of empowering community members to access timely information, make safe decisions, and move quickly when needed.
In Sonoma County, disasters have been a regular reality over the last six years - wildfires, flooding, and COVID - pushing us to rethink how we design and deliver readiness by investing in grassroots capacity.

This breakout session shares foundational, community-tested approaches to grow social capital, strengthen trust, and build a countywide network of partners who solve problems together - in ways no single agency can sustain alone.

Attendees will see practical examples of empowering neighbors to support each other through programs including the Better Together Symposium, Neighborhood-led evacuation drills, Meet Your Street, hyper local neighborhood preparedness group support, and partnerships with tourism, libraries, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations.
Participants will leave with actionable steps to build, sustain, and measure a scalable preparedness partner network.