Alice Frame – Program Coordinator - Health Promotion for People with Disabilities Initiative - Disabilities Health Unit – Michigan Department of health and Human Services
The importance of collaboration between emergency
preparedness and disability programs cannot be overstated. It’s crucial.
There are several key contexts in which that collaboration
can be very beneficial – for example, planning, exercise participation,
evaluation, and partnership building.
However, outreach and starting that conversation can seem intimidating. People are not always comfortable discussing
disability or approaching people with disabilities, because they are afraid of
offending someone.
Like any conversation, though, it starts with “hello.” To
help the emergency preparedness community take those first steps in outreach to
the disability community, below are a few sample “scripts” of how that
conversation could look:
1. Outreach for planning
“Hello, my name is NAME and I work with ORGANIZATION. I work
in emergency preparedness planning and think it’s important to include people
with disabilities and disability advocates in the planning process, to make
sure that we are equipped to meet the needs of the disability community during
an emergency.”
2. Outreach for exercise participation
“Hello, my name is NAME and I work with ORGANIZATION. I work
in emergency preparedness and am part of a team planning practice emergency
exercises to help our responders prepare for actual disasters. We are
recruiting community members to participate in the exercise, and would like to
have individuals with disabilities participate.
This will help our responders develop skills and understand the unique
needs of individuals with different types of disabilities, so they are better
prepared to help in an actual emergency.”
3. Outreach for evaluation
“Hello, my name is NAME and I work with ORGANIZATION. I work
in emergency preparedness and am part of a team evaluating our current response
plans. We want to make sure that we are considering all people in our plans.
Would you mind sitting with us to evaluate them, or make sure that we are
prepared to meet the needs of people with disabilities?”
Ultimately, outreach is outreach. People with disabilities
are not a wildly separate sect of the population – they are part of the general
public. In fact, people with disabilities make up 25.5% of the general public here
in Michigan. Like you would with anyone else, the conversation just starts with
hello.
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