It starts with Hello: Beginning outreach to the disability community

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It starts with Hello: Beginning outreach to the disability community

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.