There are significant challenges faced by the majority of communities across the nation, including two over-arching issues: lack of communication between stand-alone organizations (government departments, businesses, nonprofit organizations and citizenry in the community) and lack of trust between these same entities.   The commonly known phrases “stovepipes” or “silos” are still in place in most communities.  Yet, community resources range from the simple to complex when it comes to their capability to respond to not only the significant crisis but the day-to-day emergencies.  Plus, when a community is hit with a significant crisis we see what happens over and over again – many of those who do not routinely work together for preparedness in the past are now working together.

Therefore, Project Partnership reaches out through the community to not only the first responder community (both public and private sectors) but to other organizations as well.  These would be the businesses, nonprofit organizations and the various federal, state, tribal and local individual departments within the community as well. 

We would envision that each community who elects to participate in Project Partnership would hold a community-wide forum that would explain the purpose, which is to form a public/private partnership for joint crisis management.  However, FEMA would provide materials and/or advice/guidance on the process.

There are excellent examples in the past that could be easily modified, such as the older Project Impact by FEMA.  Also, we just finished 12 years of running a national program that facilitated public/private partnerships for joint crisis management at the city, county or regional level across the nation.  For more information, please go to www.cip.msu.edu and this program was last funded by one of the FEMA departments.   Plus, there are many other partnership organizations across the nation.

In summary, when community leaders at the business, nonprofit, government and citizen level come together to collaborate on preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery – that community has tremendous capability to be prepared through Project Partnership.