Managing in Chaos: Serving in Disaster

Disaster Tip Sheets for Religious Leaders this workshop is entitled “Managing in Chaos: Serving in Disaster” and explores disaster resilience for religious leaders.
This is an interactive one-day orientation to disaster resilience is based on 16 all-hazards Disaster Tip Sheets for Religious Leaders. The tip sheets help leaders prepare to serve in effective, inclusive, and compassionate ways when disasters strike.

Curriculum:
A “chaos game” opens the session, engaging participants in the “feel” of a disaster in their community. Subsequent activities focus on helping communities to manage the “chaos” in ways that promote healing and growth for the body-mind-and-spirit of individuals and their communities.
The day is generally divided into the four phases of a disaster lifecycle (like most of the Tip Sheets) as follows:

• Mitigation: Implement measures to lessen future impact of disaster on houses of worship and faith-based organizations and the services they provide
• Preparedness: Incorporate best practices and lessons learned into plans/systems, ensuring necessary resources are available
• Response: Implement contingency plans designed to save lives, protect property, provide for public welfare, maintain essential services
• Recovery: Help communities heal, return to a state similar to or improved from pre-disaster conditions

Activities include:
• Spider web exercise
• Tabletop exercise
• Story-telling exchange
• Photo analysis
• Tabletop exercise – flu planning guide template
• Three-part brain exercise
• Nested model of analysis
• Meaning exercise