Is Neighborhood Readiness a Thing?

Yes! Teamwork has multiple benefits even for readiness.

When neighbors work together as a team, they can achieve more than each person can do individually. By pooling their unique talents and resources, local volunteers can make their shared readiness vision a reality. The spirit of cooperation and unity of purpose helps neighborhood “teams” overcome obstacles and challenges they may face. Combining efforts and skills allows groups to not only leverage the strengths of each participant, but almost always be more fully prepared, as well as knowing that in a given situation support and back up are available.

Imagine a weather event like a huge snowstorm that downs lines or a substation in the deepest part of winter. Days or weeks without electricity means no heat, even gas heat (which requires electricity). When neighbors ban together, they can share the pain and the resolution so that they all pull through. A lone home that doesn’t have adequate means would be challenged more severely.

The teamwork benefits are especially profound when the scenario that needs to be dealt with involves danger from people that do not have your family’s best interest in mind—potentially an angry or militant mob situation. To fend them off, a neighborhood team can be more effective than a lone effort.

Getting from small talk to banding together, to determining individual strengths, to creating a plan with assignments, to sharing resources, and having leadership to execute is often very arduous.

The biggest impediments are:

1. 1. it’s likely that most people in your neighborhood live in ignorance and/or disbelief and trust that there’s always the government or some charitable agency to protect and take care of them;
   2. it’s hard to trust others (to be available when times are tough, to follow a plan, to have your back in dire circumstance, to not cower, to make tough decisions and act on tough decisions (yours or theirs), especially under mass stress and never before seen life challenges;
   3. there are outright posers that will talk the talk when times are good, but only have intentions of leaching off of others when a crisis hits, without pulling their weight and when that happens, it can be a catalyst to disarray and division amongst others.

If you can overcome all of the above and truly—yes truly have neighbors that you can trust with the lives of your family when they themselves will be pushed to new limits, then organizing is a very intelligent task to get underway.

State of Readiness always advises you and those you care for, to be the gray man, to maximize your state of readiness, and to remember that when the need is obvious, it’s too late.