Citizen Corps Councils
Resources for Councils
Lancaster Citizen Corps Council
Fusing Technology with Old-Fashioned Cooperation
- Overview
- Council Background
- Strategy
- Council Results
- Next Steps
- Lancaster Citizen Corps Council Contact
Overview
Roughly 11 percent of Lancaster County’s population of 483,000 is concentrated in the City of Lancaster. The region, known as Pennsylvania Dutch Country, has long featured farmland but has added a substantial tourist trade. Over the past few decades, a number of industrial operations have opened up in this area, including factories turning out heavy machinery, electronics, textiles, and healthcare products. Lancaster City also contends with four nuclear power plants within a 50-mile radius of its borders. All of these circumstances make the area a prime terrorist target, a concern that has been greatly amplified by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In addition to potential man-made disasters, Mother Nature threatens the area with winter storms, flooding, and the occasional tornado.
Council Background
Lancaster Citizen Corps Council, among the first 100 Councils to form nationwide, was started primarily through the determination of one citizen who for years had been a member of the Lancaster City Council and the City’s emergency management coordinator.
In January 2002, Gene Duncan signed up on the National Citizen Corps website and within weeks organized the Citizen Corps Council for the City of Lancaster. Thanks to Duncan’s deep roots in the community, a group of organizations quickly backed the effort, including Lancaster Township’s own emergency planning coordinator, local hospitals, and first-responder entities, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, Lancaster-based technology firm, InnerLink, Inc, the Lancaster School District, and a host of others.
Strategy
The initial strategy was to bring the core group together, develop a mission statement, and then present the organization to the public in a way that made clear that the Council was dedicated and capable of fulfilling its mission. Within a year, the core group built up its membership and on February 19, 2003, the Council issued a press release with the news of the newly formed Lancaster Citizen Corps Council.
The Council is woven from the threads of 40 wide-ranging organizations, including first responders, academic institutions, government agencies, faith-based organizations, several private companies, service agencies, and local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
The Council’s Executive Advisory Board now boasts 20 community leaders and agency heads and, with the help of five permanent committees, the tools needed to create a disaster-response plan that engages each part of the community. The committees are:
- The Medical Reserves Corps
- The Public Health Agriculture
- Food and Water Committee
- The Education and Volunteerism Committee
- The Justice and Law Enforcement Committee
To unify their efforts, the Council adopted the mission statement: “To harness the power of every individual through education, training, and volunteer service to make communities safer, stronger, and better prepared to respond to threats of terrorism, crime, public health issues, and disasters of all kinds.”
The Lancaster Citizen Corps Council defines its role as one of strengthening the community at the neighborhood level, a natural extension of Lancaster’s community policing efforts to build partnerships between first responders and citizens and to share responsibility for addressing neighborhood concerns. Select members of the Advisory Board meet monthly with Neighborhood Watch captains to update them on safety and training information. The organization’s leadership also recruited bilingual trainers and prepared training materials in Spanish to reach out to the area’s large Latino population into the fold. Soon, the Council will commence with a plan to work closely with persons with special needs, such as the hearing impaired community in Lancaster.
Thanks to in-kind contributions from local private- and public-sector entities, as well as Pennsylvania’s Digital Divide grant, the Medical Reserve Corps works with the TEAM (Telecommunications, Education, Administration, Medical) system, which aids the instant retrieval of volunteer skills, qualifications and licensing, and legal and medical data, and interfaces with digital camcorders in the field. The TEAM technology, which proved critical during the World Trade Center disaster, also monitors the health of volunteers during an emergency.
Council Results
While the Lancaster Citizen Corps Council has not yet been called into action to deal with calamity, it continues to build on to the area’s emergency preparedness capacity.
A lesson learned from early experiences is the importance of having programs and supporting infrastructure in place before beginning aggressive outreach activities to recruit citizens to participate. The Council’s early difficulties in setting up CERT training are one example of the need to ensure that logistical delivery mechanisms are in place before recruitment efforts begin. To overcome some of the early hurdles, the Council found that pulling personnel from the state emergency management authority into the local picture spurred action.
Meanwhile, having successfully uncovered areas of weakness in communication during their first technology drill, the Council planned a second emergency drill for the autumn of 2003 and is also looking into the use of smart card technology to speed up the allocation of volunteers to emergency sites. This technology, currently under demonstration with the Lancaster County Special Emergency Response Team (SERT), may help planners quickly match the skills of volunteers to the conditions at emergency/disaster sites, which would create a much faster and more effective system for allocating human resources.
The Lancaster Citizen Corps Council also received a Digital Divide Grant. This grant allowed them to refurbish 50 computers and provide training and Internet access to those financially unable to purchase their own. The computers allow this group of volunteers to communicate frequently with the Council and the Lancaster Police Department to disseminate information. This project has received positive feedback from police officers, chaplains and others that work closely with citizens and Neighborhood Watch block captains.
Also, by the end of 2004 the Council will launch a pilot program for citizen medical information that will cover 14 to 16 blocks, so that citizens needing oxygen, kidney dialysis, and other medical services receive speedy and appropriate aid during an emergency.
Next Steps
The Lancaster Citizen Corps Council has clear plans for their future, and their vision starts with the structure of the organization. The Executive Advisory Board wants to make the Lancaster Citizen Corps Council a non-profit organization and craft a set of bylaws to make it eligible for additional grants.
The Council also recognizes the value of engaging the media, and is recruiting members of the local media for the Executive Advisory Board. The Board is looking into a radio talk show that will offer listeners tips on how to prepare against disasters, and has hired a marketing consultant on a part time basis to beef up its outreach work. Currently, the Council conducts various outreach activities such as setting up booths at community events in the county, and making presentations to area businesses, retirement homes, and neighborhood groups.
Lancaster Citizen Corps Council is also currently working to partner more closely with the Lancaster Bureaus of Fire and Police Chaplains Corps, made up of 13 clergy members from various denominations. These participants are sworn officers who take training with both departments and are used for death notifications, stress debriefings, and other counseling services. The Chaplains Corps was introduced to the Lancaster Citizen Corps Council during 2003, and the role of the Chaplains in promoting the Citizen Corps mission continues to grow. The clergy are a great link between first responders and citizens and also have churches that are neighborhood based – a nice fit with the neighborhood block groups. Additionally, the Council is looking at placing computers from the Digital Divide grant in the churches for citizen access. The Chaplains have also been helpful in identifying people in their respective congregations to become Citizen Corps volunteers.
The Council has also recently begun a long-awaited CERT training program for volunteers. By the end of March 2004, they will have approximately 30 community members who have been CERT trained.