Disasters strike throughout the United States each year, bringing massive property destruction and disrupting millions of lives.  While Corporation programs have always supported disaster preparedness and response efforts, they have played a much broader and more extensive role in recent years.  This experience demonstrated that national service participants can fulfill a wide range of preparedness and response roles – management and coordination of volunteers and resources, training and development of coordinated response plans, and providing direct service to affected communities.

To help meet these responsibilities and better position the Corporation to provide leadership to volunteer management and preparedness efforts, in June 2007, the Corporation’s Board of Directors designated disaster preparedness and response as an agency strategic initiative.  While the initiative is still under development, the intent is to build national, state, and local response capacity to use volunteers and plan effectively to provide volunteer support when, where, and how it is needed.

The Corporation identified the following potential performance measures:

National Target for 2010

• Percent increase in the number of volunteers registered in a national disaster response database

Corporation Target for 2010

• Number of Corporation program participants who have been certified in disaster-related training
• Number of Corporation program participants who are available for deployment in support of local, state, or other disasters
• Number of community members who receive disaster preparedness information or training from Corporation program participants