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Your community already has professionals who know how to manage crowds safely, coordinate complex logistics, and build community trust. With focused disaster preparedness training, these skills become life-saving capabilities. Discover how to add emergency response to your professional toolkit and position yourself as an essential community asset when crisis strikes.

Your community already knows and trusts you—now it’s time to make sure your other partners in preparedness do too. Build partnerships with local emergency management, connect with other venues and organizations doing this work, and create the networks that turn individual preparedness into coordinated community response.

You’ve seen firsthand what your community needs to stay safe and resilient. Use that knowledge to push for policies and funding that recognize event professionals, faith & community leaders, and other professional gatherers as critical partners in disaster preparedness.

To Emergency Management Directors, State and Local Officials, and Federal Disaster Response Leaders:

America faces an unprecedented surge in weather disasters—striking communities every four days on average and forcing millions from their homes every year. As emergency managers seek to build stronger local and state response capacity, we have a powerful opportunity to leverage an existing, skilled workforce that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of professionals already excel at the core skills needed for effective disaster response: crowd management, complex logistics coordination, crisis communication, and maintaining public trust under pressure. They are venue operators, festival producers, faith leaders, and community organizations. These professionals don’t need to be trained from scratch—they need “last mile” integration with emergency management protocols, specialized disaster preparedness knowledge, and formal recognition as community resilience assets.

We call on emergency management officials, policymakers, and community leaders to:

• Formally recognize arts, culture, faith, and venue professionals as essential partners in disaster preparedness
• Invest in targeted training programs that build on existing professional skills
• Include these sectors in emergency planning and response coordination
• Support funding and policies that strengthen community resilience through existing cultural infrastructure

Every community already has people with the skills to save lives in disasters. It’s time to give them the tools and recognition they need to use them.