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Establishing: Diversifying Your MRC Activities

It is essential to construct a mission for your MRC and ensure your mission is focused enough to match the limits of your available resources. Balance tension between your focus and expanding your MRC’s relevance to its community.

To accomplish this, consider the MRC from the emergency preparedness, emergency response, and public health perspectives. Although your MRC may focus primarily on one of these, there may be needs in your community for all of them. Addressing some or all of these perspectives also can help your MRC stay connected to the ongoing, routine requirements of your community and your community’s more intense undertakings. All are important ways of participating in the life of your community. Working to eliminate health disparities and preparing the community for emergencies also can help to mitigate an emergency’s effects on the community’s health.

There are several approaches to adopting a more diversified view of your MRC’s activities. For example, you can determine ways to supplement existing preparedness, medical, or health projects.

You might connect with community preparedness, public health, or medical initiatives in your community prior to the formation of your MRC, which:

Helps to meet crucial community needs
Improves community preparedness for emergencies
Helps to demonstrate responsiveness to community needs that also will enhance public perception of the MR
Allows your MRC to benefit from resources earmarked for these initiatives

Establishing links with vulnerable segments of the community (disability needs, groups with limited English-language proficiency, low-income communities, etc.) also may be productive, as many of these groups can be served during non-emergency periods and will have unique requirements during disasters. Public health and preparedness efforts targeted to these populations can help prepare them for an emergency and train them to be more resilient to its effects.

Another option is to position your MRC so that it can be integrated into existing organizational structures or programs, such as:

Opportunities for students in professional schools who might need local internships
Professional training related to emergency response or public health efforts
Community preparedness through CERT or other Citizen Corps programs
Activities of local professional organizations

Developing an organizational culture of responsiveness to community needs and of actively linking to these needs sends a positive message to your volunteers. It can encourage them to develop their own social network in the MRC. When volunteers—like members of any organization—develop collegial and social relationships with their peers, these relationships can strengthen volunteer commitment. This conserves and strengthens your unit’s most important resources: your volunteer corps.

Your MRC activities can contribute to establishing the MRC as part of your community's shared vision for public health and emergency response. Help others in your community understand how the MRC’s contribution can become part of what makes their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods safer, healthier, and better prepared.

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Last Updated on 8/23/2006