Community Resilience, Preparedness & Prevention Program

Wave Riders is a community resilience, preparedness, and prevention program built on a simple principle: sustain ourselves first, then help others. Emergencies are not the time to begin searching for resources, building relationships, or figuring out who can help. Wave Riders does that work before an emergency occurs by building a strong community network, identifying available resources, developing partnerships, and strengthening the knowledge and capacity needed to remain resilient when circumstances change.

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Our Goal

The goal of Wave Riders is to build a community that knows its resources, knows its partners, and knows where to turn when help is needed. Through ongoing relationship-building and resource mapping, we create a network that can help sustain our members and community during emergencies and, when capacity allows, extend support to others.

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What Wave Riders Members Do

Wave Riders is a working network. Members actively help build and maintain the community's preparedness capacity by:

• Mapping community resources. Identify restaurants, markets, businesses, temples, churches, community organizations, facilities, food and water resources, transportation, equipment, language capacity, volunteers, and other assets that may be useful during an emergency.

• Building relationships and networks. Connect with people and organizations before they are needed so we are not meeting one another for the first time during a crisis.

• Recruiting members and partners. Invite businesses, organizations, agencies, and individuals to participate and identify how they may contribute to the community network.

• Developing partnerships. Establish relationships and agreements with organizations that may be able to provide space, supplies, services, information, expertise, or other resources when needed.

• Sharing information and knowledge. Bring useful information, training opportunities, government resources, emerging risks, and lessons learned back to the network.

• Identifying gaps. Determine what resources or relationships are still missing and work to strengthen those areas before they are needed.

• Keeping the network current. Maintain contacts and periodically confirm that resources, partners, and information remain accurate and useful.

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Quarterly Working Meetings

Wave Riders meets once every quarter. These are working meetings designed to strengthen the network rather than meetings simply for the purpose of meeting.

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Members share new resources and contacts they have identified, introduce new partners, update existing information, discuss emerging risks and community needs, share training and knowledge, and identify gaps that should be addressed during the next quarter.

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Each meeting contributes to an evolving Community Resource Map and Network Directory that documents what resources exist, where they are located, who our contacts are, and how they may be reached.

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How the Program Grows

The work continues between quarterly meetings:

Meet → Identify Gaps → Go Into the Community → Build Relationships → Identify Resources → Recruit Partners → Document What We Learn → Update the Resource Map → Meet Again

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Over time, the network becomes stronger. We know more people. We identify more resources. Partners become familiar with one another. Members gain knowledge and experience. Gaps become easier to recognize, and the community becomes less dependent on figuring everything out after something has already gone wrong.

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When an Emergency Happens

Wave Riders does not replace government emergency services or responsible authorities. Instead, the network provides community capacity that already exists before an emergency begins.

• When something happens, we should not have to start by asking:

• Who can help us? Where can we go? Who has this resource? Who should we call?

• We should already have many of those answers.

• When an emergency happens, Wave Riders doesn't start building the network. We activate the network we have already built.

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Our Approach

We cannot prevent every emergency or control every changing condition. What we can control is how prepared, connected, informed, and resourceful we are when they happen.

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Prepare before the wave. Sustain ourselves through it. Help others when we can. Stay resilient.