Draft 0.1, 29 September 2026. Visible to administrators only, for review before publication.

Module 2: Preparing your community: organization, assets, networks, emergency funds

Reading: about 25 minutes. Workshop: 90 minutes. For members of Rotary clubs and districts, and for the local leaders they train.

What you will be able to do

• Help a community set up a small preparedness team with written roles and a backup for every key person.
• Run an inventory of the community's human, material, relational and financial capital.
• Map the local actors to contact before a crisis and turn personal contacts into written agreements.
• Guide small businesses and households through basic economic preparedness: critical functions, vital records, insurance, stock and savings.
• Design a community emergency fund with clear rules on who decides, who signs and who reports.

Why it matters

The Rotary Foundation has given RAGCED two mandates: train communities before disasters, and help restart local economies after them. Both depend on what exists before the event: a community that knows its resources and has protected its businesses, records and savings loses less and restarts faster. RAGCED's own statement of purpose speaks of "community-based emergency preparedness services to improve economic resilience". This module takes the preparedness chapters of the Disaster Field Guide, written for Rotary clubs, and turns them into a method the club can share with the community it serves. Immediate relief is outside RAGCED's scope: for the first hours and days, see the Disaster Field Guide (https://disasterfieldguide.org/).

Local volunteers fill and stack sandbags ahead of a flood crest (Winfield, Missouri, USA, 19 June 2008). Photo: FEMA / Jocelyn Augustino, public domain

Villagers gather at an assembly point during a community evacuation drill (Loc An commune, Thua Thien Hue province, Vietnam, 4 December 2012). Photo: USAID Vietnam / Richard Nyberg, public domain

1. Organize: who does what before the crisis

The guide recommends a lean structure for a club: five people are enough, not a committee of fifteen that meets to decide when to meet. The same logic works for a neighborhood, a village or a market association.

Role	Before the crisis	During the crisis
Community lead	Chairs, speaks for the group	Decides, authorizes, informs
Coordinator	Keeps the plan and lists current	Runs operations
Logistics	Knows storage, vehicles, suppliers	Moves goods and people
Communication	Keeps contact lists, tests channels	Alerts and relays
Finance	Keeps the fund and its register	Records every expense

Three rules carry over from the club model:

• Deploy people by skill, not by rank. Fill in a simple skills matrix: who is a nurse, a mechanic, an accountant, a teacher, a truck owner.
• Write a chain of succession. The lead may be injured, away or unreachable. Write down who takes over, in what order, and after how long without contact.
• Keep it light. The club helps the community organize itself; it does not run it. A 2019 microfinance guidebook from a Rotary action group puts it simply: the most effective programs are those where Rotarians do not do all the work themselves.

Involve young people: Rotaract members bring digital skills and energy; minors stay out of danger zones.

2. Take stock: the community's four capitals

The guide asks each club to inventory three capitals. For a community, add a fourth: money.

• Human capital: skills, languages, availability, limits such as health or mobility.
• Material capital: vehicles, generators, pumps, premises that can host or store, kitchens, tools, radios.
• Relational capital: who knows the town hall, the fire service, the hospital, a wholesaler, a bank manager. Many people belong to several organizations; these dual memberships are bridges.
• Financial capital: household cash reserves, savings groups, business working capital, insurance cover, access to credit.

Rotary's community assessment tools warn against the most common flaw of an inventory: the risk of ignoring skills and other non-material resources. Count people and relationships before counting trucks.

Keep every list in two formats: a protected digital file with a copy on a USB key, and a laminated paper copy kept in two places. In a disaster one of the two fails. Update the inventory once a year, at a fixed date.

3. Connect and communicate before the crisis

Relationships are built before the disaster, not during it. The guide maps five families of local actors: rescue and emergency services; humanitarian and social organizations; community organizations of every kind; local authorities and public services; and local economic actors such as supermarkets, transport companies, pharmacies, fuel stations, builders and printers.

Formalize each link in three steps:

1. Document: name, role, direct phone, what they can provide, date last checked.
2. Introduce: invite the contact to meet the community group, so the link does not depend on one person.
3. Agree: a one-page memorandum of understanding naming the parties, the purpose, the commitments on each side, a one-year term and one contact per side.

Then prepare the channels:

• A call tree: each person calls two or three others. Test it at least once a year, time it, correct the wrong numbers.
• Backup channels for when mobile networks fail: text messages often get through when calls do not; walkie-talkies or amateur radio for local links; runners carrying standard paper messages as a last resort.
• One voice. Instructions come from one authorized source. Information moves up raw and comes back down summarized.
• Pre-written messages: alert, cancellation, update. Drafted in calm times, sent in seconds.

4. Protect livelihoods: economic preparedness

This is the heart of RAGCED's contribution. A disaster destroys homes, but it also wipes out stock, records, customers and savings. The Community Toolkit for Economic Recovery and Resiliency, a Canadian manual for local economic developers, cites the Institute for Business and Home Safety: at least one business in four does not reopen after a catastrophic event. The main reasons are a lack of working capital, under-insurance, damaged stock or property, a shortage of workers and a smaller customer base. Each of these can be reduced before the event.

With small businesses, work through a short continuity check:

• Which functions are critical? Those most sensitive to downtime, those that keep cash flowing and legal obligations met, those that protect reputation or an irreplaceable asset.
• What happens if you lose your premises, your stock, your staff, your records, your equipment, your utilities or your suppliers?
• Where could you operate if your premises are closed? Plan one fallback location, ideally two.
• Which stock and equipment could you not replace quickly, and where could they be moved or protected?
• Are vital records backed up away from the premises? Staff and payroll data, accounts, customer and supplier lists, leases, insurance papers, plans.
• What does your insurance really cover? Review it once a year and ask which hazards are excluded, such as floods. After a disaster, supplies are short and prices rarely fall.
• Can you reach your staff, suppliers and customers if phones and email fail?

The free OFB-EZ toolkit of the Institute for Business and Home Safety follows the same logic: know your risks, your operation, your employees, your customers and suppliers, your finances and your information technology, and test your plan.

With households, the same principles apply at home: copies of identity and property documents kept in two places, photographs of belongings for insurance claims, a small cash reserve in small notes (payment terminals do not work without power), and a family plan with meeting points and a contact outside the area.

With the local economy as a whole, the club can:

• Keep a list of local business owners with several ways to reach each of them, including mobile numbers.
• Hold short continuity workshops for small business owners, at a time and place that suit them. Club members who are accountants, insurers, lawyers or bankers are natural facilitators.
• Meet local lenders in calm times to discuss what they could offer after a disaster. The Community Toolkit notes that bankers design affordable terms better before a crisis than during one, and warns against pushing businesses into debt they cannot carry.
• Where people have no access to banks, consider savings groups. The RAGCED microfinance guide describes groups of 15 to 25 self-selected members who meet regularly to save, lend small amounts on flexible terms and offer basic insurance. Savings built in normal times are the first cushion after a shock.

5. Train and practice

An untested plan is a hypothesis. Four activities a year keep a community ready:

• A start-of-year briefing to present the plan and update roles and lists.
• First aid for as many volunteers as possible, and psychological first aid for those who will meet affected people. The World Health Organization offers a free online course.
• A tabletop exercise of 30 to 45 minutes on a realistic local scenario, with two or three added complications, such as the mobile network going down or a wave of untrained volunteers, followed by a short debrief.
• A municipal civil protection drill, when one exists.

After each exercise, write a one-page after-action report: what worked, what did not, and corrective actions with an owner and a deadline. Add one economic scenario each year: the market hall floods overnight; which traders can reopen within a week, and what do they need? The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, on 13 October, is a good date for a public event with local partners.

6. Emergency funds and savings

When disaster strikes, suppliers want cash and outside funding takes weeks to arrive. A fund set aside in advance lets a community act in hours instead of spending its first days looking for money. The guide's rules for a club fund apply to a community fund:

• A separate account in the group's name, never in a person's name. Liquidity matters more than yield.
• Written bylaws adopted in advance: purpose, target amount, sources, who authorizes what.
• A spending scale: small amounts decided quickly by two people, larger ones by the lead, the largest by the board.
• Two signatures for every withdrawal. The person who authorizes an expense is not the one who pays it.
• A register of every expense with its receipt, photographed the same day.
• Regular reports: quarterly in normal times, weekly during an operation, a full report at the end.
• Replenishment within a year after use.

Build the fund steadily: a small annual contribution per member, a share of the budget, one fundraising event. Prepare and test an online donation page in calm times, with two administrators. Check local rules on collecting donations.

Go further

From the Disaster Field Guide by Guillaume Bourgogne (companion site: https://disasterfieldguide.org/):

• Chapter 5, The club response structure
• Chapter 6, Personal preparation of the Rotarian
• Chapter 7, Inventorying the club's capital
• Chapter 8, Emergency communication
• Chapter 9, Activate your networks before the disaster
• Chapter 10, Train and practice
• Chapter 11, Club emergency fund

From the Rotary club guide to community economic development by the same author (in preparation): The club's CED structure; Inventorying the club's capital for CED; Activating networks before the project.

Public resources:

• Community Toolkit for Economic Recovery and Resiliency, Canadian version, Economic Developers Alberta, 2019.
• OFB-EZ business continuity toolkit, Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (disastersafety.org).
• Psychological First Aid, free course on OpenWHO (openwho.org).
• RAGCED microfinance guide (2021), on the RAGCED website.
• International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, 13 October, United Nations.

After running this module in your club, please send your feedback (a pre-filled email), or fill in the feedback sheet in the workshop sheets and send a photo of it. It helps RAGCED improve the programme.

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