Date & Time
- 2024 DATES: SEP 26 | OCT 24 | NOV 28
- 2025 DATES: JAN 23 | FEB 27 | MAR 27
- Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET
- Location: VIRTUAL (ZOOM WEBINAR)
Register
Participants attending a minimum of 50% of sessions will receive a certificate of attendance from CIFAL York
BACKGROUND
Business continuity and resilience are essential for ensuring that organizations can sustain operations and recover swiftly from crises. Business continuity focuses on maintaining critical functions during and after a disaster, requiring detailed planning, risk assessment, and the implementation of response and recovery strategies. This involves creating and testing business continuity plans (BCPs), establishing communication protocols, and ensuring the availability of necessary resources. Resilience, on the other hand, extends beyond immediate response to encompass the organization’s ability to adapt, learn, and strengthen its operational framework in the face of ongoing and future challenges. This includes fostering adaptability, investing in flexible infrastructure, and developing a culture that supports continuous improvement and innovation. By integrating business continuity and resilience practices into disaster management, organizations can enhance their capacity to withstand disruptions, minimize impact, and recover more effectively, ultimately ensuring long-term stability and operational excellence. During major disasters many businesses and organizations are impacted which increases the overall direct and indirect losses and costs of disasters. Similarly, the impacted businesses need to recover to enable and support the community and wider recovery and reconstruction. Unfortunately, despite the increasing frequency and intensity of disaster events, many businesses are not prepared for and able to minimize the impacts and recover from disasters. This speaker series aim to create a knowledge base, knowledge and experience sharing platform to enhance business continuity among, small, medium and large businesses globally.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
The key goals and objectives of the speaker series are to:
- Learn how to combine business continuity and resilience efforts to create a comprehensive disaster management strategy that ensures both immediate operational continuity and long-term organizational adaptability.
- Learn how to align business continuity plans with resilience-building initiatives to create a cohesive strategy that addresses both immediate response and long-term recovery and growth.
- Understand the importance of business continuity and resilience in sustaining operations and recovering swiftly from crises.
- Recognize the key components of business continuity, such as response and recovery strategies, BCP creation, and communications protocols.
- Understand the importance of establishing communications protocols.
- Understand the importance of adaptability and flexible infrastructure for resilience.
TARGET AUDIENCES
- Local, state/provincial and Central/Federal government agencies
- NGO’s, community
- Business managers, firms, companies
- Media
- Education, research institutions, schools, colleges, universities.
- Corporate sector- investors, suppliers, and insurance companies.
- Emergency management associations and organizations
- Risk and business continuity management professionals
- Operations managers
- Supply chain managers
SESSION 1 THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 26 12:00PM-1:00PM (EDT)
Moderator: Francesco del Carpio
Operations Coordinator, CIFAL York
Panelist: Dr. Ali Asgary
Professor, Disaster and Emergency Management, York University; Director, CIFAL York
Topic: Unfolding Challenges of Business Continuity and Resilience
Panelist: Dr. Santosh Kumar
CEO, International Institute of Security and Safety Management
Topic: Unfolding Challenges of Business Continuity and Resilience
SESSION 2 THURSDAY OCTOBER 24 11:30AM-12:30PM (EDT)
Moderator: Francesco del Carpio
Operations Coordinator, CIFAL York
Speaker: Dr. Krishna S. Vatsa
Member NDMA, Formerly Regional Advisor, South Asia, UNDP and Disaster Recovery Advisor UNDP, New York
Topic: Business Continuity for Building Financial Resilience
SESSION 3 THURSDAY NOVEMBER 28 12:00PM-1:00PM (EST)
Moderator: TBD
Speaker: TBD
Topic: TBD
SESSION 4 JANUARY 23 12:00PM-1:00PM (EST)
Moderator: TBD
Speaker: TBD
Topic: TBD
SESSION 5 THURSDAY FEBRUARY 27 12:00PM-1:00PM (EST)
Moderator: TBD
Speaker: TBD
Topic: TBD
SESSION 6 THURSDAY MARCH 27 12:00PM-1:00PM (EST)
Moderator: TBD
Speaker: TBD
Topic: TBD
Register
Organizers
CIFAL York is part of UNITAR’s global network of training centres for knowledge-sharing, training, and capacity-building for public and private leaders, local authorities, and civil society. CIFAL Centres are local and regional hubs for innovative, participatory and co-creative knowledge exchange opportunities to support decision-making processes, build capacity, and accelerate the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals. Established in 2020, CIFAL York started its operation in June 2021 as the first CIFAL Centre in Canada. Health and Development training and knowledge sharing is among the key focusing areas of CIFAL York.
For more information or questions please contact: cifaldirector@yorku.ca
International Institute of Security and Safety Management (IISSM)
The International Institute of Security and Safety Management (IISSM) is a non-profit educational Institute registered in 1992 under the Indian Societies Act. It is also registered with the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium enterprises, Government of India. IISSM is committed towards promoting professionalism among security and loss prevention practitioners and creating all round security awareness and consciousness amongst personnel in the related respective management cadre. It offers consultancy services and runs customised and thematic courses covering almost all aspects of the industrial security, safety, fire prevention, loss prevention and allied subjects. It acts as a catalyst to bring professionals together for experience-sharing and updating professional knowledge through numerous Training Courses, Seminars and Workshops, to keep abreast with contemporary advancements in the technology and prepare them to achieve their aims and objectives in their respective professional fields. It has elaborate Professional Certification Programmes for security and safety practitioners, consultants and bestows fellowship on highly selected professionals.