Michelle Wiench

Project Description:

The purpose of We're Ready! (WR!) Community Disaster Preparedness Workshop (wereready.org) is to facilitate communities in designing and implementing their own disaster plans through interactive and engaging community-building activities. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of the We're Ready! (WR!) Workshops for two main types of participants: 1. Community members (residents) 2. Municipal staff, emergency managers, NGOs, and other professionals across Canada for a Train-the-Trainer (T3) version of the workshop. Historically, emergency preparedness programs have targeted individuals and households (still the main focus in Canada) and have had minimal success (Uscher-Pines et al., 2012). The We're Ready! (WR!) Community Disaster Preparedness (original) workshop, co-developed by Dr. Bogdan and residents from High River, Alberta, focuses at the community level. The WR! approach is unique: its purpose is to facilitate (rather than lead) communities to design and implement their own neighbourhood-level, locally-relevant disaster plans, and build their social networks and community capacity, through interactive and engaging activities. WR! consists of workshop activities to create the following deliverables: hazard and evacuation maps; communication plans; and a community capacity inventory. WR! is intended to complement existing emergency preparedness programs. The Train-the-Trainer (T3) workshops will consist of the WR! workshop as well as additional training materials to guide participants in adapting and implementing the WR! workshops to different demographic groups and types of hazards. As a member of the We’re Ready Team, I worked on preparing and facilitating workshop activities with Dr. Evalyna Bogdan and Aziz, another team member working on the project. This summer We’re Ready! partnered with the City of Vaughan. Before starting the research, we worked on the ethics submission documents for York University. I learned more about the research process and facilitated activities for the Train-the-Trainer workshop for emergency management professionals. The Train-the-Trainer workshop provided an overview of how workshops are run, allowing emergency management professionals, city staff and all other attendees to learn how they implement We’re Ready! workshops in their own communities. We spoke to community group representatives to prepare workshops for groups interested in hosting We’re Ready!. The pre- and post-workshop surveys serve to analyze the effectiveness of the workshops which are currently still in progress. Lastly, I will work with the team to analyze these results and co-author a report by the end of the summer. Throughout my experience, I had opportunities to network, meet emergency management professionals, and tour the Provincial Emergency Operations Center.

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The Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) – Undergraduate enables our students to meaningfully engage in research projects supervised by LA&PS faculty members. Find out more about DARE.