The Evidence

In the 1970s, combat medics returning from Vietnam were trained to deliver life-saving care to patients before they could get to a hospital. Within ten years, cardiac arrest survival rates tripled and accident-related deaths dropped 40%.

Today’s event professionals, venue operators, and community leaders possess similar foundational skills. These workers routinely “build a city in a day” at festivals and events, coordinating temporary power, water, communications, crowd management, medical aid, and rapid logistics. These are exactly the skills communities need during disasters. With focused emergency response training, this workforce and the venues they operate become a rapid extension of community safety capacity, at a time when it’s needed more urgently than ever.

Disasters are vastly outpacing current response capacity.
Since 2011, America has experienced major disasters at rates far exceeding the historical norms on which our current response systems were built. The last five years saw natural disasters more than double the historical baseline—while FEMA operates with a consistent staffing shortage and 73% of emergency responders report burnout. This fact sheet reveals the gap between escalating disaster frequency and our collapsing response infrastructure, from resource allocation failures, lengthening response times, and firsthand accounts from national emergency coordinators who warn “we don’t have people to send.” We urgently need to find a better way to protect the 95% of American communities left at risk by the current system.

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Up to 4.7 million Americans in cities & towns across the country already possess core disaster response skills
While emergency management systems buckle under unprecedented demand, 4.7 million professionals in arts, entertainment, faith organizations, and volunteer networks already possess core disaster response skills but remain invisible to emergency systems. These professionals routinely manage crowds, coordinate complex logistics under pressure, and maintain community trust. They operate venues that are natural disaster response sites and resilience hubs. This geographically distributed workforce is capable of providing massive emergency response capacity exactly where traditional systems are stretched thinnest.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ They just need that “last mile” of coordinated training and organized pathways for deployment.

America’s rural towns face the greatest resource gaps but possess some of the strongest latent infrastructure that could dramatically improve local disaster readiness.
While rural communities face the most severe emergency preparedness funding gaps, they possess uniquely strong cultural infrastructure networks that represent untapped disaster readiness assets. This fact sheet examines how rural arts organizations outperform urban counterparts in community reach and engagement, while pre-existing relationships between cultural workers and emergency managers create natural deployment advantages. The analysis demonstrates how targeted investment in rural cultural infrastructure could strategically enhance community disaster preparedness, precisely where traditional emergency management resources fall short.

AI-proof workforce development

Emergency management faces a workforce crisis: high turnover, burnout, unfilled positions, and limited training capacity. Communities pay for this through inadequate preparedness and costly disaster response.

#ReadyWhen addresses the root cause—creating sustainable career pathways that reduce turnover, prevent burnout through regular skill deployment, and build the skilled workforce that makes effective disaster preparedness possible. It formalizes community assets that already exist in towns across the country.

Emergency management requires situational leadership—split-second decisions with incomplete information, reading group dynamics, building trust under pressure, and adapting to rapidly changing conditions. These skills cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, and they atrophy without regular use. Working festivals and events keeps emergency managers operationally sharp while building community relationships before disasters strike.