The resolution

Just fifty years ago, emergency medicine was transformed when the untapped skills of returning medics from the Vietnam War were recognized, refined, and integrated into civilian life—creating a paramedic system that tripled survival rates for critical emergencies and cut accidental deaths by 40%. Today, paramedic services are so woven into our communities that we cannot imagine life without them—a transformation born from recognizing and investing in latent capacity.

Today, our arts and cultural sector faces a similar moment of opportunity. Across the country, arts venues, museums, festivals, and event professionals already excel in logistics, crowd management, communications, volunteer coordination, and rapid adaptation. With focused training, partnerships, and readiness investment, these venues can become the next generation of community resilience hubs—protecting the public and strengthening recovery in times of need, while building job‑ready skills, strengthening local capacity, and delivering measurable public safety returns.

Whereas:

• Disasters and large-scale disruptions are increasing in frequency and complexity, shifting greater responsibility to states and communities;
• Arts, cultural, faith-based, and event sites—and the skilled professionals and volunteers who power them—represent a substantial, underutilized workforce with experience in temporary infrastructure, mass care, risk management, inclusive communications, accessibility, sanitation, sheltering, and logistics;
• Event professionals’ competencies—wayfinding, ADA compliance, surge planning, evacuation, reunification, interoperable communications, and real-time coordination—map directly onto emergency operations;
• Annual events function as “exercises in the wild,” generating practical learning, vendor and volunteer networks, and trusted community touchpoints that can be activated within hours;
• Proven pioneers—including the National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness and Emergency Response (NCAPER), Performing Arts Readiness (PAR), Majestic Collaborations’ Art of Mass Gatherings, the University of Kentucky Arts Emergency Management program, Footprint Project, Kentucky Cultural and Heritage Response Network, Team Rubicon, World Central Kitchen, and the Event Safety Alliance — have developed field-tested models, training, and standards that jurisdictions can adopt or adapt;
• As EMS expanded from local pilots to national practice by defining problems, mobilizing local assets, and exchanging best practices, so too can locally derived programs achieve rapid gains and contribute back to the field.

• Recognizes arts, cultural, and faith-based centers—and the event and festival professionals who activate them– as essential to preparedness, response, and community resilience.
• Encourages local, needs-driven program development—grounded in self-assessment, continuity and emergency planning, and formal collaboration with emergency management, public health, VOADs, and community-based partners—so jurisdictions can tailor solutions while sharing lessons learned statewide and nationally.
• Supports targeted investment in:
  • A vocational pathway that translates event operations into incident-ready capabilities, with credentialing that recognizes prior learning and aligns with compatible training frameworks;
  • Resilience upgrades and reserve funds enabling rapid activation as cooling/warming centers, shelters, points of distribution, pop-up clinics, and communications, re-unification, and enrichment hubs;
  • Scalable communications, accessibility, language access, and volunteer management systems.
• Utilizes annual events, festivals, and county fairs as practical readiness labs—transparent, iterative exercises that test alerting, wayfinding, medical coordination, evacuation, and inclusive design under real conditions, with public after‑action improvements. In doing so, communities build everyday familiarity with the same systems needed in both celebration and crisis—waste, water, power, communications, and food distribution—while strengthening community engagement and interagency coordination.
• Directs agencies to identify funding streams, streamline administrative processes, clarify liability and reimbursement, and establish activation protocols—aligned with FEMA guidance where applicable—that mobilize these partners within hours, not days.
• Encourages participation in statewide and national learning networks to exchange tools, training, after-action insights, and standards—multiplying local innovations into broader public benefit.

This resolution affirms a pragmatic insight that transcends party lines: the people who already build temporary cities can help safeguard permanent ones. By empowering locally derived programs to innovate—while drawing on existing verified models—we convert creativity into capacity, and familiar community spaces into a ready, resilient civic network at scale.