Once the coalition is established, the next step is to bring together your team. Whether you meet in person or by teleconference, setting goals for your kick-off will help you stay on track. Here are tips on drafting your meeting goals and planning your presentation.
Sample meeting goals
- Introduce the team
- Present a high-level description of the project
- Review team and stakeholder roles and responsibilities
- Clarify how and when you’ll communicate
- Invite feedback
- Outline next steps
Customize our PowerPoint presentation to help prepare your kick-off meeting.
Note: The Community Toolbox from the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas offers a comprehensive guide to conducting effective meetings.
Tips from the field
For most people, community resilience is a relatively new idea. The kick-off meeting is an excellent opportunity to bring people up to speed on the concepts of resilience and how they differ from preparedness.
An excellent resource is the RAND Corporation’s Learn and Tell Toolkit. It can help you explain in plain language what it means to be a resilient community and the differences between resilience and traditional disaster preparedness, among other topics.
Refer to our Successful practices section to find stories of others striving to increase resilience in their community.
Share examples
Focus groups also suggest sharing examples of how communities have wiggled through disasters and bounce back. Showing is better than telling, they said. For sources, RAND offers in-depth coverage of resilient cities in the United States and across the globe. The Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) website features “Voices of Resilience,” a video series of communities working together to build resilience.
The Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) offers community success stories. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers case studies from a policy lens.
Refer to our ABOUT menu to learn of other resilience initiatives of interest to your coalition.