The 2 Steps a Month is a program to help organize yourself and your community to be more prepared in the case of an emergency. Each month we’ll focus on two steps that you can take to become more prepared. We encourage you to share this information with friends, family, neighbors and members of your community.

Ideas on how to organize your community
1.  Make copies of the handouts and distribute. Make them a different color each month.
2.  Get several people in your community to distribute the monthly flyers and have them check in with those people to answer questions and to add that personal touch.
3.  Get emails of community members or neighbors to make the documents available electronically. You can also send a couple of reminders monthly to get the monthly steps back on people’s radars.
4.  Have a monthly gathering to discuss emergency preparedness. For some months, you can get together and do the steps together such as creating first aid kits or go bags.
5.  Post flyers around your neighborhood. Use the same color as the monthly flyer.

Month 1: Emergency Contact and Evacuation Plan
This month’s 2 Steps are to create an emergency contact list and evacuation plan. In our neighborhood we have an emergency container for the neighborhood and are also asking people to share their emergency contacts and medical alert information. To maintain privacy, this information would be stored in the community kit in individual sealed envelopes and opened only if we needed to contact a relation or needed to administer first aid in an emergency.

Here are the first month’s steps:

• Step 1: Emergency Contacts letter of explanation
• Step 2: Emergency Contact List
  Note: The borders are very small about 0.5″ on each side. This was done to ensure that we could get as much information as possible onto the 2-sided document. The print in orange is text you may want to change for your particular situation.

Month 1: YouTube video

Tip of the month:  Always keep your gas tank at least half full. Think: “Half tank is the new empty.”

During an earthquake, we may need to evacuate the area. There may be a rush on gas or electrically operated gas pumps may be inoperable if the electric power is interrupted.

Organize Your Community

In my neighborhood, we had 8 people volunteer to be responsible for passing out the papers each month and checking in with 4-5 households to make sure they understood the program and had support, if needed. (Here are some talking points for volunteers. Highlighted information are things you may want to change out.) We also created an Excel spreadsheet to collect contact and follow-up information. (I’m not much of an Excel user so I apologize for the lack of formatting.) On telephone poles around the block, we put up flyers to remind people about this month’s 2 Steps.

*Some content from Get Ready Marin!

Click on the tabs above to get the
2 Steps for other months.

Please share with your community.