Lutheran Social Services of Northern California was recently honored as a "Model Disaster Preparedness Agency" by the Fritz Institute. The honor results from the agency’s pioneering efforts in increasing disaster response capacity for underserved communities.

 

LSS NorCal is one of 12 organizations participating in the Fritz Institute’s BayPrep Disaster Resilient Organization program, and has identified and prioritized the services they will deliver in the wake of a disaster. A structural engineer preliminarily assessed LSS NorCal facilities for structural integrity and expectations under extreme conditions and the agency conducts ongoing intensive personal preparedness training with staff. Other preparedness efforts include continuously-evolving continuity of operations plans and continuously-refined incident command system structures.

 

The Fritz Institute launched BayPrep in 2007 to address the needs of underserved communities during a disaster. The program brings leaders from government, private industry, and the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors together to work in a structured, multi-disciplinary way to identify and address gaps in preparedness.

 

The Disaster Resilient Organization program is designed to help develop the response capacity of community and faith-based human service providers in the San Francisco Bay Area following a major disaster, and to evolve standards and metrics for disaster preparedness that will not only be applied throughout the Bay Area region, but eventually serve as a model for parallel initiatives nationwide.

 

Other BayPrep participants include Catholic Charities/CYO, Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco, Glide Foundation/Glide Memorial Church, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Jewish Family and Children’s Services, Meals on Wheels, Mission Neighborhood Health Center, NICOS – Chinese Health Coalition, Project Open Hand, San Francisco Food Bank, and the St. Anthony Foundation.