Sariah Israelsen: You're listening to USU Extension Educational highlight. I'm Sariah Israelsen and joining me today is Michael Pate, USU associate professor and project co-leader for the My Preparedness Initiative. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Pate: Thanks for having me.
Sariah Israelsen: So tell me a little bit about this initiative, goals that it's trying to accomplish; just let me know what it is.
Michael Pate: Well, briefly, in a nutshell, it's a project to encourage and develop young leaders to respond appropriately for emergencies. Natural disasters have all been too common around our state. And so this is a national initiative.
It's a national project that came out of Mississippi State and has been recognized through various national awards. And we're very fortunate to get grant funding to bring this here to Utah. And we're going to focus on helping communities prepare for wildfires as well as other natural disasters in their response.
So part of it is a way to develop youth leadership, and then identify careers that they might be interested in as they progress through the program and look at ways they can get involved with emergency response merchant preparedness and their community.
There'll be doing a community project, it's my pi plus six, so they're working with other families in their community to develop an emergency preparedness plan. So it has a couple of different facets.
One is to help develop young leaders in emergency preparedness to develop community response to reduce loss as far as an emergency goes and to prevent injuries and other things that might occur during an emergency, as well as develop community awareness and response.
Sariah Israelsen: So can we go a little bit more in depth in what these youth are going to be taught with this disaster preparedness?
Michael Pate: So these students will be going through FEMA CERT training, and then they have the prep plus six, which is a community service project. But they get CPR and AED certification, as well as some specialized training and ham radio and other technologies and disaster simulations.
We'll work on developing communication skills, civic responsibilities, they'll build some life saving skill sets, give back to their community, identify hazards, be weather aware, they're going to develop a bunch of emergency kits and communication plan.
So they'll have disaster preparedness, that focus on fire safety and suppression, disaster, medical ops, and treatment of injuries, search and rescue and some disaster psychology is what we put into their training.
Sariah Israelsen: So just from your point of view, why is this initiative so important for these kids to be a part of?
Michael Pate: So the CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team. And when I think about this training, why it's so important is it helps our communities develop an awareness and a safety culture.
And it starts with our you. And think about the Future Leaders Here in Utah, and Be Ready Utah. I think we have to engage these youth because they're the ones who are coming up.
And as we develop our communities, I think they're getting those youth involved, as long as with their parents, is a critical component in developing that safety culture in our communities.
And our response when it comes to emergency preparedness, and we think about the number of wildfires that Utah has faced current flooding, even in winter time when we might have disasters occur with blizzards or anything that might cause problems with commerce or productivity in our state.
I think it does a wonderful benefit to our economy, and as well as our communities and being able to respond if you think about the COVID 19 pandemic, and how individuals and communities responded, I'm kind of caught with our hands in our pockets in a sense, and we weren't able to respond to everything was more of a knee jerk reaction.
So having this isn't part of our communities and developing our youth who are going to be our future leaders in our communities. This will help as we look into the future with other emergencies that might occur.
Sariah Israelsen: That was Michael Pate, USU associate professor, and project co-leader. Thanks so much for joining me today and talking to me about this.
Michael Pate: My pleasure. Thank you for your time.
Sariah Israelsen: And thank you all for listening and make sure that you join me again next week.
