| By Eric Leckey, Former Associate Administrator, Mission Support, FEMA for Homeland Security Today | www.HSToday.us
Every September, Homeland Security Today (HSToday) and the Government Technology & Services Coalition (GTSC) amplify National Preparedness Month—sharing the expertise, ideas, and lessons that can help make our communities and our nation more prepared and resilient. We focus our editorial on preparedness and host an in-person collaboration, EM2026. The time couldn’t be more important. We face risks from hurricanes and wildfires to cyber incidents, floods, and emerging nation-state threats. The challenges ahead are significant, but so too are the opportunities.
This year, FEMA has selected a theme that speaks directly to the responsibility we all share:
Americans Stand Ready.
Those three words capture something fundamental about emergency management. Preparedness does not begin when a disaster is declared. It begins long before an event—with individuals, families, neighborhoods, government agencies, emergency managers, first responders, businesses, nonprofits, academia, media, faith-based, and other community organizations doing the work every day to make their communities stronger and more resilient.
As part of our annual National Preparedness Month initiative, HSToday is once again inviting the entire emergency management community to help us tell that story—and, more importantly, to share what is working.
Across the country, communities are developing creative approaches to preparedness. Emergency managers are finding better ways to reach residents. Public safety agencies are building stronger partnerships. States and localities are testing new technologies. Nonprofits and faith-based organizations are reaching vulnerable populations. Businesses are strengthening continuity and resilience. Neighbors are finding new ways to help neighbors. We want to hear from you.
What Is Working in Your Community?
Throughout National Preparedness Month, HSToday invites emergency management professionals and partners across the homeland security enterprise to submit ideas, strategies, programs, pilot projects, public information campaigns, technologies, partnerships, lessons learned, and other initiatives that have improved preparedness in your communities.
- Tell us about the program that surprised you with its success.
- Share the public information campaign that actually reached people.
- Show us how you engaged a community that had been difficult to reach.
- Tell us about a partnership that solved a problem your organization could not solve alone.
- Share how you are using technology, data, AI, drones, communications tools, or other innovations to improve preparedness.
- Tell us what you tried, what you learned, and what you would recommend to another emergency manager facing the same challenge.
- Big or small, sophisticated or simple—we are interested in ideas that work.
Because a good idea developed in one community should not have to stay there.
Stronger Together
One of the great strengths of the emergency management profession has always been its willingness to share.We share resources during disasters. We share personnel through mutual aid. We share lessons after incidents. And we learn from one another because none of us has every answer—and no community should have to solve every preparedness challenge on its own.
We are stronger together.
That principle has guided HSToday’s National Preparedness Month efforts year after year. We want to use our platform to create a national exchange of practical preparedness ideas—from practitioners, for practitioners, and the communities they serve.
Throughout September, we will collect submissions and publish selected contributions on HSToday, giving professionals across the country an opportunity to learn from work already underway in communities like theirs. At the conclusion of National Preparedness Month, we will bring those contributions together in a SPECIAL EDITION of HSToday dedicated to preparedness and resilience—creating a resource that can continue to inform, inspire, and strengthen communities long after September ends.
Expanding HSToday’s Commitment to Emergency Management
This September will also mark an exciting new chapter in HSToday’s longstanding commitment to the emergency management community.
In early September, we will announce HSToday’s new Emergency Management Editorial Board, bringing together experienced leaders and practitioners who will help guide and expand our coverage of preparedness, mitigation, response, recovery, resilience, innovation, and the changing role of emergency management across the nation.
At a time of significant discussion about the future of emergency management—and the respective roles across levels of government and partner communities—we believe it is especially important that the voices of practitioners help lead the conversation. Our new Editorial Board will help us do exactly that: elevate experience from the field, identify emerging challenges, explore new approaches and technologies, and ensure HSToday remains a place where the emergency management community can exchange ideas and learn from one another.
Help Us Build It
Our annual National Preparedness Month effort is more than a call for articles. It is a call for engagement and collaboration. You do not need to be a professional writer. You do not need a national program or a multimillion-dollar initiative. If something has helped your community become better prepared, we want to know about it.
Send us your experience. Send us your lessons learned. Send us the program another community could replicate. Send us the idea you believe deserves a larger audience.
And encourage your colleagues and partners to do the same. See submission guidelines here.
Every year, National Preparedness Month gives our community an opportunity to recommit to the work we do throughout the year. FEMA’s Americans Stand Ready theme provides an especially powerful reminder that preparedness is not the responsibility of one agency, one level of government, or one profession. It is a shared endeavor—one that starts with individuals and requires commitment, coordination, and clarity of purpose.
It belongs to all of us.
Let’s use September to share what we know, learn from one another, recognize the extraordinary preparedness work already happening across America, and give successful ideas the opportunity to travel from one community to another.
Because when our communities are prepared, our nation is stronger. And we are always stronger together.
LEARN MORE AND GET RESOURCES FROM FEMA AT WWW.READY.GOV |
