Most movements or organizations require some form of “outreach” in order to grow – or even to avoid getting smaller! Perhaps one of the only group to gain ever larger adherents without any form of outreach…..is the cemetery! Political parties, private schools, certainly retail establishments, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies all understand that outreach is part and parcel of growing their income and influence in a society.
The survivalist/prepper movement has traditionally left outreach to the purveyors of related products. Preferring anonymity and eschewing public recognition, leadership and followers alike have avoided any form of outreach.
But Christian love and compassion demand that those of us who understand the possibilities of any nation in such a fractured and dangerous world, speak out and encourage others to be better prepared for the safety of their families, children, and grandchildren. This is just Christian love in action.
So I would like to recount, in some anonymity, some great new leadership that materialized in an undisclosed city, and the growth that resulted. This is only the story of a beginning, but it is an important one that might pass on courage to budding leadership in other cities.
It began years ago, when an older person at a small church held a meeting to talk about the risks of things like EMP. One of the attendees checked out the claims and found they were, if anything, understated rather than hysterical. That started off a chain of events in that community and beyond that would see all kinds of prepper development including group rifle training, multiple solar power systems, even some written books, and various people gaining FCC ham radio licenses.
The next part of the story in that city was growth of a semi-prepper ham radio group that expanded and expanded capabilities, while working as closely as possible with established authorities in emergency management, rather than avoiding them. The goal is to protect the city for as long as possible to avoid as long as possible the police “going home” and another Katrina-New Orleans disaster happening. And incidentally, in the Katrina disaster authorities began forced confiscation of firearms from vulnerable citizens. Despite laws passed since then, I’m convinced that human foibles will cause that to occur again in similar circumstances.
In the process of expanding, that ham radio group gained significant expertise in holding good-sized conferences and hands-on exercises to train ham radio operators in skills that obviously are “dual use” – useful both in “rule of law” and “without rule of law” situations. A good number of the participants were surely closet prepper types.
Go along a few years, and further development of beligerancies in North Korea, Gaza, Yemen (Houthis), and on and on, and something remarkable bubbled up in the larger city nearby. A leader in a local religious association and a middle-aged professional stepped forward and brought up the idea of holding a conference to address survivalist-type themes. This small nucleus appeared to have relatively little experience in holding significant conferences….and that was about to change!
The leadership pair had the wisdom to reach out for additional help– and contacted a well-known emergency communications leader, fairly well known as “prepared.” And so meetings began to plan a Conference. Along the way, since this was being done as “proper” and “out in the open,” a professional from the firearms industry joined in, bringing more expertise.
The group met on a regular schedule and hammered out plans for location, plenary sessions, and thought out a large number of small-group sessions, and began to seek out expertise for those sessions. Sessions could include:
- Basic firearms safety
- Growing crops
- Animal husbandry
- Security – of groups, not just individuals
- Food storage, and simple meal preparation
- Financial issues in societal disruption
Experts on these topics and more were not difficult to find. The leadership group had less experience “managing” experts and moved slowly to demand deadlines and production of outlines or well-planned talks. The major speakers had more experience and easily came up with solid slide sets for crisp talks; some of the smaller session speakers were a little less organized.
Nevertheless, the organizational techniques that are taught and used all over the nation by emergency operations centers and incident commanders, such as the Incident Command System and the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Protocol, were introduced to the leadership and were to varying degrees adopted, with excellent outcomes in terms of shoring up the planning and making the Conference look and feel more and more professional.
Some of the leadership had experience in managing web-based event registration and helped set this up for the group, which meant that the other leadership gained valuable experience! The encouragement of using ICS and HSEEP organizational techniques also provided more experience and skills for the leaders, who were continuously learning as they went along. They slowly gained experience at “promotion” and eventually were able to successfully create news releases and get free print and web-media coverage.
A local church with excellent facilities was arranged for the venue. Again, having a wide catchment of friends and relationships made this easier. The facility was centrally located, with adequate parking and modern rooms suitable for both large-group and small-group settings. Being easy to locate on a main thoroughfare helped!
Registrations were slow in coming at first. Word-of-mouth is key in promoting such things as “quasi-prepper” gatherings because people are concerned about appearing interested and concerned about the quality of the material that will be presented. People don’t want to appear to be “extremists.” Having “name-brand” speakers and a well-known venue certainly helped! Each registrant could be contacted if desired, and registrants would likely “speak well” of the upcoming Conference – and thus registration grows by geometric progression.
The newly-minted leadership group did a great job of arranging a day in advance for speakers and leadership to visit the facility all throughout the day and conquer logistical problems. A very comprehensive ICS-201 Briefing document has all of the important details of who, what, where, and when settled down so speakers and group experts could actually see photos of the event space and their times, places, and duties. Book tables and raffle efforts were encouraged. This advance visit turned out to be very significant because there were logistical problems to overcome. Some speakers just talk; others work with handouts, and some use both handouts and a blizzard of slides and illustrations to get across a large number of important points. Those needing audio/visual equipment had a chance to see what was available and plan on personally supplementing what was missing. That planning day was crucial to the success of the event.
Finally, the appointed day arrived – after only 2-3 months of planning. More experienced event planners would have preferred 6 months for these first-time-ever leaders, but they were shooting for a certain time of the year. The facilities were opened early for speakers to arrive and one leader worked furiously to get the audio visuals in the main hall to work properly and set up a huge display for ARES® – with a full working radio setup capable of sending WINLINK radio emails. Also, a huge television (from the living room) running a looping slide show and also some books for sale. The fellow from the shooting industry also had a nice display.
The raffle table eclipsed us all! I was amazed about how many outright GIFTS the new leaders had managed to wheedle out of “big box” stores, but they went way beyond that. They also dug into their pockets and bought a lot of stuff to give away in the raffle. This even included freeze-dried food! I’m not a big fan of raffles but what I realized was that they were actually educating through the products, which ranged the gamut of useful items. Notably, the leader who managed the raffle spread it out so that it was occurring in small segments between various talks – and made it incredibly interesting.
They also had put together lunch as part of the admission price. They outsourced this primarily to ham, turkey, and other sandwiches from Subway – a very wise decision, but they also had snacks and healthy bananas. Lunch went extremely well, as a result.
The plenary talks consumed two hours with introductions and instructions. I thought they went very well and were intended to (a) raise legitimate concern about the future and (b) erase hysteria and (c) prepare people for “hard times” of all kinds, whether spiritually focused or not.
After the two plenary talks, the participants were off to the first of four rounds of 25-minute talks with 5 minutes for moving between talks. Lunch occurred after the first round of talks. Each person could get to only four out of a much larger number of talks – but it was enough that a couple could split up and get the full flavor of all the talks. The ones that I personally gave were hard-hitting, designed to get people to understand how to work with their neighbors for security in anything from simple unrest all the way to complete societal breakdown. My listeners were generally spellbound. The other talks I was able to visit were just about the same – extremely interesting.
Everything ended with a get-together in the mid-afternoon and a sendoff with a printed evaluation form. Nothing says “organization” like getting structured feedback from attendants at a conference! That is an indication of excellent leadership, because it makes it so much easier to discover weak speakers, and unexpected perceptions and problems.
I was really thrilled to see the new leadership hold a “hotwash” session (just like a FEMA Exercise) within a week of the event. A lot got discussed and I had a chance to suggest how they could do their next event even more successfully. After they calmed down and rested a bit, one of the new leaders put out a document to all the leadership and speakers going over all the feedback they had received and the suggestions for improvements they had received. It was just in a simple email format, but it was great for setting the stage for a follow-on conference maybe 9 months from now, to go even more in-depth on many of the subjects. Might get to go into electricity generation by many techniques, much more into food production, etc.
All in all, I saw new leaders emerge in our community, and the concept of self-reliance get a huge boost in the Christian community. Possibly we were primarily “speaking to the choir,” but it was a respectable and informative meeting. We had, as expected, relatively modest support from churches and pastors, but we had a few key supporters who made a huge impact. Now that the conference went so well, we will likely see a lot more support in the future. I was able to get the leaders to work at taking pictures that can be used as part of an even stronger promotion the next time. The torch is slowly being passed from the old guard to the up-and-coming leadership and that needs to grow and grow and grow to serve and protect many many more in our communities.