The Statesmen's Community Emergency Response Team program or SCR-CERT, is an experimental effort in community and self-preparedness: mobilizing neighbors to deal with local emergencies of all kinds. In any kind of emergency, the biggest killer is panic and the greatest hurdles are communications and teamwork. There are many ways to accomplish critical tasks, but in the middle of an emergency is not the time to argue about it. Critical skills need to be identified quickly and everyone in the community should have a useful role, whether it is assisting law enforcement, helping track a lost child through the woods, setting up impromptu day care, or having a hot meal for the rescue workers when they return. Vulnerable members of the community, including strangers who may not have emergency shelter, children, the disabled, elderly persons, sick and wounded must be identified and taken care of quickly and efficiently. When at all possible, this care should come from the community itself, not outside strangers.

 The Statesmen's program is based on four fundamental rules of emergency management:

1. The first rule of emergencies is not to have one, and therefore the first step in the SCR-CERT program is helping people prepare ahead of time for foreseeable problems. This includes having a food, fuel, and financial buffer, basic emergency supplies, the ability to communicate to report problems, hear instructions, or get help, awareness of safety and security, self-defense, and first aid. For every person who is prepared for an emergency, that is one less person who needs help and one more person relief efforts can concentrate on instead.
2. Someone who is prepared is a potential resource to help others who, for whatever reason, did or could not. If you never use your first aid skills on yourself or in your home, perhaps you will keep an injured motorist breathing until a medical professional can arrive. If you never need to defend yourself, defense training might save another's life. The more these skills are spread around the community, the better chance someone will be there to help you, your family member, your child when needed. There is less than one police officer per one thousand people; it is physically impossible for them to always be when and where needed, but you have a lot of neighbors much closer to home.
3. Teamwork does not just happen: it takes time for people to learn about each other, trust each other, and develop the communications structure to work well under adverse circumstances. That is true of police, it is true of citizens working together, and it is true of citizens and police working together to make our communities safe. One of the largest benefits of community training is simply meeting your neighbors, the amateurs and the professionals, and starting to build the esprit d'corps necessary to meet trouble and excel.
4. Adversity, danger, and violence can be paralyzing; the best way to help someone is to give them a useful role. Dwelling on danger, on personal loss, on suddenly unfamiliar and chaotic circumstances, on pain can lead to a rapid spiral where people become depressed, unstable and a danger to themselves or others. Giving people a role and utility within their measure reverses this spiral and they can quickly become an asset to a relief effort.
5. Bad morale is contagious but shared pain is diminished and shared joy is multiplied. People need to be able to continue to function as a community during an emergency, to re-enforce each other's efforts, to share the burden of loss, to worship, and to celebrate the victories and small miracles of life. Establishing community, morale, and even entertainment quickly pays dividends. Small comforts and elements of the familiar have a disproportional effect under bad circumstances.

This experimental effort will be centered between the Springfield and Joplin area, working within those and the surrounding rural communities. The efforts will be documented and the experiences will be used to fuel similar efforts elsewhere. People are uncertain, many are angry and upset at the trouble of our times. What they need to understand is that they and we have the ability to get through this together, just as past generations of Americans got through our fiery birth, two world wars, two major depressions, a civil war, and all of the trying times in-between.Our faith tells us things will be OK, and Christ's example shows us that even when things are decidedly not OK, we are still OK.

We will be having get-togethers on a private farm in Stotts City owned by the current leadership. These will take the form of a pot-luck with outside training activities, while family and support folks can be inside doing cooking, book-work, tool or equipment smithing, preparation work, so there is a place in this for the whole family. We have a decent site out here with some mixed acreage, a good mix of plants for learning foraging and medicinals, plenty of raw materials, adjoining land owned by friendly neighbors, space for small arms practice, search and rescue work, pitching practice camps, and drilling of all kinds of things. Right now, just to get things organized, attendance will be by arrangement (contact us to discuss) as we ramp up a bit of an organizational structure. We are intending to get specialists of various kinds (where not present directly in the group) out here on occasion to work with specific skills, coordinate with other groups (e.g. relief organizations, law enforcement, and professional emergency personnel), do demonstrations, or share experiences.

We will encourage people to get outside training and certifications (e.g. First Aid, CCW ("Concealed Carry"), firearm safety, First Responder, Volunteer Fire Fighter, Tracking, Search and Rescue). Cooking for groups under bad conditions, preparation of emergency facilities (e.g. camping and sanitation, field hospital), spontaneous individual response to emergencies, and call trees (to mobilize a whole community and make sure vulnerable persons such as children, disabled, and elderly are taken care of) will also be a focus.

 Is this a "militia"?

 In some sense, this group will play the role of a "militia" in the original, Constitutional meaning: the community and private citizens turning out for emergencies, but this will not be a place for people with guns to sit around and complain about the government. If that is your purpose, seriously, please do not come; there is a lot to learn and God does not usually phone us when scheduling emergencies. Self and civil defense was an important aspect of a militia and the militia was explicitly considered by our Founders to be a check against run away government but it was hardly the only purpose and certainly not its typical role. The militia is also the folks who turned out to lay sandbags or dig ditches to divert a flood, to form a search line for a lost child in the woods, to cook meals and set up crash space when the rescue party came back, to keep the peace in time of trouble, or any number of emergencies. Paying a professional force of sufficient size, whether of police, firemen, or military to perform these common but unpredictable tasks was and is essentially impossible (just look at our budget deficits from local to federal).

The purpose of a military or paramilitary unit is to break things and kill people. The purpose of the militia is to save lives, protect property, provide comfort, and secure the community. Training a team, such as a military unit, to the specific role of projected violence is difficult but at least well defined and responsive to top-down authority. Training a team to effectively perform the varied roles a Community Emergency Response Team (essentially the community itself) may be called to requires unparalleled flexibility, a structure both clear and fluid, and a breadth of skills and experiences not predictable in advance. This is why the military, the National Guard, or even the police, by and of themselves, cannot play this role effectively.

Isn't FEMA doing this?

FEMA has a Community Emergency Response Program. Its educational materials and training are often useful and we intend to make use of them and their experience, but this kind of effort really must be organized bottom-up, from the community, not top-down from the government. Government and other national efforts have a role in promoting standardization of terms and techniques, of establishing communications infrastructure, and sharing experience across communities and across emergencies, but only the community itself and its private citizens can understand their unique, local needs and respond to emergencies effectively. Our national experience with many emergencies attests to this. Besides, it is simply the responsibility of the local community to care for itself as far as it is able and community-oriented efforts supply a pool of ready volunteers for dealing with larger, regional crises. As just a few examples, both sides in the Civil War depended heavily on citizen soldiers and support personnel drawn from the state militias, and in the World Wars, the American citizen soldiers were legendary (General Leonardwood, after whom the local base in Missouri is named, was instrumental in the efforts to draw experience from civilians, especially retired military, and spread that knowledge throughout the country prior to World War I). The available stockpile of skills and leadership at the community level determines how we fare in national emergencies of all kinds, military and non-military alike.

There are many aspects to emergencies, including decisons about allocation of critical resources held by private individuals and matters of religion or personal pain which it is not appropriate for the government to be involved in as anything but a last resort. Rather, The community makes these decisions, implements them together, and communicates them as needed to others.

So, is this just another relief organization?

No, we are focused on emergency response, not disaster relief. People trained under this program might very well participate past the boundary of the immediate response and into relief efforts, but the focus for large emergencies is on getting the community to survive with as little loss as possible long enough for larger relief efforts to begin. It takes time for relief efforts to be formulated, arrive, and determine just what they need to do. In many emergencies, the situation develops in moments and people on scene must immediately function as a team. As a situation stabilizes, an emergency response hands off to long-term solutions. With an established communications network and knowledge-on-the-ground from local responders, an outside relief effort's effectiveness can be multiplied.