Day of Service: Emergency Preparedness Fair

[KJ4SNG]

Hi all! I'm a brand-spanking new ham and am also emergency preparedness coordinator for my ward in Georgia. Our stake president requested each ward to have a handful of volunteers get themselves licensed as ham radio operators, so I took that as a challenged, found someone to teach a class and got this pulled together. We've had a group get licensed and have another group preparing right now to test again in April. So we will have a good sized group of licensed hams soon!

During the class, one of the students happens to be the person in charge of our ward's participating in the Day of Service. She asked me about combining our Emergency Preparedness Fair with the Day of Service...I agreed,.... and now our fair is county wide to include everything imaginable! We have our area hams as well as our ward hams involved in this too. We're pretty excited! We've invited many of the stores that sell generators and flashlights and everything in between to be there and set up demonstrations. We have firemen, policemen, county extension office,... gobs of people we're including.

I know that some of you have done something similar where you included ham radio operators and I wondered if perhaps you had any advice or ideas for things we could incorporate into our fair that would be beneficial for all age groups without being much difficulty? I'm open to suggestions!

And once this fair is over, I'm interested in what you do to involve yourselves with other LDS hams around? This site seems like a good start and I've already sent a note to the ward members to visit it.

Thanks!
Marianna

[KE5TTU]

We just had a similar event here in Fort Worth. We invited the Red Cross, CERT teams, Fire Department, and had displays for canning, food storage, gardening, water purification and storage, emergency cooking (solar ovens, alternative fuels,etc), first aid, ham radio, 72-hr kits, and a guy from Ready.gov (not sure how we got him there).