My name is ____________________ , I'm part of the JustFOOD Halifax Action Plan team. With the potential of a hurricane hitting us in the near future, we are supporting the municipality's emergency food response planning. We are working towards a larger emergency food strategy, but we are reaching out to you now as a key player in your community who might be interested in being part of the immediate response.
The purpose of today's outreach is to see if your organization might be interested in potentially playing a role in HRM’s emergency food response and to learn more about what resources you might have available that could support the response. We wanted to open up the conversation to see if you might be interested in being a resource that emergency measures folks could call on during the hurricane season, if an event impacts your community and there is the need for distribution of emergency food. If so, we could then talk more about potential roles and responsibilities and could craft a simple agreement outlining the relationship, funding, insurance coverage etc.
The goal of our outreach is to be able to provide Emergency Measures staff with information that they can use during an emergency event on how to connect with your organization, understanding of what resources you have to support emergency food, and potential role in emergency response. During an event, they would reach out to you and negotiate how you might be involved in the response.
Does this make sense and would you be interested in talking more about this?
A few clarifications before we begin:
· In no way does this outreach or a partnership with the municipality mean that your organization can’t do your own emergency response or initiatives in times of crisis. This would be about how we could partner around getting food to the most vulnerable in your community during an event.
· Entering into a partnership doesn’t mean that you will definitely be called upon in an event, it means that we would ask you to be prepared to fulfill your role in case of an event. EMO would have information about your organization and potential role as part of their situational analysis, so they could call on you if needed.
· The municipality does have a formal process for appointing a facility or organization as an official emergency services provider. If your organization provides a role, supplies, or other support as part of an emergency response you would be compensated for costs. We would work these details out as part of an agreement.
The information you provide here is being recorded on an HRM-protected community engagement platform. The information will only be shared with the HRM Emergency Measures team.
Do you have any questions before we begin talking about your organization?
Note that this is a work in progress for us, we are learning as we go. We are very welcome to hearing any considerations from you that we have not included here.
(**note for us: if the contact decides they would prefer to fill the survey out on their own, we could send it to them - ideally we will fill it out with them on the phone)
