2026 CRHNet Symposium

Pre-disaster recovery planning helps communities strategically plan for recovery before a disaster occurs. These efforts facilitate timely and strategic recovery, and helps align investments made during recovery with community priorities. Further, pre-disaster recovery facilitates timely recovery that can reduce the long-term impacts of disasters, minimize costs and support more equitable recovery outcomes.
Pre-disaster recovery lays out the vision, governance and organizational structures, as well as the priorities, and roles and responsibilities for recovery.

This workshop will walk participants through the steps needed to develop a recovery plan, the partners to include, and the resources available for communities. Collectively, these steps are designed to set communities up for a more effective recovery that improves resilience and reduces risk.
Participants will be introduced to the essential components of pre-disaster recovery planning and guided through two scenario-based activities. The first interactive activity will walk participants through the process of creating a recovery vision. The second activity will help participants understand how to organize recovery into thematic sectors for a whole-of-society approach to disaster resilience. This engagement session can be brought back to communities to run in their own communities.

This session aligns with theme as throughout the session, facilitators will encourage participants to consider how the vision and proposals of recovery actors will reflect the voices of communities that may face barriers to participation, including newcomers, seniors and those experiencing homelessness – a core component of pre-disaster recovery planning.

Day after day, emergency managers in Canada prepare for, respond to, and help communities recover from and mitigate various types of hazards, some of which overlap or require long-term activation of emergency operation centres. This group of practitioners experience varying types and degrees of stress, require extraordinary coping skills as well as access to enabling systems and helpful interventions to perform their duties in ways that maintain their own well-being. Unsurprisingly, stress, including harmful outcomes such as trauma, burnout and compassion fatigue are common in the emergency management profession and can result in significant health consequences, early or premature departure from the job, and as a result, a potential reduction in community safety. Despite this, little attention has been paid to date in research on the experiences of stress (acute and chronic) in the Canadian emergency management context, or how, for example, demands of work, role structure and extra-organizational factors contribute to individual pressures and strain.
 
This session aims to initiate conversations with EM representatives / stakeholders from across the country about stress and its related features. The goal is to help normalize occupational stress as a shared human experience, to reflect on personal stress experiences in anonymized ways and without oversharing, and to learn about different strategies in place for coping, or helpful resources from peers (in the room).