Building Resilience Before Disruption Strikes

September is National Preparedness Month (NPM), a time dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of resilience, readiness, and risk reduction. Whether at home, in the workplace, or across an entire community, taking proactive steps today helps individuals and organizations anticipate disruptions, reduce impacts, and recover more effectively when challenges arise.

Throughout September, we’ll explore how proactive planning and resilience help individuals, organizations, and communities better withstand disruption.

Why Preparedness Matters

Preparedness is more than assembling an emergency kit or developing a response plan. It involves understanding risks, identifying critical priorities, establishing continuity strategies, exercising capabilities, educating leaders, and building the resilience needed to respond and recover from disruption.

From natural disasters and public health emergencies to cyberattacks, utility outages, and infrastructure failures, disruptive events can affect anyone, anywhere. While we cannot prevent every disruption, we can take proactive steps to prepare for them. In the first half of 2026, the United States experienced $31.9 billion in damages from weather and climate disasters, while the average cost of a data breach for U.S. organizations reached $11.5 million. Although disruptions cannot always be prevented, preparedness helps reduce their impact and strengthens our ability to respond and recover.

Preparedness is not a one-time activity. It is an ongoing process of planning, training, exercising, and continuous improvement. The investments we make today help strengthen our ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from tomorrow’s challenges.

Preparedness Is for Everyone

Preparedness isn’t just for emergency managers.

It applies to:

• Individuals and families
• Businesses
• Schools
• Government agencies
• Nonprofit organizations
• Entire communities

Resilience is not “nice-to-have.” In a world shaped by natural disasters, public health crises, cyber threats, infrastructure disruptions, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical conflict, preparedness is a necessity.

The most resilient organizations understand that readiness is not simply an emergency management responsibility. It is a strategic capability supported by leadership, governance, risk management, business continuity, and a culture of readiness.

Be Prepared. Be Resilient.

September is National Preparedness Month, and this year’s focus begins with a simple but powerful question: Are you prepared?

Preparedness is about self-reliance, resilience, and planning ahead before a disruptive event occurs. Whether you’re protecting your family, your business, or your community, the time to prepare is before you need your plan.

Many people assume emergencies won’t happen to them:

• “I’m not worried.”
• “That would never happen.”
• “That only happens in the movies.”
• “It happened to them, but it won’t happen to us.”

History tells us otherwise. Events like cyberattacks, pandemics, severe storms, utility outages, and other disruptions have demonstrated that emergencies can affect anyone, anywhere.

The consequences of disruptive events can be significant. Across the United States, major disasters, cyber incidents, infrastructure failures, and other disruptive events continue to affect millions of people and result in billions of dollars in losses each year. While the causes vary, the lesson remains the same: planning ahead helps reduce impacts and accelerate recovery.

What Risks Could Affect You?

Readiness starts with understanding your risks.

The hazards facing your family or business may be different from those faced by someone living across the state or in another country. One community may be prone to flooding, another to hurricanes, wildfires, severe winter storms, prolonged power outages, or infrastructure failures.

Consider the risks that could affect:

• Home and family
• Workplace
• School
• Community

For businesses, this begins with understanding which disruptions could have the greatest impact on people, operations, customers, finances, and reputation. This is why organizations conduct Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) to identify critical operations, evaluate the consequences of downtime, and determine recovery priorities before an incident occurs.

What Is Your Plan?

If an emergency occurred today, would you know what to do?

• How would you communicate if phone service was disrupted?
• How would your business continue operating if your office became inaccessible?
• How would you access critical information if systems were unavailable?
• How would employees continue serving customers if primary facilities were unavailable?

The same planning principles apply at every level. Individuals develop emergency plans for their households, while organizations document their preparedness and recovery strategies through formal resilience and business continuity programs.

For organizations, these answers are documented in Business Continuity Plans (BCPs). While a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) identifies critical operations, dependencies, and recovery priorities, a BCP outlines how the organization will sustain operations and recover during a disruption. It establishes the strategies, procedures, roles, responsibilities, communications, and recovery actions needed to respond in a coordinated manner when normal operations are interrupted.

Together, BIAs and BCPs turn preparedness into practical action that strengthens organizational resilience. However, plans alone are not enough. Organizations must regularly test and exercise their plans, validate assumptions, identify gaps, and educate leaders on their roles and responsibilities during a disruption. Exercises help ensure that recovery strategies work as intended, while leadership training builds the confidence and decision-making capabilities needed to navigate significant disruptions effectively.

While organizations may rely on formal plans, exercises, and governance structures, the underlying objective is the same as personal readiness: understanding what is important, anticipating potential challenges, and being ready to respond when disruptions occur. Those same principles apply at home, which is why every household should maintain an emergency kit tailored to its unique needs.

What’s in Your Emergency Kit?

A preparedness kit should be customized to your household’s unique needs. Consider how you will meet essential needs related to food and water, medical care, communications, power, important records, and the care of children, older adults, individuals with special needs, and pets during an emergency.

Every household has unique needs. Families with young children, aging parents, medical requirements, or pets may require additional planning and resources.

The same principle applies to organizations. Every business has unique requirements based on its people, facilities, critical operations, technology, suppliers, and customers. Understanding those dependencies is a key component of preparedness and resilience planning, helping organizations identify the resources and capabilities needed to sustain operations during a disruption.

How Else Can You Get Ahead of Risk?

Readiness extends beyond emergency supplies.

Consider:

• Joining a neighborhood preparedness group (FEMA offers the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program that educates volunteers about disaster preparedness for the hazards that may occur where you live)
• Participating in community emergency programs
• Building relationships with neighbors
• Developing workplace emergency procedures
• Participating in preparedness exercises and training
• Supporting school or community preparedness activities

Strong communities are built before disasters occur, not during them.

Organizations strengthen preparedness through training, exercises, governance, and continuous improvement. Effective governance establishes clear decision-making authority, escalation paths, accountability, and coordination before, during, and after a disruption.

Exercises, testing, and leadership education help organizations validate capabilities, identify gaps, improve coordination, and strengthen decision-making. Tabletop exercises, simulations, and recovery tests provide opportunities to evaluate plans under realistic conditions while reinforcing roles, responsibilities, escalation procedures, and governance expectations.

Why Prepare?

Why do we spend time, effort, and money planning for “what ifs”?

Because the alternative is not worth the risk.

Preparedness helps protect people, property, operations, finances, and the things we value most. It enables faster response, quicker recovery, and reduced disruption when challenges occur.

Whether at home or in the workplace, being prepared is fundamentally about resilience: the ability to adapt, continue, and recover when unexpected events happen.

The reality is that emergencies are not a matter of if, but when.

This National Preparedness Month, make it a priority to develop a plan, strengthen your readiness, and prepare your household. If you are a business leader, review your risks, validate your Business Impact Analysis, maintain and test your Business Continuity Plans, conduct exercises, educate leadership teams, and ensure governance structures are in place to support timely and effective decision-making during a disruption.

Whether you’re building an emergency kit at home, conducting a Business Impact Analysis, maintaining a Business Continuity Plan, participating in an exercise, or educating leadership teams, every preparedness activity strengthens resilience and helps ensure that people, organizations, and communities can withstand and recover from disruption.

The actions you take today will determine how effectively you respond, recover, and adapt tomorrow.