Partner Spotlight

Bringing essential skills tailored to every audience—even while hoping the people and communities they touch never need to use them.

Through challenges that span geography, age, diversity, language and the availability of cellphone coverage and broadband, Listos California partner San Diego County Fire Community Emergency Response Team (SD Fire CERT) provides free services in hard-to-reach rural areas including many lower income and vulnerable populations.

They have a lot of ground to cover. Literally. Tasked to serve 40 communities across 1.5 million acres of unincorporated area, this Listos California grantee knows well that in a natural disaster, the county fire department’s 500 first responders cannot be everywhere or reach everyone at once.

That’s why SD Fire CERT is committed to building on its foundational commitment to serve equitably, inclusively, and to a diverse population through broad community outreach. To do so, they are expanding training for community emergency response volunteers and for residents and neighbors to be better able to be their own first help until first responders can arrive.

It’s a challenge that San Diego-born county CERT coordinator Teresa Greenhalgh sees as their mission to meet and exceed. She operates under the rubric that those who may benefit most from preparedness information are often best reached by custom-tailored types of outreach and connections.

“Your community may be a little bit different from mine; let’s work together to see what works for your community and you as an individual,” Greenhalgh says whenever she starts her training sessions.

“We try to do it in fun, non-threating steps that meet people where they’re at – literally and figuratively and at their level,” Greenhalgh said. “We’ve hosted ‘Kids Ready 2 Help’ activities for after school programs and Brownie troops. We also stage games that quite popular at the other end of the age spectrum, like Senior Emergency Preparedness Bingo that we present at senior centers’ weekly luncheons throughout the county.”

With SD County Fire CERT serving vast rural areas where people have large yards, distant neighbors, and often far-away emergency crews even in non-disaster times, volunteers and first responders teach how to use tourniquets and ways to be the help until help arrives. They also offer certification in providing CPR for adults, children, and infants. With backing from a Listos California grant from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), SD Fire CERT is expanding efforts across its service area, including new CPR classes and other trainings in Spanish.

“Our programs like fire extinguisher training have the added bonus of being great opportunities to recruit new CERT volunteers from all our populations,” Greenhalgh notes. SD Fire also offers mental health first aid training and defensible space and fire-resistant landscaping workshops. And they’ve recently added interactive fire safety and earthquake safety sessions for adults with access and functional needs.

“My mom’s family were migrant farmworkers,” Greenhalgh recalls. “She did not grow up with access to higher education. Years later when I moved to a rural San Diego community to help care for her, I learned the importance of being able to take care of yourself and your neighbors and the importance of helping someone with access and functional needs to be prepared—just in case.

“It’s very important, I believe, to train people with access and functional needs but treat them just like you do any other resident in the county. We may give them some special tips and help them modify their reaction or their response such as drop, cover and hold on. We may help them modify it a little bit because they may be in a wheelchair or have a cane. So that modifies it a little bit for them, helps them to be prepared, but it helps them have ownership for their care and their response.”

In every connection across the diversity of their county, San Diego Fire CERT strives to adhere to a best practice that says people learn best when they hear things 3 times: tell them what you’re going to teach, teach it to them, and then review what you said.

And, says Greenhalgh, who has addressed state and national gatherings, really take that to the next level, “when you want people to initiate a change, they may need to hear the message six or seven times.”

She wants no one to think “it can’t happen to me.” Because it can.