Pennsylvania Ready Campus

Building Community-Campus Partnerships for Disaster Management

June 2004 – December 2005

James Lee Witt Associates was hired to provide guidance and expertise to campuses throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on Ready Campus, a partnership among higher educational institutions and their neighboring communities. Ready Campus is designed to strengthen the preparation for and response to emergencies by using campus facilities and training campus volunteers.

The initiative was supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, Pennsylvania Campus Compact, the American Red Cross, and College Misericordia in Dallas, PA. Ready Campus in Pennsylvania has served as a model for academic institutions throughout the country. Most recently, colleges and universities across Mississippi and Louisiana have adapted the program in their states.

With staff expertise in all aspects of public safety and emergency preparedness, JLWA advised participating Pennsylvania colleges and universities on how to implement the Ready Campus in their communities. JLWA created the Ready Campus Manual that includes an overview of the initiative, and a how-to guide on forming campus-community partnerships and implementing the initiative at the local level.

In addition, JLWA helped facilitate four statewide training sessions for college, university, and community participants beginning in October 2004. Presenters discussed the initiative and how campus safety directors, faculty and students could best respond in the event of an emergency.

The final piece of Ready Campus was the development of service-learning courses that incorporated crisis recovery elements within a variety of academic majors. These courses represented the "learn-by-doing" method to educate tomorrow's leaders to be crisis managers.

While Director of FEMA, James Lee Witt created Disaster Resistant Universities (DRU), a program to prepare universities for the impacts of disasters. DRU recognized that the long-term health of a university and its surrounding community is inextricably linked to how it prepares for and how quickly it can respond to and recover from an event.

Visit Pennsylvania Ready Campus webpage