A resilient community is an informed community. The HCRI provides information about hazards and resources through our website and community-based education-outreach opportunities.
Our education-outreach events integrate active learning techniques with risk perception and preparedness behavior theory to motivate participants to take action to protect themselves, their property, and their loved ones.
The HCRI worked with a variety of academic and community-based experts to create the following hazard webpages: wildfire, flooding, extreme winter weather, earthquake, drought, extreme summer weather, heat, air quality, and smoke, climate change. Upcoming pages include landslide and cybersecurity.
These workshops are designed to help participants better understand wildland Urban interface (WUI) hazards, personalize their household risk, and develop positive attitudes toward taking mitigation and preparedness actions.
We use active-learning and goal setting strategies to help participants engage with the material and set reasonable, measureable, and achievable goals.
Pre- and post-questionnaires allow us to assess changes in participants’ knowledge, perception, and protective action intention.
The workshop was developed in collaboration with the Boise Fire Department and Idaho Firewise with an external review from the Fire Adapted Network. It is designed to be place based and adaptable to different fire-prone ecosystems and communities.
Spanish-speaking communities are rarely involved or represented in earthquake preparedness resources and few materials are tested for their effectiveness at promoting preparedness.
To address this gap, HCRI researchers worked to develop earthquake education workshops that are accessible to Spanish-speaking audiences and are facilitated by Spanish-speaking community members.
They used education best practices to develop a general flow for the interactive 90-minute workshop and then updated the content based on feedback from community members and partners to ensure it was culturally relevant.
The team used a “train the trainer” approach to teach local partners how to deliver the workshops in Spanish.
The workshop audience were Spanish speakers living in the Portland, Oregon region who will be impacted by a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. However, materials could be easily adapted for anyone living at risk to earthquakes.
We advise on NOAA’s outreach materials such as severe weather flyers. NOAA also collaborates on our climate-related hazard pages.