emergency Preparedness

Disaster Training Helps Area Seniors

By Casey Freed

Neuse Presbyterian Church is a small historic structure situated on a rural side road in New Bern. The church has been serving its community since 1926. But in response to the devastation of Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, the little church with the big heart would serve on a much broader scale by opening its doors to serve as a place of refuge for volunteer work teams who flocked to New Bern to rebuild in the wake of the storms.

Photo by casey Freed Work teams from nine counties arrive at new Hope Volunteer Village for a Disaster case Managers Training course. Paticipants learned how to coordinate responses following a disaster, such as a hurricane.

Shelter in the Storm

With the help of other organizations, the Church’s educational building was altered to comfortably house up to 60 volunteers, with nine bunk rooms, two kitchens, nine showers, laundry facilities, and an area for community outreach and education.

The center, now known as the New Hope Volunteer Village, is part of the Craven County Disaster Recover Alliance (CCDRA) and was this year’s host site for Catholic Charities’ and CCDRA’s 2021 Disaster Case Managers Training Course. Participants from nine counties traveled to New Bern to attend the training. As an active member of Brunswick County’s Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters (VOAD), Brunswick Senior Resources, Inc. (BSRI) sent a member of the BSRI Aging Resource team to attend the two-day course.

Learning How Best to Help

BSRI’s role along with other agencies active in VOAD is to collaborate with each other at local, state, and federal levels to better coordinate response following a disaster, and to effectively ensure that disaster survivors have access to all possible resources.

These types of trainings strengthen effective disaster case management skills, helping BSRI’s Aging Resources team to provide assistance to Brunswick County seniors at every phase of disaster, from assessing risks seniors face prior to a disaster, to assisting seniors in overcoming barriers they face in applying for assistance afterwards.

The course covered 10 topics for conducting disaster case management. It included group activities that allowed participants to put training into practice.

One participant in the training course said that following Hurricane Florence, there were many people who did not understand the application process involved with receiving assistance from FEMA. Overwhelmed by what they had already been through, they simply gave up and missed out on resources that they qualified for. That’s why these training courses are crucial to providing case managers the skills to step in and be an advocate and voice for disaster survivors.