Welcome to Neighbors Together, a web-enabled disaster preparation tool

Welcome to Neighbors Together, where you can help create the tools and practices for neighborhood preparedness and response, and help your neighborhood prepare for the possibility of an earthquake, fire, pandemic or other major disaster.

This project was started in 2005 to address avian flu. At the time we wrote:

Among humans bird flu has been fatal in about half of all cases reported. After ten years of gestating in Southeast Asia, the H5N1 bird flu virus has burst out and has now been found in Europe and Africa. Smuggled eagles seized in Los Angeles by Customs agents were found to carry the virus. If it becomes infectious among humans, it will reach you and me and every person in the world.

Though the probability of a bird flu pandemic is unknown, the consequences of a pandemic could be grave, with death-toll estimates in the millions. Experts generally agree that government and public health capabilities will be overwhelmed by any significant pandemic. Because there may be insufficient effective vaccine, broad government and public participation in containing the spread of the virus could be critical.

We guessed wrong about which virus would become pandemic, but we were correct that it was coming. Now it is clear that we must prepare for the worst. After the CoVid pandemic there will be something else, local, regional or national. Any preparation work done by your neighborhood can be applied to other disasters that might strike. Neighbors Together chose to use pandemic flu as the focus for preparedness because, frankly, it's about the worst case imaginable - but anything people do to prepare will help with lesser emergencies.

Please explore this site - right now in its infancy - and get involved. The work you do may help not only your neighborhood and family, it may help people in other parts of the country and world, people who may even be maintaining the health and communication and transportation and supply systems that all of us depend upon. We live in an interlinked world, and all the work we do to make that world more robust and resistant to disruption improves everyone's safety and well-being.

Please get involved. It won't be easy to help people around the world to prepare. But it matters. Click on the Getting Started page to begin.