Project Overwatch is a preparedness strategy: the state of Schafhund supporting and educating society from a position where it can observe the terrain ahead, especially the vulnerabilities within society and the community.
This allows Schafhund to provide a disaster resilience plan to insure immediate delivery of support during a disaster so that government authorities can maneuver without disruptions.
The ability to prevent, respond to, and recover from natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other disasters requires communication, collaboration, and coordination across all sectors of the public, private and the government through a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort
to ensure effective coordination during incident response.
Transforming to a Culture of Preparedness
Disaster can strike people in any community at any time, building slowly naturally, or striking suddenly without warning
through man-made acts. Whatever the scenario, Schafhund wants to be part of a team of responders. Just like our United
States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mission, “to reduce the loss of life and property and help communities
nationwide protect themselves from all hazards, including natural disasters and acts of terrorism” Schafhund supports the
nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery and
Schafhund supports preparedness by developing policies that are in line with the DHS National plans, ensure that adequate
plans are in place and are validated, define necessary capabilities required to address both man-made and natural threats,
providing integrated and synchronized preparedness resources and technical assistance to state, local, tribal and territorial
US government partners.
The DHS National Response Framework presents the guiding principles that enable all response partners to prepare for and
provide a unified national response to disasters and emergencies from the smallest incident to the largest catastrophe. The
DHS Framework establishes a comprehensive, national, all-hazards approach to domestic incident response.
Schafhund will take an innovated view on preparedness planning that makes it possible to manage the entire life cycle of a
Schafhund’s strategic and operational plans establish priorities, identifies expected levels of performance and capability
requirements, provides the standard for assessing capabilities, and helps stakeholders learn their roles for a disaster.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explains the term "resilience" refers to the ability to adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and rapidly recover from disruption due to emergencies. Whether it is resilience towards acts of terrorism, cyber-attacks, pandemics, and catastrophic natural disasters, our national preparedness is the shared responsibility of all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and individual citizens.
Schafhund collaborative definition of Resilience: Adapting to adversity. Resilience is the ability to roll with the punches. When stress, adversity or trauma strikes, you still experience anger, grief and pain, but you're able to keep functioning — both physically and psychologically.
Psychological resilience is defined as an individual's ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity.
What is Disaster resilience? It is the ability of individuals, communities, organizations and states to adapt to and recover from hazards, shocks or stresses without compromising long-term prospects for development. The ability of countries, communities and households to manage change, by maintaining or transforming living standards in the face of shocks or stresses – such as earthquakes, drought or violent conflict – without compromising their long-term prospects.
Disaster resilience is part of the broader concept of resilience – ‘the ability of individuals, communities and states and their institutions to absorb and recover from shocks, whilst positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term changes and uncertainty’
In conceptual terms, vulnerability and disaster resilience are closely related. Some authors see vulnerability as the opposite of disaster resilience, while others view vulnerability as a risk factor and disaster resilience as the capacity to respond.
Disaster resilience has been described as both an outcome and a process. Practices focused on outcome have tended to adopt top-down reactive approaches which can favor the status quo and take attention away from inequalities resulting from insecurity and disaster. As a process, building disaster resilience involves supporting the capacity of individuals, communities and states to adapt through assets and resources relevant to their context. For some, this implies enhancing peoples’ rights and addressing socio-economic, gender and environmental inequalities that exacerbate vulnerability.
In its simplest form, the practice of disaster risk reduction requires any number of the following activities to build community resilience:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Strategy
Allocating Homeland Security Funding Based on Risk
Since fiscal year 2003, DHS has awarded more than $36 billion in preparedness grant funding based on risk to build and sustain targeted capabilities to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from threats or acts of terrorism and natural disasters.
Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessments (THIRAs): Beginning in FY 2012, all states receiving homeland security grant funding are required to develop and maintain a Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment, which includes the range of threats and hazards faced by an applicant. Through the THIRA process, states will compare existing capabilities with target capabilities to identify potential gaps and focus grant funding accordingly.
The National Preparedness Goal
In 2011, DHS announced the country's first-ever National Preparedness Goal required under Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8. The goal sets the vision for nationwide preparedness and identifies the core capabilities and targets necessary to achieve preparedness across five mission areas laid out under PPD 8: prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery. To support this effort, DHS completed the first Strategic National Risk Assessment in 2011, which helped identify the types of incidents that pose the greatest threat to the nation’s homeland security.
Disaster Response and Recovery
Every year, disasters put millions of Americans in danger and destroy billions of dollars’ worth of property. But every year, all year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is on the job —as part of a team helping communities reduce their risk, helping emergency officials prepare for all hazards, and helping people get back on their feet after their lives are disrupted by a disaster.
Supporting Communities Affected by Disasters
FEMA coordinates federal operational and logistical disaster response capability needed to save and sustain lives, minimize suffering, and protect property in a timely and effective manner in communities that become overwhelmed by disasters.