Promoting Community Preparedness and Resilience: A Latino Immigrant Community-Driven Project Following Hurricane Sandy.

ABSTRACT

As community residents and recovery workers, Latino immigrants play important roles after disasters, yet are rarely included in preparedness planning. A community-university-labor union partnership created a demonstration project after Hurricane Sandy to strengthen connections to disaster preparedness systems to increase community resilience among Latino immigrant communities in New York and New Jersey. Building ongoing ties that connect workers and community-based organizations with local disaster preparedness systems provided mutual benefits to disaster planners and local immigrant communities, and also had an impact on national disaster-related initiatives.