Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) President Frank Farance reports:
Attend an Introductory Presentation for Roosevelt Island CERT
The Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) was funded, via Public Purpose Funds, to develop a Roosevelt Island Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). CERT teams are volunteer organizations, based in the community, they support communities for emergency response – such as the main phases of preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. This team is local, it’s a “workplace” CERT which means it just covers Roosevelt Island and vicinity – this should not be confused with the City-wide effort which is sponsored by NYC Emergency Management – our effort is independent of the City effort.We created this local team because we discovered over the years that the City-wide program (which included a team and then consolidated into the Upper East Side division) was less attractive for Roosevelt Island participants, who only wanted to volunteer locally for our community and weren’t interested in traveling to other parts of the City.
CERTs do supportive and helpful things for our community, including providing emergency preparedness through presentations and activities, building community resiliency, help during recovery and mitigation, and supporting our partners. Here are some examples from our RI CERT FAQ.
So if you live, work, study, or have a material interest in the Roosevelt Island community AND you’re 18 years or older, you can participate. Because this involves a significant investment of you (8-9 weeks of basic training, and possible advanced training), we ask that you make a Good Faith commitment to participate for 12 months (basic training) or 18 months (additional advanced training).
One more thing: CERTs never self-deploy, we do NOT show up at events and seek to offer help. We only deploy when we are dispatched, and that comes from a request from a partner organization, such as RIOC, one of the buildings’ managers, or an Island organization.
Want to learn more about this? We have two Zoom sessions this week: Thursday July 10 at 7 PM, and Saturday July 12 at 10 AM. Each session is about 60 minutes, which includes presentation and interaction, and time for Q&A afterwards.
We will be taking applications in July-August and choosing our first cohort in last August for training in September-November (typically one weeknight for a 2.5 hour training session), and graduation at the end of November.
If you are interested in participating in this Introductory presentation, please RSVP with your name and phone number via E-mail to: rira.president.farance@gmail.com
Thank you for your interest!