There’s nothing like a little snow to get islanders back into thinking about emergency preparedness — however we care to define “emergency.”
Thankfully, our island communities have well-formed plans for responding to those in need during short-term extreme weather events. We recently highlighted the Salt Spring and Southern Gulf Islands’ emergency programs and pods in our sister publication, Aqua, where a common theme among organizers was that in our “remote” communities, all of us must take more responsibility for our own wellbeing, and for our neighbours’.
So in a longer-term event, after our 72-hour emergency kits and grocery shelves start to thin out, what then?
It takes only a casual look back toward the early days of the pandemic — or forward toward the potential impacts of uncertain international trade — to show the value of building some self-reliance into emergency planning. In this regard we applaud the growing Neighbours Feeding Neighbours (NFN) program, linking neighbourhoods and emergency pods with Salt Spring’s food security enthusiasts — local farmers, backyard gardeners, market sellers and community organizers — to increase the island’s resilience to the sort of events that disrupt our “normal” supply chain. NFN, alongside the Farmland Trust, works to increase capacity and connectivity through networking and education about food production, storage and preservation.
Everyone can visit nfnsaltspring.org and ssifarmlandtrust.org/foodshare to learn more about emergency food preparedness and explore upcoming workshops. And the door is always open for people who want to get involved with the Salt Spring Island Emergency Program — reach out to SSIEPC@crd.bc.ca to connect with, expand or even lead your neighbourhood pod. Pender, Galiano, Saturna and Mayne residents can send an email to SGIEPC@crd.bc.ca.
And if the most dire forecasts fail to materialize, the worst that could be said was that we grew our community connections, learned more about our local food producers and picked up an invaluable skill or two.