Working in a Preparedness Team

If the world as we know it collapses, it’s not only about survival. Once your survival needs are met, you’re going to have to rebuild and to continue on with your life. Having a group of people you trust with you makes that a lot easier.

The problem is that each person I add to my retreat would seem to lower my safety margin by requiring more supplies. Fortunately, this is only true if my supply amount is fixed. My one year supply of food for my small family of three becomes a six-month supply if three people are added. I have a mother and father, plus a sister, her husband, and their six kids. Suddenly my nice cushion of supplies turns into a few months supply.

However, if those people I add to my retreat bring their own supplies with them, it dramatically increases my safety margin. In a large-scale societal collapse it is safe to assume that in the beginning mouths to feed is a liability, but after the initial period, those same mouths provide a workforce, a brain trust, and a security team.

No one person can do it all, and even if you could no one has enough time to get all the disaster-required tasks complete.

Can you cut enough wood to keep the cooking fire burning, while scrounging food, cooking it, hauling water, building shelter, patrolling for situational awareness, and then stay up all night on watch? No, you can’t—no one can. A team can do this and more.

The problem with a team is building the right one. Everyone thinks they can get along, and they probably can when things aren’t stressful, but add in fear, uncertainty, discomfort, hunger, and stress, and it becomes a different group of people.

It is imperative you carefully select a team that is compatible and that is willing to sacrifice for the good of everyone. There have been countless studies on how teams form and I have taken some graduate level courses on that process. In my opinion the military gets it right—they don’t look for common beliefs, they look for common values. They build trust among the team members, have a common purpose, constantly test themselves, and deliberately work with introduced stressors.

In my unit, we had conservatives and liberals, cowboys and city boys, lifers and slackers, but we all were dedicated to our cultural values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment. We did not want to let the team down, or be the weakest link.

It takes time to identify people with common values because anyone can talk about values that they don’t actually hold. How many people are on social media talking about their wonderful relationships while chasing every available member of the opposite sex?

Values are important, but so are skills. I still think values are more important, but no team needs all muscle and no brains, or all shooters and no doctor. A perfect team would be like a special forces A-team—highly motivated and team dedicated, with all members having a base skill set, and each one having some needed specialty.

It is unrealistic to think you can find a trauma surgeon, a sniper, a master gardener, and an engineer all willing to join your group. We just don’t function in society with that wide a range of friends; however, you can find a nurse, a gardener, a car mechanic, and a former infantryman in almost every social circle.

Be selective, be discrete, and be on the lookout for users that are poison in a group.

A good team takes time to build, which means you should start now.

In building a team, you should know your area and move slowly. Giving lectures on disaster preparedness as the new owner of a rural homestead may seem like a good idea to show your expertise, but chances are your neighbors are lifelong farmers and have been living those concepts their entire lives.

Alternatively, you may expose your preparedness in a community where basic preparedness is looked on with hostility and you may be unfairly categorized as crazy, or a conspiracy theorist, or “anti-government.”

If I had to do it all over again, I would not have been so quick to identify myself as a prepper online. It has had benefits, but it has also had negative employment consequences and put personal stress on relationships. Be cautions when self-disclosing your ideas and beliefs when attempting to find like-minded individuals.

A Safe Way to Find Potential Team Members

Everyone knows what a neighborhood watch is; it has little negative connotations outside of the little old lady with the binoculars minding everyone else’s business. It is supported by local law enforcement and not seen as a community threat.

Getting a watch started is a safe way to take the temperature of a community in regards to who is interested in being proactive in personal safety.

Taking this a step further is a program called the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). The CERT program is funded through the US Department of Homeland Security and is designed to be a small group of community volunteers that are trained in light search and rescue, basic first aid, and disaster assistance. They receive free training and support from the local government and, in the case of a large-scale disaster, can help their community. In turn, the CERT team will reduce dependence on first responders.

Cautious and appropriate conversations during training and team activities can easily identify the mindset of the members. With care you can build a team of local individuals that value the same things you do, who have some level of training, and that you can practice disaster skills with in socially acceptable ways.

CERT Team.
Flickr: COD Newsroom.

This is important because you do not want to be in the position of being both the community outcast, and the only identified prepper after a collapse as it can suddenly be socially acceptable to try to take from the “crazy hoarder.” My dad would say, let them try, I have guns, but you can’t shoot everybody, and even if you could, the consequences are terrible.

The concept of the zombie apocalypse is actually designed to be a socially acceptable method of discussing how to kill masses of people that are not prepared and are willing to kill you for your stuff.

To me, being an upstanding community volunteer that has training, skills, and social backing is a much better way to survive a collapse. Suddenly, you are not a crazy prepper, you are a community leader that happens to have some extra seeds and garden tools you “found in your basement.” Now you are not a threat, but a community asset. A community tends to protect their assets.

It is definitely worth the effort to build a team, but sometimes that is just not possible. If you cannot find members you can trust, it is best to be tight-lipped and not spread information about your preparedness.

Whether you can find a team or not, you always have family, and getting your family to understand prepping is vital to long-term security. Unfortunately, sometimes family is the hardest group to work with.