FEMA released today its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan which seeks to unify and further professionalize emergency management across the country, helping us build a stronger agency and a more resilient nation.
When disasters strike, FEMA cannot succeed alone in the mission of helping people. We need to work in coordination with our partners and stakeholders to ensure that response and recovery is federally coordinated, state managed, and locally executed. This strategic plan strives to rally all our stakeholders and the Agency around the three goals of preparedness, catastrophic readiness, and reducing complexity.
“We must all work as one through this strategy to help people before, during, and after disasters to achieve our vision of a more prepared and resilient nation,” said FEMA Administrator Brock Long.
The Strategic Plan outlines three ambitious, but achievable goals for the next five years:
- Build a culture of preparedness
- Every segment of our society, from individual to government, industry to philanthropy, must be encouraged and empowered with the information it needs to prepare for the inevitable impacts of future disasters.
- Ready the nation for catastrophic disasters
- FEMA will work with its partners across all levels of government to strengthen partnerships and access new sources of scalable capabilities to quickly meet the needs of overwhelming incidents.
- Reduce the complexity of FEMA
- FEMA must continue to be responsible stewards of the resources we are entrusted to administer. We must also do everything that we can to leverage data to drive decision-making, and reduce the administrative and bureaucratic burdens that impede impacted individuals and communities from quickly receiving the assistance they need.
These goals, and their supporting objectives, reflect recommendations and perspectives from conversations with disaster survivors and communities, and from what FEMA learned from the recent historic disaster season, through insights shared in collaborative Discovery Change Sessions with employees, and an online IdeaScale campaign.
“Each of these goals represents a major undertaking, and FEMA won’t be able to accomplish them without the help of the entire community,” said Administrator Long. “This plan is just the beginning as we galvanize the whole community to help individuals and families during times of need. We are going to be talking about it a lot and acting on it.”
The plan is available online at FEMA.gov/strategic-plan.