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For those of you who are unaware of who I am, my name is Amber L and I am the director of Family Preparedness

at FieldCraft and I have been doing this job for about two years now. So we created this whole family preparedness department

in the midst of 2020 during the pandemic and so we have developed lots of programs. We have run many, many people through courses that all really had

the highlight of family preparedness and how it related to real life events and circumstances and how we could best apply that, right?

Because there's so many different appealing and amazing and incredible concepts that we see online in all of these little content segments.

But without the framework that exists for our own personal families and the nuances of our families, the applications missing and so people had what we found was people had inspiration from all of this content, you know, being prepared as a family in whatever circumstance, whether that's natural disaster, manmade disasters,

whether that's just something very simple like basic medical skills at home or having everything you needed in the framework of your mobility rig that needed to support a family.

And there was there was the application missing for people and so we worked really hard to address that and to try to fill that void.

And so what we wanted to do today was we haven't really gotten on here and talked about family preparedness in a while. I think it's been probably over a year since we've even done a podcast on family preparedness. So we kind of wanted to speak to the complications that we've seen and we've addressed and we've created amends for the successes that we've witnessed and what that application looks like.

And then tell you about where the future of family preparedness is going with field craft. So, like I said before so many people had questions about where do I start with my family and it's so varied because when it comes to family preparedness, there's so many different age groups, there's so many different variables.

So, you could be living in an inner city, you could be living more rural, you could be an apartment, you could be in a two story brick home, you could be in a mobile home, you could be in a college dorm room, right family preparedness isn't just about the family unit, it's about preparedness in an overarching standpoint for the average person.

So, I think sometimes that concept got lost on people, well, I don't have a family, so where do I fall into this category? Well, family preparedness is about developing a blueprint for safety and a culture of safety for the individual and then that splinters down to whatever that family unit looks like could be your parents, it could be your nieces and your nephews, right.

So, there's many different variations of what that looks like, what family preparedness looks like. And so, we have mindset and that often involves understanding your basic reaction to the world around you and where we found with families that that became so important was making sure that the family unit or the individual understood the way that they're might work.

So, that's a three response as an individual, are you a fight flight or freeze type of person when it comes to the different scenarios that you're encountered with the fear based scenarios that you're encountered with the emergency situations that you're encountered with what are your skill sets as an individual, what are your shortcomings as an individual, how do you account for those, how do you modify those in order to make yourself stronger in that department and eliminate that variable that was causing fear, causing worry or causing anxiety or hesitate.

So, the mindset component was so very important and it all really began with teaching families and taking teaching individuals how to have conversations sitting down having conversations with your family with even yourself journaling out how you react to situations, how you felt in a certain situation where you felt a lack of preparedness when it comes to the community.

So, the mindset of preparedness when it came to X, Y, Z, right and getting to understand and know yourself as an individual, the next component of family preparedness included home safety.

And so, while tactical training is very sexy and people love to come out to tactical training and having skill sets with your firearms is very important, it wasn't the only tool that you needed for your home safety or your public safety.

Which we'll get to in a second, but with home safety, we really wanted to be sure that we weren't only equipping the families with the ability to defend their home, but also to defend themselves within their home whenever something as basic as a firearm couldn't even be utilized so that could be basic fire safety and awareness of how to respond and react to a fire in your home.

Basic safety standards when it comes to the kitchen when it comes to water, all of this is such an important conglomeration within the network of a home in order to increase your safety and that was missing so many times because the big fancy shiny things were addressed but not the smaller actual conceptual parts of creating a safety threshold within that home.

So, then we had public safety and that included preparing your family and your children with code words or yourself with code words so important for adults or pro words to be able to speak back and forth to one another in the event of an emergency when they needed to alert somebody to their feelings of unsafe being unsafe.

How people could communicate with you or track you if they needed how you are using situational awareness in public, how you're teaching situational awareness to your family in a non fear based way, making it part of your life.

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