Join a City Bureau and Grist workshop series to learn about extreme weather events, how to plan for them, and ways you can streamline and share information in an emergency. 

By Lyndsey Gilpin and Navjot Heer

No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area and change your life. Whether it’s a hurricane, winter storm, flash flood, tornado, wildfire, or heat wave, disasters can damage or destroy your home and property, cause lengthy power outages, and stall civic services. 

The information people need most is especially hard to find. There’s a lot of conflicting, confusing information out there about disasters and the agencies, programs, and people responsible for responding to them — so communities often end up scrambling to create and share resources during an emergency while trying to stay safe. It's critical to have a plan before something happens. 

This four-session workshop series, hosted by City Bureau’s Documenters Network and Grist, a nonprofit newsroom covering climate change, will equip you to prepare your personal toolkit for extreme weather. You’ll also learn how to organize with others in your community so that everyone can stay safe and informed.   

Participants will adapt Grist’s Disaster 101 toolkit — a comprehensive guide about prep, response and recovery — to their local contexts and practice using it for other crisis situations as well, such as ICE raids or pollution events. Together, we’ll make plans to find accurate information, identify and interact with local and federal agencies that respond to disasters, and strengthen community networks to be more prepared and resilient in the face of more frequent and intense disasters. 


Here’s a look at the topics of all four sessions: 

  • The Basics of Extreme Weather: Tuesday, May 19 from 5:00 - 6:30 P.M. CT (RSVP here!)

  • Preparing Your Toolkit: Tuesday, July 7 from 5:00 - 6:30 P.M. CT

  • Creating a Plan with Your Community: Tuesday, September 22 from 5:00 - 6:30 P.M. CT

  • Sharing With Neighbors & Applying the Toolkit to Other Crises: Tuesday, November 10 from 5:00 - 6:30 P.M. CT

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit offers comprehensive information on disaster preparation, response, and recovery, as well as specific guides on housing, food access, and public health, guides for undocumented immigrants, and more. Because the guide was built for urgency, many of the resources are in plain text and as downloadable PDFs for offline reading in case of internet or power outages. These resources were made with the input of community organizations, disaster relief groups, local government officials, researchers, and residents.

You'll adapt these resources to your own community's conditions and contexts. Here are some examples in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Michigan. We’ll hear from Grist reporters and from Documenters who have lived through disasters firsthand, and begin to build out a shared network of support and information distribution, so that you have people to lean on if and when something happens to you. 

These workshops are free and open to everyone. Grist will also host office hours in between workshops to assist participants in customizing their toolkits and making local communication plans. Create an account on Documenters.org to register. Participants who attend all the workshops in this series will receive a special badge on Documenters.org. 

Questions? Please email Navi at navjot@citybureau.org.