Your role as Emergency Manager in the Prevention & Mitigation phase is crucial. Working under the guidance of your Nation’s Chief, Council, and executives, you are responsible for coordinating annual hazard and risk assessments so that you know what potential incidents you need to try to prevent or mitigate.
You need to recommend prevention and mitigation strategies for serious risks and implement those that Chief and Council approve of. To do that, you’ll need funding – another part of your job is researching funding programs from Indigenous Services Canada and applying for those that are a good fit. (Your Finance Department should be able to help you with this). Once you’ve implemented prevention and mitigation measures, you also need to evaluate the effectiveness of those measures on an annual basis.
If community awareness and training are part of your prevention and mitigation strategy (and they should be), you’ll be giving presentations and arranging for training from vendors (like Hazardscape).
A lot of what you do in this phase continues into the next one – Preparedness – including things like keeping Chief and Council informed of any needed changes to emergency plans or measures, running regular emergency management team meetings, and maintaining ongoing relationships with federal and provincial officials, other indigenous governments and organizations, NGOs, and local businesses.