The Pillars Of Preparedness™
Background
Between 2010 and 2012, America faced significant political and social challenges, causing widespread anxiety. Concurrently, the emergency preparedness industry experienced a surge in interest. People sought ways to enhance self-reliance and readiness for unpredictable events.
Project Initiation
Our endeavor began as a response to this demand. We aimed to streamline and visually organize preparedness and self-reliant living concepts into a cohesive framework. This system would simplify the complex landscape of emergency preparedness.
The Pillars of Preparedness Project™
During this period, our company was deeply involved in educating through classes, seminars, and personalized consulting on practical and adaptive emergency preparedness strategies. We identified a need for a structured model to organize and prioritize preparedness knowledge and actionable steps.
Challenges Identified
Problem 1: Existing approaches often struggle to cover the breadth of preparedness topics while keeping a balance of sufficient depth in critical areas, all while not getting lost in “rabbit holes”, as well as avoiding burn-out and overwhelm.
Problem 2: Many individuals fixated on specific preparedness areas, neglecting others crucial for comprehensive readiness.
We’d often see clients, friends, and family hyper fixating on one area of preparedness, while other areas being left on the perpetual backburner. (i.e. they’d build up a crazy amount of food, or security items, but had little to no water preparations, etc.)
Models & Frameworks
When teaching survival priorities, there’s two main models most people are familiar with…
The Survival Rules of 3, and The Core 4
These models help people mentally organize and prioritize what to focus on during an emergency or survival scenario.
1. The Survival Rules of 3: This model categorizes survival priorities based on time without essential needs… or “what can kill you the quickest”
– 3 minutes without air (think under water, or in a house on fire and filled with smoke)
– 3 hours in extreme exposure without shelter
– 3 days without water
– 3 weeks without food
– (keep in mind this model is generally speaking for most people, there are definitely exceptions and we have hundreds of story-examples of these exceptions, but these are accepted as the general rule.)
2. The Core 4 Model: Focuses on the essentials of survival:
– Shelter
– Fire
– Water
– Food
The Survival Hierarchy of Needs
We always taught an expanded version of The Survival Rules of 3 called “The Survival Hierarchy of Needs” which incorporates additional critical factors affecting survivability.
While achieving preparedness and self-reliance extends beyond these core areas, they provide an excellent starting point. (See below for a breakdown of this expanded hierarchy.)
However, for a comprehensive approach to emergency preparedness or genuine self-reliant living, the hierarchy serves as just the survival foundation. We recognized the need for a holistic framework to encompass other crucial aspects of preparedness such as communications, transportation & mobility, hygiene & sanitation, financial preparedness, networking & relationship building, and other essential areas.
Enter the Pillars of Preparedness Model.
The Pillars of Preparedness™
The Pillars of Preparedness™ framework serves as a visual reference and mind map to guide individuals in their journey towards preparedness, while becoming truly adaptive to challenging circumstances.
This project started in 2010, and has evolved behind the scenes while working with individuals and families, in effort to provide a more effective and guided course of action through the challenge of becoming an adaptively prepared person.
Plan & Offerings
The plan is to release a Pillars of Preparedness™ book series, an online course, and a Pillars of Prep™ mobile app, in order to assist and guide people through these areas of preparedness in a comprehensive way. They serve as not just an information source, but to provide a self-paced learning framework, and a specific action methodology to work through and guide you along your journey to a balanced plan for life & emergency preparedness.
Learning Science
We are a bit obsessed with learning science, and have strived to incorporate structured learning paths, interactive self-assessments, a roadmap progress map, and other knowledge-science methodologies into our solutions, to help you develop your own personalized action plan to becoming truly prepared for what life throws at you.
Progress tracking
Progress tracking is a huge component of emergency preparedness, and our system goes beyond traditional guides by offering a learning experience that you can track your progress along the way using worksheets from the book series, as well as online features from the website, and utilizing the mobile app option, to help you see your personal map from a bird’s eye view to understand where along the path you currently are at (and where you’re going!).
We hope you’ll join us as we release these tools and resources to the public, after so many years of using the framework in our workshops, classes, and personalized consulting. We have seen the results, and we think you’ll love using them as much as we’ve enjoyed sharing them with others.
Welcome to preparedness elevated… Let’s get building your pillars to become truly adaptive and prepared to what life brings our way.
– The Adaptive Preparedness Team