Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART ... - OU Medicine

internal weaknesses and avoid external threats. Begin to develop these strategies by
matching weaknesses to threats so you can see your vulnerabilities more clearly.
Prioritize your strategies based on the importance and urgency of issues. Ultimately, you
would like to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses so that you can take
advantage of opportunities and alleviate threats. See the template in Appendix C.
Example
Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities S-O Strategies W-O Strategies
Threats S-T Strategies W-T Strategies
For a simple example illustrating how to create strategies, assume that you are an
organized volunteer response team in a community that is threatened annually by floods.
Your objective is to increase all-hazards neighborhood preparedness. Your most
important strengths are effective communication and engagement regarding floodrelated
issues, along with a core group of volunteers with experience in flood
preparedness and response. Your primary weaknesses are lack of experience dealing with
hazards other than flooding, complacency about all-hazards preparedness due to success
in handling floods, and lack of procedures for using volunteers in other than flood-related
activities. Your community faces potential natural, technological, and human-caused
threats other than flooding. A neighboring state recently experienced a major earthquake
which has raised awareness of potential disasters among members of your community.
You consider this increased awareness an opportunity to engage those community
members in all-hazards preparedness activities. One S-O strategy is to use your
established communication network to connect with neighbors, capitalizing on the
increased awareness to engage community members in all-hazards disaster preparedness
for themselves and their families.
Members of your community regularly volunteer for flood preparedness and response
activities for which they have considerable experience. These community members will
likely volunteer spontaneously in the event of other types of disasters as well, but you
anticipate being ill equipped to handle them which is a weakness. One W-O strategy is to
Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) Page 44