The Pl8ts Project — Midpoint check-in

Our team chose to take on an interesting challenge — Emergency Preparedness (with a focus on earthquakes).

We started off by trying to design the PERFECT emergency kit, and with more and more research we’ve done, and more people we talked to, we couldn’t ignore the obvious — Kits are not the right solution to any of the problems real people have.

So then you pivot (a bit). But how do you rationalize it?

This is the first thing we learned when we started talking to people, and what we keep hearing. Most people in this city KNOW they need to do something to prepare for an earthquake but they don’t.

They know that they should buy a kit, or refresh their kits but they don’t. They just don’t want to think about it, and they push it a way.

As I mentioned, we started with the idea of a kit building offering / service, but the more we learned about earthquake preparedness and the overcrowded market of earthquake kits, the more it seemed like this was not the right way to go.

Why?

• Buying a kit doesn’t make you ready.
• The biggest gap we see people struggle with is knowledge (what to do).
• There are hundreds of (pretty good) kits out there, and it’s hard to stand out. What will make our kit better than all of the rest?
• People don’t really want to buy kits (no matter what we do).
• The contents of these kits are very different according to who you are and who do you live with.
• Kits expire and people don’t renew them.

This was another big insight. We talked to two kinds of people, demographically — Young people, +/- millennials, which keep saying things like: “my mom has a kit so that’s ok” and “my roommates know what to do, so…”. They expressed a need to rely on others for knowledge, skills and supplies. It made them feel safe.

The second type of people were people with families, and they also have a need to rely on others, with totally different motives: “what if my kid is home and I’m not? Who can they go to?” and “my neighbor needs to know how to shut their gas off, so my unit doesn’t burn down”.

So at that point we saw our goal is to make a tool that will help our neighbors take the leap and prepare, together. Build community resilience and emergency preparedness.

We also found this:

One of the more intersting example is from Eric Klinenberg, Sociologist — After the heatwave of 1995 in Chicago, it was observed that communities in which people knew their neighbors showed significantly lower mortality numbers than similar communities where the connections were not as strong.

We also observed two kinds of people in the people that we talked to (and the people that we know). We categorized them as follows:

• The not so involved to actively uninvolved neighbor — the one who sits on the sidelines and doesn’t organize or actively try to meet their neighbors (that would be me)
• And then we have what we called The Star Neighbors — those are the community unofficial leaders, the ones who organize pot lucks, community boards, volunteer their time, etc.

And those Star Neighbors are the people we’re going to reach first to join our service, and through them we reach the other neighbors.

We want to bring small groups of neighbors together (a building, or a block) — and we want them to work together to prepare for an emergency.

We hypothesize that this social framework will be motivation to prepare. We believe the star neighbors will lead us there. We think that the other neighbors will follow.

Now we need to test our assumptions!