A few weeks ago, I was called by my Bishop to be the new emergency preparedness coordinator for our ward. I was released from my stake calling of ~3.5 years, and eagerly got to work with this new assignment. It was a fairly easy transition, since I had been unofficially involved in preparedness-related activities for our ward over the previous couple of years, serving by invitation of the previous Bishop on the ward’s preparedness committee.

In order to better serve those in the ward and help them prepare, I thought it important to begin my efforts with a survey to gauge where our ward stood. I had a fairly good idea due to previous surveys conducted over the past couple of years in our stake (see here and here), but wanted a bit more detail, and with the high turnover in our ward, needed updated information.

With the Bishop’s consent, I circulated a brief, anonymous survey through the ward and got responses from over 50 families. Our ward is a fairly average ward in terms of income, being squarely “middle class,” thus the results are probably pretty indicative of the average (American) Latter-day Saint household. I don’t consider any of this statistically accurate, but it’s close enough to be reliable and representative of the average family, in my opinion.

Below are the results of this anonymous survey.






My impressions? This is about what I expected. It’s not encouraging, of course, when a few families skew the results upward with their year supply of food; far too many families responded that they only had a few days or a couple weeks worth of food in their home.

Time to roll up my sleeves.

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