By the Alternative Economies Team Where you keep your money and where you borrow it are quiet decisions with real consequences, both for your own finances and for the resilience of your community. Big national banks are the default for most people, but they are not the only option, and often not the best one … Read more
By the Investing Team There is an old piece of wisdom that survives because it is true: do not put all your eggs in one basket. In finance, that wisdom has a name, diversification, and it is the closest thing to a free lunch that investing offers. By spreading your money across different types of … Read more
By the Accessibility Team Most emergency advice is quietly written for a healthy adult who can walk a few miles, carry a heavy pack, hear a siren, and sleep on the ground. For millions of people, that assumption does not hold, and a generic checklist can leave someone with a disability or access need worse … Read more
By the Training Team Here is an uncomfortable truth about emergencies: you will not rise to the occasion. Under real stress, adrenaline narrows your vision, clumsies your hands, and shuts down the thinking part of your brain, a well-documented effect sometimes called tunnel vision or the fight-flight-freeze response. You do not perform at your best. … Read more
By the Evacuation Team The families who get hurt in a wildfire, a hurricane, or a fast-rising flood are rarely the ones who left. They are the ones who waited: waited for certainty, waited for one more update, waited until the roads were jammed and the only way out was gone. Evacuation is a skill, … Read more
By the Household Team When a disaster forces a family to move fast, pets are where good plans fall apart. People who would never leave a child behind find themselves standing in a doorway with no carrier, no pet food, and a frightened animal that will not come out from under the bed. Shelters often … Read more
By the Alternative Economies Team The idea of exchanging value directly with another person, without a bank, a payment processor, or any central authority standing in the middle, has a natural appeal to the self-reliant and preparedness-minded. Decentralized peer-to-peer transaction networks aim to make exactly that possible, letting people transact directly with one another over … Read more
By the Family Readiness Team Disasters have a cruel habit of striking when families are scattered. Parents are at work, kids are at school, someone is across town running errands. Cell networks jam in the first minutes, and suddenly the people you most want to reach are unreachable. Meeting points solve this without any technology … Read more
By the Homestead Team For those who live near the sea, there is an almost limitless source of water just beyond the shore, if only it were not salt. Desalination, removing salt from seawater to make it drinkable, holds a natural appeal for coastal homesteaders and preppers, offering the tantalizing possibility of tapping the ocean … Read more
By the Community Team The lone survivor is a myth that gets people killed. The image of one hardened individual outlasting the collapse by sheer grit makes for good fiction, but every real disaster tells the opposite story. The people who come through hardship best are the ones embedded in a community: neighbors who check … Read more