Safe shelter kits for children during natural disasters
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on June 22, 2018 5:50 AM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Wayne County Emergency Management coordinator Craig Brown loads some of the safe space boxes provided for by the Save the Children Fund into the a trailer at Partnership for Children of Wayne County Thursday. The boxes will remain in storage until shelters are set up in preparation for a disaster.
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
The boxes are filled with games, activities and items to help children and their parents at a shelter.
It pays to be prepared -- literally -- in the case of the Partnership for Children of Wayne County.
On Thursday, the partnership put the finishing touches on a set of safe space boxes designed to give shelters the materials they need to take care of an influx of children during natural disasters, similar to Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
The boxes, large plastic tubs full of books, toys and other materials, were possible because of a $5,000 grant from Save the Children, an international organization which promotes the rights of children, following a training session held at Wayne Community College in January.
"We provided the training session, and we had 32 people attend from across the sectors," said Tara Humphries, WCC public relations officer.
"As a result of that, they gave a nice grant to the partnership, and they've been able to create these four containers full of the materials that are necessary to set up a safe space, a child-friendly space, in a child care facility."
The four containers will stay on a trailer owned by Wayne County Emergency Management Coordinator Craig Brown, so that they can be quickly taken wherever they need to go in case of an emergency.
Should the local community be hit with another natural disaster, there are a number of designated shelter options throughout Wayne County. So, if one shelter is inundated with water and floods, there are other locations where residents can weather out a storm.
Brown said the shelters could end up serving anywhere from five to 250 people during a disaster, and the boxes are equipped to handle that kind of influx.
They might not be able to provide a toy to every single child when the numbers get that high, but they will provide the infrastructure needed to keep the shelter going and keep the children engaged while they are stuck in place.
To do that, the boxes come equipped with several administrative tools to help adults establish child-friendly spaces in shelters.
Wristbands for identification, sign-in forms and other paperwork are all included to make sure that things run as smoothly as possible during the inevitable chaos of a major disaster.
Valerie Wallace took part in the January training session, and was part of the team which put together the boxes.
Coming from the Partnership for Children, the team members were well informed ahead of time on what kinds of purchases they needed to make with their grant money.
"Typically, since we are from the Partnership for Children, we work with child care facilities, so we thought along those lines," she said. "We had the ideas of what young children would like, but we went above that and put things in there for school-aged children as well."
Of the initial grant, about $3,000 went toward filling the boxes, Wallace said. The other $2,000 is going toward providing each regulated child care facility with a disaster safety kit, including weather radios and other essential items for staying safe when the weather turns bad.