Happy birthday to us! APHA’s Get Ready Campaign turns 10

This year is the anniversary of APHA’s Get Ready campaign and we’re celebrating 10 years of helping Americans become more prepared for disasters. Hooray!

When we launched in 2006, our goal was to make it easy for Americans to find, understand and share preparedness information and to help them become more prepared. Since then, the nation has faced storms — from Hurricane Sandy to Hurricane Matthew —earthquakes, disease outbreaks and numerous other disasters. And the Get Ready campaign has been there to help people prepare for them.

From fact sheets and Q&As to photo calendars and even a song contest, the Get Ready campaign has shared a ton of educational tools that have helped people ready themselves, their families and their communities for emergencies. Check out some of the fantastic resources we’ve shared:

• 500 posts on our Get Ready Blog, which continues to provide regular news, features and other information on timely preparedness topics.
• 70 fact sheets, covering everything from stockpiling to hurricanes to vaccinations. Our lineup has changed as current events have, with fact sheets on MERS, Ebola, dengue and Zika released as the topics made headlines.
• 50 creative, humorous e-cards that allow people to share preparedness messages on Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Mother’s Day and other occasions.
• Almost 50 podcasts, featuring interviews with health and preparedness leaders on a range of topics.
• 30 high school and college scholarship winners, who wrote essays on preparedness and received funding from Get Ready for their education.
• 15 Q&As with disaster experts, who’ve provided practical tips on getting ready for disasters.
• 5 years of photo contests with hundreds of entries, which were turned into adorable preparedness calendars featuring cats, dogs, toddlers and more!

And we haven’t even mentioned our videos, infographics, cookbook, tools for kids, quizzes, hand-washing materials, coloring book and preparedness events, like Get Ready Day. There’s so much great information it’s hard to mention it all!

Swing by the Get Ready website today to see all the wonderful tools we’ve created for you. Then share them on your campus or in your community.

Thanks for celebrating 10 years of becoming more prepared with us!