California heritage institutions can request a free emergency preparedness assessment by filling out an online form, emailing [email protected], or calling 855-501-3020.
Schedule a Site visit
NEDCC's “Ready – Or Not” Cultural Heritage Disaster Preparedness Project (press release) is a three-year initiative funded by the State of California to assess emergency preparedness at California organizations that care for cultural and historic resources (e.g., archives, libraries, museums, and tribal nations).
A team of heritage preservation consultants based in California conducts on-site visits for participating organizations and delivers a summary report that documents the organization's current state of emergency preparedness.
Each report includes recommendations for mitigating risks, taking emergency preparedness actions, and completing a disaster plan, thereby providing each with tools to better protect their collections in an emergency, ensuring that California’s cultural heritage is preserved into the future.
Follow along with the site visits at #ReadyOrNotCA on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
NEws
- NEDCC is hosting wet salvage workshops at Turtle Bay Exploration Park and the Tulare County Museum in 2025. Join cultural heritage organizations, emergency management personnel, and government departments for a hands-on experience with salvage techniques for water emergencies, focusing on formats commonly found in cultural collections, including books, documents, photographs, and audiovisual materials. Register in advance here.
- If your organization is working on Core Documents Verification or the Museum Assessment Program (MAP), the “Ready – Or Not” team can assist with the disaster preparedness plan and provide guidance on museum best practices. Contact Hillary Ellis, Lead Emergency Preparedness Consultant, for more details at [email protected].
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Press release
California Grants Portal
See Portal ID 8843, https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/ready-or-not-cultural-heritage-disaster-preparedness/
Emergency Preparedness among Cultural Organizations in California
California is home to one of the most diverse and expansive cultural collections in the world. These photographs, books, diaries, manuscripts, pieces of art, and other artifacts are the primary keepers of local and tribal history and art.
In 2020, the California State Library and its cultural heritage partners embarked on the California Cultural Collections Protection Survey, which gathered information about the state of California’s cultural heritage collections and the extent to which institutions prioritize, plan for, and resource collection protection. The survey data estimated 1,200 cultural collection-holding organizations lacked disaster preparedness plans. Many of these collections are at grave risk of disasters, including natural events such as earthquakes or floods, as well as human-caused emergencies or threats.
Project Summary
In response to the results of the California Cultural Collections Protection Survey, the “Ready – Or Not” Cultural Heritage Disaster Preparedness (press release) project is a three-year initiative to assess emergency preparedness at California organizations that care for cultural and historic resources (e.g., archives, libraries, museums, and tribal nations). A team of heritage preservation consultants conducts on-site visits for participating organizations and delivers a summary report that documents the organization's current state of emergency preparedness. The report includes recommendations to guide the organization through a process of identifying and mitigating risks, taking emergency preparedness actions, and completing a disaster response plan.
The consultants give advice as organizations work through the recommendations to write their disaster plans, and consultants follow up to monitor and encourage each organization’s progress in completing its disaster plan.
At every stage, organizations are expected to carry out their emergency planning internally and follow their usual procedures (e.g., securing Board approval or involving stakeholders from across the organization). The planning process itself is crucial to emergency preparedness, as it encourages communication, documentation, and collaboration—all of which are important skills for successful disaster response.
Having taken these steps, each organization is better prepared to protect its unique collections in the face of a range of emergencies such as wildfire, earthquake, flood or mudslide, pipe break, extended power outage, pest infestation, terrorism, unexpected closure, and public health emergency. This, in turn, ensures that California’s cultural heritage is preserved into the future as part of the historical narrative of the state and its people. In addition, the summary assessment report, self-completed disaster plan, and preparedness actions demonstrate an organization's commitment to preservation and can be used to support applications for grants and other funding that may be available to strengthen collections care and emergency preparedness.
Information sessions
Learn more about the "Ready—Or Not" project and explore ways to engage in an emergency preparedness consultation.
Disaster Preparedness for Community Archives: View the recording.
Disaster Preparedness with Limited Resources: View the recording.
Disaster Planning for Remote and Rural Museums: View the recording.
Disaster Preparedness for Small Organizations: View the recording.
Disaster Preparedness for Tribal Organizations: View the recording.
Disaster Planning for Tribal Cultural Heritage Organizations: View the recording.
Getting Started with a Disaster Plan: View the recording.
Getting Your Library Ready for Disaster: View the recording.
Updating Your Disaster Plan: View the recording.
FAQS
- What happens at a full-day site visit consultation?
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An emergency preparedness consultant travels to each site for a full-day consultation (9am-4pm). The agenda includes an introduction and discussion of emergency preparedness goals, followed by a 3-hour Q&A session on past incidents, current practices, and risk assessment. After lunch, there is a facilities walkthrough, and a wrap-up meeting for final questions, impressions, and next steps. If the walkthrough takes 2-3 hours, a full-day is suitable for your organization.
- Can my organization meet for a half-day consultation?
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An emergency preparedness consultant can visit for a half-day (10:00am to 2:30pm). The agenda has a flexible schedule but is meant to include a 3-hour Q&A session on past incidents, current practices, and risk assessment. There is a brief facilities walkthrough. If the entire building, including cultural heritage storage, can be seen in 30-60 minutes during the walkthrough, the half-day option is suitable for your organization. If some staff or volunteers are present for part of the day, the schedule can be adjusted to meet their availability.
- We have offsite storage and multiple locations. Can you visit all my sites?
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Yes, if you are a multi-site organization that holds several locations under one entity, we can plan to visit each site. Please provide the number of branches, buildings, or offsite storage locations to be assessed. This will help us schedule one or more days for site visits to cover all locations. We will tailor the consultation schedule to accommodate your organization's needs.
- What staff need to be at the consultation?
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We encourage attendance from as many staff and volunteers as possible, particularly those in Collections, Facilities, and Operations, during the consultation. If some individuals need to arrive or leave mid-day, the consultant will adjust the agenda to accommodate their participation. For instance, if the facilities manager can only join for an hour, we will prioritize covering facility-related questions and walkthroughs during that time. If your team is small (one or two members), we still encourage as many people as possible to attend and actively participate in the disaster planning process, including the site visit consultation and assessment.
- Can my organization really participate if we only have one staff/volunteer or a small collection?
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YES! "Ready – Or Not" encourages small organizations to participate. We work with your small organization to determine what your disaster planning needs are and how much capacity your staff or volunteers have to carry out recommended actions.
- What do we discuss at the site visit?
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The discussion focuses on past incidents, current practices, and risk assessment for building, collections, and human safety.
- What is in the report after the consultation?
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The Emergency Preparedness Assessment Report provides observations and recommendations for various areas, such as business continuity, IT security, physical building security, protection of collections, facilities risk mitigation, water and fire protection, and human safety. The report, tailored specifically to your organization, includes best practices and actionable recommendations to minimize risks, plan and prepare for disasters, and effectively respond. Additionally, the report includes an Appendix with valuable resources to support your organization's disaster plan.
- When will the consultant send the report?
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You receive an Emergency Preparedness Assessment Report about two weeks after your site visit consultation.
- How long do organization staff or volunteers have to make edits to the report?
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We encourage organization staff or volunteers to review our Emergency Preparedness Assessment Report and make any factual corrections within three months of the visit.
Resources for Participating Organizations
Pocket Response Resource: Instructions for Arts and Cultural Organizations
Download the Pocket Response Resource template here.
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What it is:
- A concise emergency resource that can be tucked in your pocket or stored on your device for immediate access to emergency contact information and emergency response actions.
- A template that your arts or cultural organization, of any size or type, can easily customize, update, reproduce, and distribute.
- An initial element of your more detailed and holistic preparedness plan. It’s a great place to start, and a great exercise to get your team engaged in thinking about emergency planning in a way that’s approachable and that quickly results in a useable document.
What it’s not:
- It is not a readiness, emergency, or disaster plan. A plan is a combination of documents, processes, policies, trainings and drills that has been developed by an internal team and is familiar to all key staff and volunteers.
- It is not a replacement for training and drills for staff and volunteers who may need to immediately respond to an emergency. Preparing and training provide the ‘muscle memory’ to swing into action right away.
- It is not the place to stop! Visit https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/disaster-assistance/ for more information and resources to build out your complete preparedness plan.
How to fill it out:
- Less is more. You may be tempted to load this document with information that seems convenient to include. Don’t! Users must easily find exactly the information they need in the critical minutes and hours after an emergency. And, adding too much information will expand the document to three pages.
- Based on your particular computer, device, or operating system, the PRR may display differently. You may need to make some minor adjustments to ensure your PRR covers only two pages.
- Fill out a separate Pocket Response Resource for each of your buildings/locations.
- Consider security. You may need to include sensitive information in this document, which can be risky in wide distribution. (Examples include personal contact information, institutional financial and security information, facility access points and security details, etc.)
- If your organization has multiple facilities/buildings on a campus/complex, staff from each facility should work together. Complete those items which are common across the organization, including the institutional contacts and responses, and then tailor the remainder to specific locations.
Collections Management Grant Opportunities
Download a PDF 
here.
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Supports a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where our stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue. Working with media, heritage and public spaces, history museums and other institutions, and conveners of shared experiences—including the digital or ephemeral—Mellon strives to expand the public expression of the histories that have made us and the values they hold. Their program works across and within diverse communities, encouraging a bold, innovative rethinking of past practice, as well as visionary new approaches for how to collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories about who they are.
Through the Arts and Culture program, Mellon celebrates the power of the arts to challenge, activate, and nourish the human spirit. They support exceptional creative practice, scholarship, and conservation practices while nurturing a presentative and robust arts and culture ecosystem. They work with artists, curators, conservators, scholars, and organizations to ensure equitable access to excellent arts and cultural experiences and support approaches that place the arts and artists at the center of thriving, healthy communities.
Working with colleges, universities, and organizations in higher education committed to the humanities and social justice, the Higher Learning program makes grants that broaden our understanding of American history and culture; develop the interpretive tools and methods researchers use to create meaning; support faculty and students whose work exemplifies a drive toward greater equity in their fields and institutions; and promote pathways for those seeking to exercise transformative academic leadership.
d. Public Knowledge Grant Programs | Mellon Foundation
The program works with archives, presses, and a range of university, public, and other local, national, and global libraries that are foundational to knowledge production and distribution in culture and the humanities. The program’s goal is to increase equitable access to deep knowledge that helps to build an informed, heterogeneous, and civically engaged society. Through this work, Mellon aspires to cultivate networks and maintainable infrastructure, expand digital inclusion, and ensure that more authentic, reflective, and nuanced stories are revealed, preserved, and told.
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Funds may be used to support any eligible expenses associated with the general operations of an arts or cultural organization, including but not limited to rent, utilities, and staff salaries.
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California Natural Resources Agency
The California Natural Resources Agency announced more than $19.7 million in funding by the California Cultural and Historical Endowment to support 63 museum projects from more than 25 counties. Funding will support small capital projects and programs in museums that have been severely affected by COVID-19 and that serve historically underserved communities or students subject to Title 1.
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Institute of Museum and Library Sciences
Designed to support small museums of all disciplines in project-based efforts to serve the public through exhibitions, educational/interpretive programs, digital learning resources, policy development and institutional planning, technology enhancements, professional development, community outreach, audience development, and/or collections management, curation, care, and conservation. Inspire! has three project categories: lifelong learning, institutional capacity, collections stewardship and access.
Supports museums of all sizes and disciplines to undertake projects that strengthen their ability to serve the public through exhibitions, educational/interpretive programs, digital learning resources, professional development, community debate and dialogue, audience-focused studies, and/or collections management, curation, care, and conservation. Museums for America has three project categories: Lifelong Learning, Community Engagement, Collections Stewardship and Access.
Designed to support Indian tribes and organizations that primarily serve and represent Native Hawaiians in sustaining heritage, culture, and knowledge through exhibitions, educational services and programming, workforce professional development, organizational capacity building, and collections stewardship.
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Los Angeles County Arts & Culture
The Organizational Grant Program (OGP) provides Los Angeles County nonprofit arts organizations funding to address priority needs and ensures cultural services for the diverse communities that comprise LA County. These two-year grants support arts organizations whose services positively impact residents, neighborhoods and communities by providing direct access and increased opportunities for quality arts activities and programming that is often free or low cost.
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National Endowment for the Humanities
HCRR advances scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities by helping libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country steward important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. The program strengthens efforts to extend the reach of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible. Awards also support the creation of reference resources that facilitate the use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation. Projects may address the holdings or activities of a single institution or may involve partnerships between organizations.
Supports projects that bring the ideas of the humanities to life for general audiences through public programming. Projects must engage humanities scholarship to analyze significant themes in disciplines such as history, literature, ethics, and art history. Awards support projects that are intended to reach broad and diverse public audiences in non-classroom settings in the United States. Projects should engage with ideas that are accessible to the general public and employ appealing interpretive formats.
Aims to advance humanistic knowledge by fostering rich scholarship that a single researcher could not accomplish working alone. The program supports sustained collaboration by teams of two or more scholars. Teams may propose research in a single field of study or interdisciplinary work. NEH encourages projects that incorporate multiple points of view and pursue new avenues of inquiry in the humanities.
Supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.
Supports projects that interpret and analyze humanities content in primarily digital platforms and formats, such as websites, mobile applications and tours, interactive touch screens and kiosks, games, and virtual environments.
Small and mid-sized cultural organizations are keepers of history and culture, sources of lifelong learning, and community place-makers. Public ImpactProjects grants seek to assist you in meeting your community’s needs by expanding the scope, reach, and excellence of your public programs. These awards support a variety of activities that focus on enriching interpretive strategies, strengthening interpretive skill sets or enhancing community engagement with public-facing programs. This program aims to meet small and mid-sized organizations where you are by supporting projects that are appropriate in scope and content to each organization’s resources and community needs.
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Testimonials
James Bier, Museum Director of the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center:
“I wanted to take a moment to express my deepest gratitude for your valuable time and effort spent with our museum staff yesterday for the “Ready-Or Not” Cultural Heritage Disaster Preparedness Project. Your insights and expertise were truly enlightening and have significantly contributed to the success of our project. Your dedication to preserving and promoting cultural heritage is inspiring, and we are incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from you. The knowledge and perspective you shared will undoubtedly help us in our ongoing efforts to safeguard our cultural heritage.”
“The report offered a lot of guidance for writing a disaster plan and suggested key focus areas for the plan. Since the assessment, we have written a disaster plan, installed a security camera in the collections area, installed a new portable air conditioner in the primary storage area, and limited public access to collections areas. As the first archivist at my institution, the "Ready - Or Not" project supported me in advocating for enhanced disaster preparedness and better environmental conditions for our collections."
"We have already placed barriers between window blinds and collections facing direct sunlight. We have requested a carpenter to check for any shelving not tethered to the wall. Almost all items are now on pallets with risers, and we will soon be ordering bungee cords as well as RH and Temperature data loggers. The incident report notebook was a great idea, which we have retroactively instituted. This was a great experience for all of us.”
PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS:
This project is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.
