Disaster Recovery in Rural Communities (MGT-415) is a planning and management-level course designed for public officials, community leaders, and private-sector representatives in rural communities who play key roles in the disaster recovery process. The overarching goals of the course is to assist rural communities with effective and efficient implementation of recovery efforts, thus ensuring the best possible long-term social and economic recovery of their communities from disaster.

In recent years there have been numerous natural disasters that have affected small and rural communities in devastating ways. In some cases, disasters have destroyed basic community, economic systems and commercial infrastructures. Many of these disasters effected rural areas and communities which had very few resources to deal with the destruction.

Course Objectives
This is a one-day classroom-based course designed to train community leaders, emergency managers and whole community representatives in rural communities how to plan for and execute disaster recovery efforts. This course assists rural communities with planning for strategic disaster recovery efforts that ensure the long-term economic success and resiliency of their communities. Case studies are examined to demonstrate how communities have recovered (or failed to recover) and why they were successful or unsuccessful in their recovery efforts.

The course consists of six instructional modules addressing both short- and long-term community recovery (LTCR) elements, as well as supporting documents of reference for students and a model long-term community recovery plan referenced throughout the course.

Topics and key elements to be covered in the modules include:

Conducting disaster recovery pre-planning activities
Planning for and prioritizing disaster recovery efforts
Developing ways to involve the whole community in short and long-term recovery
Implementing disaster recovery plans
Executing recovery projects in a prioritized manner

Upon completion of the course, students will develop a capacity to mitigate disasters to prevent loss of life, environment, and property; facilitate the development of recovery plans that revitalize communities impacted by disasters; and efficiently administer the disaster recovery process. Students will actively engage in a fictional disaster recovery scenario.

This course utilizes a digital delivery of course materials. Students must download the attached documents to a digital device before the start of class and bring the device with them to class fully charged. If this is a consortium course, documents will be sent from them for download.

This is a dual registration course. Students must register with RDPC as well to attend and receive credit.

Please be sure to complete the RDPC registration as soon as possible to avoid any delays.

RDPC registration link: https://studentportal.ruraltraining.org/courses/display/397