AmeriCorps; Disaster Services

Safe Families. To our AmeriCorps team, it’s more than just a title; it’s what we strive for every day. Our team works tirelessly to provide the life-saving training of the American Red Cross to under-resourced areas all across the city of Chicago. All of the classes we teach are free of charge to any community member that wants them because we fully believe nobody should be denied the training or knowledge to help in an emergency or a disaster.

The majority of our service comes through the teaching of kids’ safety classes. Primarily, we teach fire safety, germ prevention, water safety, home alone safety and even First Aid for children and how they help in an emergency. However, we also try to educate parents and adults in these communities as well by offering classes in emergency and disaster preparedness as well as full certification in CPR and First Aid. By offering these classes for free, our AmeriCorps team is able to reach thousands of people that might not ever receive training because of the potentially high costs.

Each member is assigned several zip codes within the city (and an outlying county) where they work non-stop to reach out to schools, churches, community organizations, volunteers, parent groups, non-profits and anywhere else they can find to offer our services and classes. This year alone, we plan on reaching over 60,000 children with our classes and with only several months left in our service year, we are above target for our goal! In addition to the extraordinary kids’ safety numbers, our members educate several thousand adults with emergency (CPR/First Aid) and disaster preparedness information to ensure they practice safety and preparedness in their own homes.

Beyond the classes, the Safe Families program focuses a great deal on volunteerism as both AmeriCorps and Red Cross team members. One of the biggest tasks we have is that each member is responsible for creating two service projects throughout the year. So far our members have developed a wide-range of projects including blood drives, organizing safety fairs and even neighborhood and park clean-ups. We also lend a hand to help the Red Cross with many of their events. Safe Families members have been instrumental in providing volunteers and planning many local Fire Stoppers events to educate the community on fire safety and provide free fire safety equipment. And when we’re not busy teaching classes and volunteering, many of us are out there spreading the word about AmeriCorps to hundreds of high school and college students where we teach.

While the numbers speak volumes to the hard work and dedication of this team, the true impact comes from the life-saving information we share with the community every single day. Just recently, we had a member receive a phone call from a teacher whose classroom she had visited just a few weeks prior to teach fire safety. The teacher explained that there had been a fire in the neighborhood and several of her students escaped because they remembered the fire safety class. Quite simply, that class saved the lives of those children that day. Our team works with energy, creativity, dedication and passion every day to make sure our community learns this information and can use it if the time comes. Without this team, it’s hard to say what would have happened to those kids that day and the countless other people that will one day have to put their Red Cross class skills to the test. The dedication, sacrifice and sincere passion of this team make it truly a program that’s “Getting Things Done” for America.