If you’re involved in emergency management, you know first-hand how challenging it can be for your state, local, tribal, or territorial government (SLTT) to prepare for and respond to natural disasters and other crises — much less recover from them. Assistance from others, particularly those from the private sector, can prove invaluable to resilience. Accordingly, FEMA, along with BOLDplanning, a division of Agility, considers the private sector, including nonprofits, a critical part of any jurisdiction and strongly encourages the development of private-public partnerships (P3s).

P3s are cooperative arrangements between two or more entities of private industry and public sector organizations for their mutual benefit, i.e., designed to help ensure communities’ life safety, economic security, and resilience. They commonly fill critical gaps in preparedness and provide a number of key benefits. Among them, and as identified by FEMA, P3s: 

  • Connect people, businesses, organizations, and government to build relationships and collaboration. 
  • Offer an ideal forum to assess risks and vulnerabilities, develop stabilization targets for its jurisdiction, and contribute to efforts that keep community lifelines and supply chains operational. 
  • Facilitate integrated joint planning, recognize interdependencies among potential impacts, identify and resolve potential conflicts, and develop or validate planning assumptions. 
  • Provide a consistent integration point for private, non-governmental, and public sector coordination for sustained resilience, response, and recovery activities.
  • Connect emergency management and economic development interests in a community.

While members of P3s often share information through the human and technical systems of a partnership network, community resilience hub, or business emergency operations center, they sometimes struggle. 

To help P3s with their information-sharing capability, FEMA has released a new online resource entitled “Information Sharing Guide for Private-Public Partnerships.” It builds upon the concepts introduced in the Building Private-Public Partnerships Guide (July 2021), which introduced the importance of robust information-sharing capabilities to improve whole community resilience. As such, the new guide offers P3s additional recommendations and a variety