Prepared, Not Scared: Your Home, Disaster-Ready

Community safety

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

LA County faces a “new normal” of escalating disruptions. Disasters threaten lives, homes and jobs:
Wildfires: 15,000+ homes destroyed in 2025; toxic air, closed schools, and businesses; families displaced, income lost.
Extreme heat: record temperatures, hospitalizations, blackouts, and water shortages.
Earthquakes: risk of widespread damage.
Floods, mudslides, landslides, tsunamis, drought: destabilized water, transit, housing, and food.
Pandemics, cyberattacks, grid failures, industrial accidents, terrorism, transportation disasters, and air quality emergencies.
Despite the above, preparedness remains dangerously low:
52% have disaster kits; 47% have family plans (PPIC 2024).
Angelenos feel the least prepared statewide
FEMA ranks LA County the highest-risk in the entire U.S.
Disasters are inevitable. Angelenos are far from ready and they know it, making them receptive to our workshop and the info we will offer them.
Emergency preparedness saves lives.

The Carbonauts superpower, built over the last six years serving the Fortune 500, is building and delivering impactful workshops.
With the LA2050 grant, we would improve and scale our emergency preparedness workshop “Prepared, Not Scared”, along with accompanying services and resources thereby greatly increasing our impact towards this increasingly pressing challenge. The workshop was developed as an accessible, action-driven workshop that helps Angelenos take action, learn skills and build the confidence to face wildfires, outages, earthquakes, and other emergencies.
Main deliverables:
32 in-person, virtual and ‘teach the teachers’ workshops
32 virtual office hours where we can coach community members
Always accessible emergency preparedness resources
Via hundreds of workshops, we determined live sessions are more impactful than on-demand sessions since attendance is much higher and it encourages active participation, leading to deep learning and true action.
Participants will:
Learn in a judgment-free environment that turns overwhelm into momentum
Build go/stay kits, create communication plans, and prepare to shelter in place
Prepare to navigate disruptions to food, water, power, communications, and transit
Practice using decision-making tools and grounding techniques to stay calm
Complete step-by-step tasks that reinforce follow-through
We will also support Youth Economic Development by teaching youth how to teach these workshops and then paying some of them to do so.

This grant seeds a future where preparedness is standard practice across LA.
Short-term:
Train thousands of citizens in disaster readiness
Help participants build go and shelter-in-place kits, create family plans, and respond with confidence
Train youth (16-24) to teach the workshops
Longer term:
Year 2 will gain great efficiencies leveraging learnings, research and development costs
Integrating workshops into employee training, schools, and community outreach
Reaching tens of thousands more Angelenos with multilingual, culturally relevant content
Increasing economic resilience during emergencies
Reducing dependency on relief and emergency services
Impact:
• Create more resilient households that are also able to help others
• Fewer injuries and mental health challenges
• Fewer missed workdays
• Reduced health costs and property damage
• Less stress due to Increased confidence towards handling emergencies
• Faster recovery, increased efficiency at bouncing back to normal life