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Continuing training, exercises, and projects will be important for several reasons. It will help CERTs to maintain and improve their skills, it will keep volunteer involvement and interest high, and it will benefit the entire program and community. This step provides some possible topics and approaches to providing continuing training to CERT volunteers.

After the initial involvement with the hands-on training, how do you keep CERT graduates actively involved with the team and maintain their readiness? CERT trainers emphasize that this requires planning, communicating with team members, offering continued training opportunities, and recognizing CERT member accomplishments.

Experienced CERT Program Coordinators have identified several areas that require special attention. Paying careful attention to these issues can make your program more inclusive and more successful. Special Topics presents each of these issues, together with tips for working through each as well as resources that you can refer to for more information.

Records maintenance is an important part of your CERT program. You may want to track:

Communication between team members during CERT activation and operations is critical. During alert or mobilization, team members need to communicate rapidly and efficiently. How communications are organized becomes extremely important to CERT operations.

Real incidents are chaotic, and CERT members have little or no experience in dealing with the chaos outside of drills and exercises. To bring order to chaos, CERTs are organized under the principles of the Incident Command System (ICS). CERT members, however, may have difficulty understanding how ICS works. This topic provides tips for making ICS easier for CERT members to understand.

Regardless of how well you organize your CERT program, it can't succeed unless you have the support of the key stakeholders in your community. These stakeholders range from the chief elected and appointed officials to professional responders to the citizens whom you want to recruit. This step presents some issues that you may need to address and provides suggestions for gaining the support of all program stakeholders.

By using a casualty sorting system, you are focusing your activities in the middle of a chaotic and confusing environment. You must identify and separate patients rapidly, according to the severity of their injuries and their need for treatment.

Starting a CERT program requires resources—personnel, equipment, and materials—and some type of program funding will be required. Local government may be your source of funding, you may get a grant, or you may have to be creative in how you fund your program. Step 2: Identifying Resources, provides some suggestions to help you determine how much your program will cost and how to fund it.