Everyone Goes Home - Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives Program

Ron Dennis
Everyone Goes Home® Program Speakers & Conference Liaison

What is the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation's Vision for Year Five? We believe:

The Everyone Goes Home® Program team should aggressively pursue Courage to Be Safe ® outreach delivery in a manner that focuses on program saturation and embedding it at all levels of the fire service including, individual firefighters, officers, chiefs, stations and companies, departments, states, regions and the nation.

An appropriate organization should take on the Courage to Be Safe® program delivery. The National Fire Academy could absorb the program as an outreach delivery. It would then be available to all states through T.R.A.D.E. Arizona has volunteered to be the "Applicant State" through our State Fire Marshal's Office and State Training Coordinator. However, we would not rule out other viable delivery options if this one doesn't work or we could use more than one option provided the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation's Everyone Goes Home® Program remains as "base camp" for program revisions and technical support.

Promoting the Courage to Be Safe® and other Everyone Goes Home® programs to a wider audience may include:

Developing a master training schedule to include national, regional and state conferences.
Pursuing the opportunity to highlight Everyone Goes Home® programs on conference agendas, and identify speakers and/or other Everyone Goes Home® representatives.
Developing a speakers bureau for Courage to Be Safe® and Safety Through Leadership at the regional, state and national levels.
Identifying a budget for program delivery and stay within the budget.
Posting the speakers bureau information on the website and marketing the delivery of courses through the bureau.
Scheduling regional Train-the-Trainer programs for LACK and developing and implementing a delivery plan.
Promoting the four Life Safety Resource Kits more aggressively as solid training and motivation resources for program implementation. The 16 initiatives are too broad by themselves but can be tackled one at a time with meaningful training tools that we have already produced.
Focus our efforts on the "Six Domains" and the root causes identified in the L.A.C.K program as the basis for promoting the initiatives as an alternative to just selling the initiatives one at a time. That way we can zero in on those initiatives and solution strategies that really make a difference.
Developing webcast training resources and implementing a delivery schedule.

By using a multi-pronged approach that is simultaneously being pursued by all of the regional and state advocates and supported by the Everyone Goes Home® planning team, we can have a more significant impact on a larger audience with more measurable results. At the same time, we need to stay focused on the three or four most critical domains and roots causes and then identify which initiatives can be used as anchor points for training and "embedding."

Finally, we need to constantly promote the following most critical components for achieving success at advocating our mission. These components were first given to us as our blueprint by Chief Rich Marinucci in Dallas at FRI in 2006 when the Advocates Program began.

Demonstrate a clear sense of urgency - Every senseless LODD is a reminder of this need.
Demonstrate and share best practices.
Involve loved ones/relevant stakeholders (family, crew members, survivors).
Display constant reminders- EVERYWHERE and EVERY DAY.
Promote rising standards of excellence by continuously improving safety benchmarks.
Celebrate successes-reward positive behaviors.