Crisis Leadership Summits for Preparedness Preparing communities for a changing threat profile
Program Summary
Program Overview
Prepare your community. The threat landscape is changing. The disaster response environment is increasingly locally-based, independent, and complex. Convene an NPLI/Harvard leadership training seminar to powerfully convene and connect leaders from across your government, business, and non-profit sectors. Attendees have included public safety, public health, local nonprofits, business, faith-based, and human service organizations, and political leaders.
Bring Harvard faculty and experienced crisis leaders into your community. The nationally recognized Crisis Leadership Summit curriculum provides Meta-Leadership knowledge and practices developed over 20 years of field research, practice, and teaching. The program also includes tailored crisis simulations designed for your community’s unique risk profile. The outcome is a more connected network of force-multiplier leaders, armed with the tested ideas, tools, and skill set of Meta-Leadership. The Summit serves as a launch point for continued community connectivity that will make a difference when a disaster hits.
Benefits
- Strengthen preparedness and collaboration across sectors, connecting key leaders and supporting unified crisis response: Exchange business cards BEFORE an emergency.
- Improve leadership capacities with pragmatic tools for navigating crisis disruption, response, and recovery: Everyone works with a shared vocabulary and framework.
- Support preparedness with proven methods that can enhance leadership performance both during times of crisis and every day, offering high impact for the investment.
- Promote systems thinking and action to build resilience across communities and organizations, based on extensive research and development at Harvard University.
- Share knowledge and lessons across your community to fortify critical decision-making before, during, and after crises: Lead with precision when it matters most.
- Align leadership practices and build confidence across sectors to reduce gaps in emergency response and coordination: Bring out the best in your community.
Impact in Action: The Springfield, MO Summit (October 2025)
316 Cross-sector community leaders | 65 Organizations Represented | 4 Customized Crisis Simulations
This program builds on NPLI’s long-term legacy of collaborating with the government and foundations to develop the Meta-Leadership Summit for Preparedness initiative, grounded in the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. That initiative, in 2006-2011, trained 5,000 community leaders across the country through 36 high-impact Meta-Leadership Summits for Preparedness. The resulting networks elevated local connectivity and response capacity.
Twenty years later, communities once again are required to take a greater role and responsibility in local disaster response. Recognizing this priority, the NPLI has relaunched the program in support of communities nationwide.
Twenty years later, NPLI relaunches its community-oriented leadership preparedness program
Additional information about Meta-Leadership Summits
- As part of the planning process before the Summit, Harvard faculty collaborate with local hosts to develop scenarios of concern to the community.
- The scenarios are realistic, relevant to the community, and jarring.
- In real life, when crisis hits, cities will be working largely independently, with limited outside support. There is value in preparing and connecting NOW!
The Boston Summit will bring together hundreds of leaders from across Boston and surrounding regions. The Summit will cover a range of locally relevant crisis-related topics, including preparing for large sporting events, public holidays, and other major events slated for the region.
316 community leaders representing 65 organizations across sectors came together for a one-day Summit supporting wider community involvement on crisis topics
- The Summit led to the formation of four cross-sector planning groups to support future crisis preparedness and resilience
— Groups range in focus from public safety and infrastructure to public health and human services
— 50% of Summit participants volunteered to be part of ongoing planning groups
- Participant feedback emphasized that the Summit broke down silos and brought the community together