North State Planning & Development Collective at CSU Chico Offers Resiliency Training to Rural Communities
The Issue – Disaster Preparedness for Rural Food Businesses
CSU Chico, a key partner of the Southwest Regional Food Business Center (SWRFBC), is situated in a region deeply impacted by natural disasters. Every year, wildfires destroy and displace communities across the region. Rural farmers, ranchers and food business owners risk losing their homes and livelihoods when disaster strikes. The need for disaster preparedness training for rural constituents inspired the North State Planning & Development Collective (the Collective), housed at Chico State Enterprises, an auxiliary of CSU Chico, to collaborate with the Eastside Producers Informational Collaborative (EPIC). EPIC is pioneering a critical initiative to strengthen the rural regional food system across Plumas, Sierra, Lassen, and Modoc counties.
Our Response
As part of our SWRFBC work, the Collective designed, developed and coordinated a presentation on the Resiliency Playbook, (Playbook) a manual the Collective created in 2024 through a USDA Rural Business Development Grant. The Collective provided the virtual Resiliency training presentation to eleven members of the EPIC steering committee in June 2025. The presentation provided a summary of the resources in the Playbook including disaster preparedness, mitigating loss by pivoting online, and disaster recovery. A detailed review of the business preparedness forms that are included in the Playbook was a main focus of the presentation. These resources provide concrete benefits for businesses who can document important information on operations, equipment, information technology, employees, key contacts, and finances. Key to the conversation was the recommendation to fill out the forms, take photos for record-keeping and save the documents in three separate locations as a principle of robust data protection.
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Our impact
The EPIC steering committee was engaged and eager to learn about and utilize the playbook and forms – both to document their own food businesses and to share the resource with EPIC stakeholders. Plans were made after the presentation to organize accountability working groups to support each other through the process of filling out the forms. Empowering EPIC members and stakeholders in their communities to take the time to document their business assets will support their disaster preparedness and ability to recover. The Collective was also able to share about technical assistance support available through the SWRFBC to further assist rural food businesses. We look forward to checking back in with EPIC during the off season (November – March) to see how the work is going and see if there are other ways that we can support the region.