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Posted By:
Ginny Katz, MPH
National Preparedness Month is a good time to talk about preparedness as something people do together.
This year we have had the chance to work on several community partnerships that shaped how we think about outreach and safety across different environments. One collaboration we are especially excited to share focused on houses of worship.
Churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, and other houses of worship are central to how communities gather and care for one another. They are places where we seek refuge, unite, organize, celebrate, grieve, volunteer, and build community. They are safe places to be vulnerable, then find strength and peace with others.
Houses of worship also extend resilience past their own walls. They often provide services and resources regularly for people in need and become a support resource for the surrounding community after a disaster.
That means preparedness in these spaces needs to support three things at once:
As houses of worship face growing natural and human-made hazards, HazAdapt Safety App is a free emergency and disaster tool that supports all three of these critical needs.
Across the country, faith communities are expressing growing concern about targeted violence. Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and other religious communities have faced recent attacks and threats, reinforcing the need for practical preparedness, active-threat training, and clear safety information for places where people gather to worship.
The numbers show a pattern across faith traditions. In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League documented 671 antisemitic incidents targeting synagogues. The Council on American-Islamic Relations documented 33 incidents targeting mosques and other Islamic places of worship. Between May and July of 2026, CAIR recorded 17 such incidents, a 183% increase over the same period in 2025. This manifested in May 2026 when a mass shooting at a San Diego mosque killed three people.
Those numbers highlight the reality of a place that used to plan for a fire drill or a medical emergency is now considering how to prepare for someone walking in with intent to harm. That is a different kind of preparedness, and it is why practical safety planning, training, and easy-to-access emergency guidance matter wherever people gather to worship.
Active shooter and active threat emergencies are understandably top of mind. They are unpredictable, terrifying, and can leave communities feeling powerless.
Preparedness gives us something we can do with that concern.
For house of worship leaders, knowing what to do when that fear is expressed by those in your care can be the difference between meaningfully empowering their safety and leaving them wanting more reassurance.
If fear about one threat becomes the reason someone learns how to take emergency action, accesses a safety resource, talks through a plan, or starts preparing for other emergencies too, that concern can become an opportunity to build resilience.
For local emergency managers, public safety officials, and other safety leaders, building resilience relationships with houses of worship is critical, and it is uniquely hard work.
People's relationships with their house of worship vary widely, and so do the budgets those houses of worship have for safety. That can make standard safety planning and security infrastructure a harder fit here than in many institutions.
As Christina Byrd, GA-ACEM, Deputy Director at Gordon County EMA, puts it:
“Our focus is always going to be meeting people where they are. Preparedness and planning as an abstract concept can be overwhelming to start, especially if you’re starting from scratch.”
Christina brings extensive experience working directly with faith communities. As the creator of a Place of Worship Safety Seminar, she approaches this challenge with an interdisciplinary preparedness curriculum that covers emergency planning, Stop the Bleed, Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events, disaster psychology, and faith-based resilience.
These seminars are in-person events, which is ideal for training and relationship building.
Her work made her an ideal collaborator when we began thinking about how HazAdapt could create practical safety outreach materials for the specific challenges houses of worship face. Something that could extend her training, while also providing a resource for someone caught in an emergency who may never have received formal training at all.
One of the resources we built together is an Active Shooter Emergency Safety Guide card for houses of worship.
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The front of the card is intentionally direct:
ACTIVE SHOOTER EMERGENCY SAFETY GUIDE.
There is no guessing what it is for.
A highly visible QR code leads people directly to the Active Shooter Emergency Guide in HazAdapt Safety App, where they can access step-by-step instructions for what to do during an active threat, along with information and resources for preparedness, prevention, and recovery.
The Active Shooter Hazard Guide includes step-by-step preparation, emergency, and recovery information applicable to adults, children, and institutions such as schools, community centers, and houses of worship. The guide also includes an Active Shooter Prep Check. In just a few minutes, people can walk through what they already have in place, identify gaps in their knowledge and preparedness, and strengthen their ability to respond together.
The immediate concern may be an active shooter or active threat, and understandably so. But the larger goal is to help people take that first preparedness step, then keep going.
Once someone has HazAdapt Safety App on their phone, they also have access to guidance for many other emergencies, including first aid situations, severe weather, power outages, disasters, and other hazards they may be much more likely to experience.
That is part of what makes the card useful. It addresses an immediate concern while also connecting someone to a much larger safety resource they can keep in their pocket.
The physical card also makes the guide tangibly easy to share and share again in a community-based environment.
“Finding tools that make it feel less overwhelming and actionable can help us facilitate preparation one person, one organization, and one community at a time. Being able to share a card with access to easy-to-follow guides is a great tool!” says Emergency Manager Byrd.
The design uses bright colors and clear imagery so the card can be recognized quickly.
At the same time, the active shooter imagery is illustrated rather than graphic. If the images were too realistic, someone might set the card aside instead of keeping it somewhere they would actually see it in a crisis. Too soft, and it becomes forgettable or may not register as something serious enough to act on.
The illustration style attempts to balance both at once.
Whether handed out at an event, kept at a welcome desk or security office, or posted in bathrooms, near doorways, or in other high-traffic areas, these cards create a direct path to emergency instructions. That can be especially valuable in houses of worship where attendance and familiarity with the building may vary widely.
The back of the card opens with a simple message:
Know what to do to help yourself and others in an active attack.
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We chose that language with intention.
In a crisis, most people in a congregation are not only thinking about themselves. They are thinking about the kids in the nursery, the elderly member who moves slowly, the friend two rows back.
A card that only tells someone to save themselves misses how people in these spaces actually think and act under threat.
The illustrations on the card create a walk-through of what someone might experience during and after an active threat and what information will be in the guide:
A person hears something concerning while others begin running. These are early signs that something dangerous may be happening.
A person closes a door while another person, including someone using a wheelchair, takes shelter. This represents hiding and creating distance from the threat when escape is not possible.
Emergency responders arrive while someone provides first aid. This represents calling for help, giving care when it is safe to do so, and bridging the gap until professional responders arrive.
A final image shows physical and emotional recovery after the event. We included that last image because the emergency itself is rarely the whole story. Recovery from violence can involve injuries, grief, fear, trauma, rebuilding trust, and long-term mental health needs. It can take far longer than the event that caused it. Houses of worship are often where communities come together to provide that care, mourn, and support one another, so preparedness should make room for that part of resilience too.
Along with the cards, we developed more general preparedness flyers designed specifically for houses of worship and community gathering spaces.
They are easy to print and post, and built to reinforce shared responsibility for safety.
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The central idea is simple:
We create safety together.
These flyers connect people with emergency guidance they can keep on their phones, while also encouraging preparedness for hazards beyond active threats, including severe weather, power outages, medical emergencies, CPR, and other hazards that may affect a congregation or gathering.
We built these materials to be flexible.
These 8.5 x 11 flyers can be printed at full-page pr half-page sizes and remain readable. Useful for places with limited space.
They are intentionally location-agnostic and usable across denominations, faith traditions, events, and community settings.
That makes them useful whether an emergency manager is visiting one local church, running a safety seminar for several faith organizations, or sharing resources at a larger community gathering.
The threats houses of worship face can feel overwhelming, and many do not have the personnel or budget of larger institutions. That adds real stress to protecting and preparing a congregation.
There are professional services built for exactly this problem. Security consultants, formal threat assessments, dedicated safety team training, and other security infrastructure can be incredibly valuable.
They can also be expensive, time-intensive, and difficult to put in place quickly.
A congregation running on volunteer hours and a shared budget may not have that kind of runway, and a threat does not wait for the budget cycle to catch up.
Create a plan. Gather supplies. Learn first aid. Understand local hazards. Prepare your family. Prepare your organization. Know what to do during an emergency.
Preparedness can be a lot to hold on our own. Getting others to help share the load of safety is essential, but can be difficult.
Not every community has a safety leader like Christina to help carry it, or the funding to bring in a security firm.
One of HazAdapt's goals is to help close that gap with something that works today. A card, a flyer, and a safety app: Preparedness outreach resources a congregation can share this week that connect people directly to guidance for active shooter emergencies, gunshot wounds, severe bleeding, and shock first aid.
From a practical implementation standpoint, these cards and flyers are easy to reproduce as needed or en masse. They can be printed on an office printer, or ordered through a local print shop or services like VistaPrint. That makes them a sustainable, accessible tool to keep in your safety toolbox.
Concern about one frightening hazard can become an entry point to preparing for many more. Safety leaders can use that moment of concern to empower their communities and help turn awareness into preparedness action.
It can look as simple as handing someone a card at a church safety meeting.
Scanning it.
Opening the Active Shooter Emergency Guide and looking through the steps.
Completing the Active Shooter Prep Check.
Exploring other emergencies they can prepare for.
Saving HazAdapt Safety App on their phone.
Sharing it with family.
Talking about it with their congregation.
Practicing what they would do.
That is how we can catalyze preparedness spreading quickly: make the first step easy, highly empowering, and shareable. One person, then an organization, then a community.
It can start with a leader or with any congregation member who wants to help their community become more prepared.
The most meaningful part of a collaboration like this is that it supports people already doing the work in their communities.
Emergency managers like Christina are the ones visiting congregations, leading trainings, answering hard questions, and helping communities think through risks they may never have planned for before.
Our job is to make that work a little easier.
Christina now has outreach materials that she can bring directly into her own programs and pass along to others. We’ve made these resources freely available, so any emergency manager, faith leader, or congregation member can use them too.
Download the House of Worship Safety Outreach Materials.
Check out the Active Shooter Emergency Safety Guide on HazAdapt.
You do not need a finished security plan or a signed contract with a consultant to use these.
Print them. Post them where your congregation will actually see them this week. Scan the guide. Put HazAdapt Safety App on your phone. Then keep working toward the larger plan as time and budget allow.
A card by itself does not stop a threat.
What it can do is give someone immediate access to information that helps them recognize what is happening, make a decision, help someone else, and know what comes next.
And once that resource is already in their pocket, it can help them prepare for much more than one emergency, on their own and with others, in houses of worship and beyond.
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Ginny Katz, MPH, is a hazard resilience researcher and the Founder and CEO of HazAdapt, a safety technology company focused on making emergency preparedness and disaster safety easier to access, understand, and use. Through HazAdapt Safety App and partnerships with emergency managers, public health leaders, universities, and community organizations, Ginny and the HazAdapt Team work to make practical safety guidance more accessible before, during, and after emergencies.
