Organizing Principles

As a faith-based disaster response organization, our guiding principles are derived from our faith and disaster management best practices.

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We strive to honor God in everything that we do. We are driven to share the love of God with our community,

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We are responsible for the safety of our volunteers and those we are helping. A primary focus on safety is built into all our processes. We learn from others and are committed to advancing best-in-class practices across the board.

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We share God’s love with and serve all people. We seek out those that are most vulnerable and work to assure that everyone who needs help receives it.

 

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Compassionate care is embedded in everything we do. We care about the people and families we serve. We never lose sight that we are helping people who have experienced a devastating loss.

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We strive to offer a great volunteer experience. We assure that our volunteers have the right tools to do the job, that on-site leadership has a plan and can teach them how to perform the work, and that they are appreciated. They can sleep soundly, knowing they have made a difference.

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We collaborate with others responding to a disaster. We lead and follow and work together to accomplish our shared goals.

 

 

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We believe in and offer standard processes for our services. Our procedures and training are based on the best practices available, and we commit to maintaining best-in-class processes. Because we provide a documented standard process, we can share in the commitment to training.

We have learned about best practices from those involved in disaster management. In particular, we have been guided by FEMA’s National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS). The NIMS system promotes fourteen characteristics of an incident management system, and TXCDR endorses all of them. These six were particularly helpful in designing our program:

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We strive to eliminate jargon, acronyms, and codes in all that we do and rely on common terminology in our communication. Clear communication is a foundation of our ability to drive collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

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We manage by objectives setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

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We focus on resource management and being good stewards of the time, people, tools, and supplies we have been given to improve the lives of those we serve.

 

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We will establish an integrated communications platform to enable our ability to communicate and coordinate with each other and direct resources to where they are most needed.

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We believe in personal and organizational accountability. We celebrate successes and admit our failures and learn from them. We hold each other and our partners accountable for their performance.

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Real-time information sharing is critical to our response. We will also focus on sharing the information we discover about the impact of a disaster in a community with government officials, our partners, and disaster case managers.