Rebuild Your Community

After a mass violence incident, communities typically respond quickly to address the danger and give practical, financial, and emotional help. Here are four different areas in which community leaders can have impact:

Organize help for victims, survivors, families and others.
Support and guide community activities of remembrance (e.g., planning funerals, memorials and anniversary events).
Manage volunteers and donations of money and material gifts.
Support resilience and recovery in the community.

Organizing Support for Victims and Survivors

It is important to offer reassurance, restore morale and unity, and organize victim services through the long process of medical recovery, emotional trauma and court cases.

Remembering

After a community tragedy, people gather to remember and honor the victims. Making decisions about how to memorialize the event can get contentious as people grieve differently and seek different kinds of symbols for commemoration. Good, nonjudgmental leadership is essential in guiding the community to make choices that will stand the test of time.

Managing the Finances and Volunteers

Mass casualty events are enormously expensive. The nitty gritty details of funding and volunteers are equally as complex.

Receiving donations, organizing volunteers, getting grants and disbursements: Who gets what? Who pays for what?

Supporting Resilience and Recovery in the Community

Mass violence shatters the community as well as individual lives. Healing happens eventually, but things are never the same again. Good leadership can prepare and guide residents in restoring faith in the future and each other.

Victim-Centric Mass Violence After Action Reports

In many communities, After Action Reports — also called After Action Reviews — are generated following MVIs and include a wealth of information about pre-event preparations, acute response and post-event support services. These two supporting documents provide in-depth guidance about how to plan and develop an After Action Report while taking victim needs into consideration.

Unexpected Challenges

After a mass violence incident (MVI), there are instances where communities can be overwhelmed and leaders are unsure how to provide assistance. These two Tip Sheets provide guidance for community leaders during the immediate response and the recovery phase of a MVI.

Photograph of the backs of a group of first responders including some wearing orange safety vests imprinted with text naming their response roles - decon officer, medical officer.

Planning and Implementation Guide for Comprehensive, Coordinated Victim Assistance for Mass Violence Incident Trials

The Guide is designed to help prosecutors, victim services and mental/ behavioral health providers, and allied professionals plan for high-profile trials with a focus on victims’ and survivors’ needs, and effective and coordinated strategies to meet them.

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