Back to the future: Reanchoring Community Emergency Response Teams in neighborhood-level resilience structures

Objective: The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program, initiated by the Los Angeles Fire Department in the mid-1980s, has experienced exponential growth and gained widespread acceptance within the emergency management system. However, this expansion has gradually shifted CERT’s role from neighborhood-based disaster response to a quasi-official extension of emergency services. While CERT volunteers provide valuable support to fire departments and emergency management agencies in many jurisdictions, this evolution is not without challenges; for example, it can increase the resource requirements for public safety institutions and introduce significant barriers to participation for marginalized populations. The objective of this paper is to address these gaps by examining the strengths and challenges of the CERT and complementary Community Emergency Hub models. Design/methods: An integrative review was conducted to analyze and synthesize the academic and gray literature documenting the strengths and challenges of CERT programs and Community Emergency Hub models. Results: This review found that the increasing formalization of CERT programs has led to operational drift and equity challenges. A novel approach to address the challenges identified in the review is proposed by integrating CERT teams with Community Emergency Hub structures at the hyperlocal level. Hubs offer social capital and inclusive physical spaces for coordination and mutual assistance, while CERT provides residents with disaster response training. Together, they enable self-organized, community-led response to significant events while maintaining essential linkages with official coordination structures. Conclusion: This integrated model offers an inclusive and sustainable framework for enhancing community-led disaster response capacities while promoting engagement with the broader emergency management system amid current resource constraints. It provides a scalable roadmap for policy innovation, local-level implementation, and future empirical research in community-led disaster response.