One of the additions to the RF-DASH portfolio in 2025 is the RF-DASH Community of Practice. A community of practice (CoP, for short) is a group of people who come together around a particular problem or set of concerns in order to further the groups knowledge in that specific area. This approach has been successful for emergency preparedness and response training in the fishing industry.
While the CoP concept is useful, these kinds of groups have existed for a very long time. A CoP typically has three ingredients: domain (the shared interest or concern), community (group of folks that meet regularly), and practice (the community members put knowledge and ideas into action). For the RF-DASH CoP, these ingredients are as follows:
- Domain: Rural and agricultural injury and incident prevention and emergency response.
- Community: All previous and future RF-DASH trainers and trainees, RF-DASH staff, and others interested in agricultural safety and agricultural emergency preparedness and response.
- Practice: The RF-DASH community members will come together to learn from others and each other and then translate this knowledge into their emergency preparedness and response work.
By starting an RF-DASH CoP, what we are intending to do is facilitate more and stronger connections between our RF-DASH trainees. Indeed, the idea to start an RF-DASH CoP didn’t originate with the RF-DASH team. It came from our firefighter and first responder trainees, involved in on-the-ground agricultural injury prevention and response work. We were interviewing previous RF-DASH trainees about the program, and one thing that we repeatedly heard from folks was that it would be great to have a forum where RF-DASH trainers and trainees could talk to each other. Thus, the idea for an RF-DASH CoP was born.
The plan for the RF-DASH CoP is to have one meeting each month. CoP meetings will hosted on Zoom and will usually take place from 11am-12pm Central Time on the third or fourth Friday of the month. Full details will be communicated at least a couple weeks ahead of time. Each CoP meeting will have a different focus (for example: recruitment issues, Farm MAPPER, best places to meet farmers, etc.), but there will also be built-in time for group discussion. The goal will be for the group discussion to drive the second half of the meetings. After each meeting, we will ask participants to submit a brief survey about what topics they’d like to bring to an upcoming CoP meeting. Every three months, instead of a typical meeting, we will have a webinar, similar to the Farmworker Housing Webinar that we hosted in early December.
The first RF-DASH CoP meeting will be on Friday, January 31st, from 11am to 12pm Central Time. Following introductions, the topic for discussion will be “RF-DASH in 2025.” The RF-DASH team will spend some time presenting what is coming up for RF-DASH in 2025, including: full-time trainer, training “seed” grants, online RF-DASH course, resource library, and textbook. The second half of the meeting will be reserved for discussion and Q&A. We hope to see you there!
To register for the upcoming RF-DASH Community of Practice meeting, please use the following link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/90Y1xMPvQH-JODxdZvqBDA.