UMCOR Care Team

UMCOR Care Team Training

The idea of a Care Team is to:

Reach out from the faith community; Care Teams help disaster survivors connect with their personal and community spiritual, emotional, and basic life resources.  

The purpose of a care team is:

To show the church cares, offering a listening presence; to reduce the terrible aloneness survivors feel; to connect survivors with long-term disaster recovery systems, gathering information and providing support and information about the recovery process and available services.

Standardized UMCOR Training is required:

All Care Team members are required to complete a standardized training offered by UMCOR.  Additional training is encouraged.

The basic training includes:

Basics of spiritual and emotional care and theology following disasters;

Disaster trauma and the long-term disaster recovery process,

The phases of disaster and stages of trauma recovery,

Common and not-so-common reactions to stress,

Practical stress reduction ideas;

Congregational and community trauma; 

Caring for the caregiver;

Meeting with survivors,

Disaster emotional and spiritual care ethics,

Strategies for handling difficult situations,

When, where and how to refer survivors for further care,

Defusing and basic crisis intervention strategies.