In this presentation, we will discuss how the Alianza Cultural para Emergencias de Puerto Rico has designed and Implemented educational programs and the impact they have had on building our local response network.
Following Hurricane Maria's impact in 2017, several challenges arose, among them: the lack of a local network to respond to emergencies involving heritage collections. In response, the Alianza Cultural para Emergencias de Puerto Rico (Alliance for Cultural Emergencies in Puerto Rico) (ACEPR) was established in 2019 by a diverse group of professionals from various institutions and private practices, all trained in emergency preparedness and response. Our goal is to assist cultural, LAM, and arts organizations throughout the Archipelago in minimizing damage to their collections during natural hazards or man-made disasters. We believe our value lies not only in building capacity but also in doing so in our own language, as there is a notable lack of emergency preparedness and response resources available in Spanish. Additionally, we focus on the unique characteristics of Puerto Rico and resource availability in our communities.
Throughout the years, we have implemented various initiatives, including workshops, social media educational campaigns, and hands-on projects. These efforts emphasize our long-term goal of fostering connections among colleagues to build a local network ready to support one another when needed. Our approach to achieving this goal has been through training on emergency management and preservation practices using the train-the-trainer method. Since 2020 we have impacted over 900 people (practitioners and students) and offered over 30 unique workshops (including multiple series) on topics such as emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for cultural heritage collections, risk assessment, climate change impacts, the development and implementation of emergency plans, salvage and stabilization of damaged collections, and collection documentation, digitization, and inventory practices. In 2025 we launched our most recent initiative, “Digital documentation during cultural emergencies.” Using the KoboToolbox community free plan, we trained over 72 professionals across the Archipélago to build our first mutual aid network, which can be deployed in a local emergency.
In this presentation, we will discuss how we have designed and implemented our educational program and the impact it has had in Puerto Rico. We will present examples of successful training programs and outline our next steps in building our local network through education activities.
