Jewish Family Services. Preparing for a disaster.

Jewish Family Services (JFS) is an agency that has served the local Jewish community for 140 years by providing supportive services that strengthen families, children, and individuals throughout life. The current complexity of the client base led the executive team to discuss how they could continue to provide services to clients in the event of a disaster. The main objective of the project was to provide a documented roadmap to continue the operation of support programs.

Wipfli educated JFS on the importance and process of disaster recovery planning and performed a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to review each program within each JFS division for critical processes, systems, financial factors, and other components that would be affected by a business interruption or a disaster event. Risk factors were identified and prioritized. Risks that met certain criteria were researched in depth to develop alternate procedures, systems, or locations to be used during disaster events. JFS managers then built program-specific disaster recovery procedures and a plan for executing them.

The importance of planning for disasters is often underestimated. The JFS staff found that the process itself provided unique insight on the needs of the programs administered by the agency, in ways that had not been addressed previously. In addition, knowing exactly what needs to be done and who is responsible for all aspects of recovery will result in less time recovering from the disaster and a shorter gap in the ability to administer services that are vital to the clients of JFS.