Today is the first day of National Preparedness Month! It’s a great time to look at what your emergency preparedness plans, update them, and check on your emergency preparedness kits to see if anything needs replaced or has expired.

You don’t have an emergency preparedness kit?

You can find out how to build one and how to get Good & Ready for the types of disasters that affect the region you live in at our Good & Ready site! You can test your emergency preparedness knowledge, find out how to create an emergency preparedness plan, build an emergency preparedness kit for your home, find out how to host a project building emergency preparedness kits for others, and find out where to get trained to be an emergency response volunteer.

There’s so much you can learn and share about getting prepared for an emergency, and you never know when one is going to happen. It’s always good to be Good & Ready.

And if getting yourself and helping to get your community prepared for an emergency wasn’t a good idea already, we’ve sweetened the pot a bit.

Each week we’ll be choosing two winners from the people who have taken the Good & Ready quiz or pledged to get themselves or their communities Good & Ready. People who take the Good & Ready quiz are eligible to win a ReadyBox emergency preparedness kit. The kit contains supplies to help keep you safe for hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes.

People who make pledges to build an emergency preparedness kit for themselves or others, get trained to be an emergency response volunteer, or pledge to create a home emergency plan are entered to win a $250 Lowe’s gift card that you can use to improve your own emergency kits or donate to your local emergency response organizations!

One person who makes a pledge will win a $1000 American Express gift card that they can use to help them get ready for an emergency and help their local emergency response organizations! All you have to do to be eligible for the prize is make a pledge to get Good & Ready!

Emergency preparedness is an important part of weathering all kinds of emergencies. Recent earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes have shown that, by being prepared, people can stay safe when an emergency strikes.

Well-trained emergency response volunteers are an important part of emergency recovery, too. They help communities to recover quickly from disasters and return to normalcy.

Are you an emergency response volunteer? Have you put together an emergency response plan and kit for your home? Let us know what you’ve done to get Good & Ready in the comments!