Help St. John Prepare

As we stand at the beginning of the 2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season, Love City Strong (LCS) continues to evolve its mission of ensuring St. John is prepared, resilient, and supported. What began as a grassroots volunteer effort in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 has grown into a comprehensive, data-driven disaster preparedness and response organization.

Our work remains deeply community-centered, leveraging local expertise and international partnerships to build a safer future for all residents.

Our Go Team is the core of our response capability. To ensure we can upscale staffing rapidly in an emergency, we maintain a robust surge capacity strategy:

Local Hiring: Every year, we hire 20 St. John residents on an on-call basis to perform door-to-door wellness checks and supply distribution.

Specialized Crews: A dedicated 5-person on-call crew is trained specifically for emergency road clearing and debris removal.

Advanced Training: 100% of our core staff are certified in CPR, First Aid, and Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) protocols, with several members holding Advanced-CERT and Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) certifications.

Our ability to look forward is strengthened by our relationships with local and federal agencies, including VITEMA, FEMA, and the Department of Health. This year, our team benefited from attending the National CERT conference, bringing back nationwide best practices to St. John.

We are also grateful for our continued collaboration with GlobalGiving. Your support allows us to maintain a proactive state of readiness, moving St. John from a reactive posture to one of empowered protection.

Thank you for being part of this work. Your generosity ensures that St. John is not just ready to respond, but fully prepared to protect its most vulnerable residents for the 2026 season and beyond.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, the Island of St. John banded together to locate and utilize essential response assets like generators, chainsaws, and food and water. This demonstration of innate community strength highlighted the need for a more formalized and robust preparation strategy.

In the years since, Love City Strong has built upon the community spirit of the disaster response, and assembled a multi use facility to accommodate emergency response supplies to ensure an organized and coordinated deployment. This facility uses a solar power system to power air-conditioned units housing food and water for the island, as well as other critical disaster response supplies.

The facility is now operational and serves as the central hub for pre-positioned emergency supplies. This significantly reduces the lag time in mobilizing critical resources following a disaster. The integration of the solar power system ensures that critical supplies, particularly temperature-sensitive items like certain medical supplies and long-term food stores, remain viable even during island-wide power outages.

Additionally, we continue to prioritize community preparedness drills, testing the deployment protocols for the supplies housed in the new facility. These exercises provide invaluable feedback on logistics and communication.

All of our programs are built on the strength of our island community, and we evaluate and adapt based on positive and negative outcomes of past experiences. The new facility represents a step forward, moving St. John from a reactive posture to a proactive state of readiness.

We are grateful for the support of our donors, and the continued investment in the resilience of St. John. Your generosity ensures that when the next storm threatens, our community is not just ready to respond, but fully prepared to protect its most high risk residents.

Thank you for helping us strengthen Love City.