Running out of your house with a half dozen 3-ring binders and large notebooks, while at the same time trying to grab your kids, pets, grandma, and a few family heirlooms, was not what the designers of the Go Stay Kit had intended. Not to mention carrying this overflowing mess to a shelter, and then trying to keep track of all your irreplaceable information.
Large preparedness 3-ring binders aren’t the same as having a Go Stay Kit. The GSK was created by health care & shelter intake workers, medical professionals and disaster prep experts. It has all the resiliency information needed to survive, and then rebuild your life after a natural/manmade disaster. What the Go Stay Kit doesn’t contain is any extraneous, unnecessary information – it’s all vital, useable stuff.
We’ve seen a lot of people recently on-line lugging around a bunch of overstuffed 3-ring binders and large notebooks filled to the brim with every conceivable kind of family/personal/medical/banking/real estate/shopping etc. information imaginable.
While these people can be commended for their eagerness, they really are missing the point. The Go Stay Kit was created as a streamlined method of collecting just your necessary personal/medical info, to be used in times of crisis. Something you could quickly grab and take with you if told by emergency responders to leave your home.
Personal/medical info is a good thing to have with you in times of trouble, but carrying every single solitary bit of your private life with you to a shelter – in a half dozen 3-ring binders and large notebooks isn’t a good idea. It’s a lot easier to keep track of one Go Stay Kit rather than tons of 3-ring binders and large notebooks.
