What is ENDEAVOR?
ENDEAVOR is a private sector–led framework that connects businesses with state and local emergency managers to plan, coordinate, and solve problems together. It provides a structured approach to improve communication, streamline response, and support recovery and mitigation efforts before, during, and after disasters or major disruptions across all sectors.
ENDEAVOR formalizes partnerships between emergency management and the private sector to improve preparedness, response, and recovery statewide. By increasing resilience and leveraging private sector capabilities, it reduces the burden on taxpayers, enhances operational efficiency, and helps save lives and protect property during disasters. What Does ENDEAVOR Do?
ENDEAVOR solves operational problems between industry and government during blue-sky days and more effective responses during dark-sky days. ENDEAVOR continually leverages the larger pool of people, tools, and resources of the SISE (Sensitive Information Sharing Environment) and its hundreds of partners nationwide. It reduces risk and increases community resilience a faster, ore efficient manner. Why was ENDEAVOR Created?For many years, government and industry have struggled to sustain a formalized, safe integrated planning framework to solve operational problems they both face during all types if disasters and disruptions.
In the past, state/local government funding or operated frameworks have struggled to fill this void, with some exceptions, and cannot provide legal protection that industry needs to have open and direct conversations about a specific problem, its impacts, the people needed to be involved, the information needed, the privacy protection of the people & information, and the possible solutions needed. ENDEAVOR is a private sector operated planning and problem-solving framework designed to support integrated problem solving between industry and state/local governments. ENDEAVOR addresses the private sector’s desire to better absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from disruptive events caused by natural or man-made threats (physical or cyber) through a sustained cross-sector problem solving process that provides private sector with: • A safe, FOIA protected space for industry and government to work • An industry operated and supported governance structure • Sustainment of the process while government cycles through turnover caused by elections, shifting priorities, resource constraints, and retirements. Background
The ENDEAVOR model was developed in 2012 by the AHC states and used to start and support the private sector's Multi-State Fleet Response Working Group, a nationally recognized group that is still operational today supporting the expediting of power restoration and private sector resource movement across state lines during large scale disaster or crisis. Under the AHC's ENDEAVOR model, the private sector operates a governance structure under an approved charter. The charter allows for government or industry sponsored use cases to be created and for states to advise the private sector in some cases and private sector advising the state and others. Adopted by Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 2018, the ENDEAVOR planning model was implemented to support a private sector integration program of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). At that time, the state was operating a BEOC program (Business Emergency Operation Center) and wanted to more closely integrate their private sector partners into their emergency planning, response and recovery efforts. PEMA has observed the success of the model over the years and wanted to adopt it to help organize the private sector and create a sustainable model that could survive elections and turnover in government or industry due to retirements, transfers, etc... The Commonwealth would start it and the private sector would sustain it. Leveraging the AHC's private sector networks, planning framework, legal protections, and facilitation capabilities, PEMA and the AHC attracted the private sector in the Commonwealth quickly, formed a governance structure, and immediately began problem solving together. The name ENDEAVOR was adopted by the private sector leadership. This ENDEAVOR - Pennsylvania planning framework proved very effective and produced immediate results in transportation policy, information sharing, and cross sector collaboration on a number of issues. Today, the ENDEAVOR - Pennsylvania working group supports 600+ stakeholders across the Commonwealth and works very closely with PEMA when responding to a number of incidents, particularly winter storms. The ENDEAVOR - Pennsylvania work group is sustained by the private sector and AHC's private sector community. In July 2023, the ENDEAVOR model was adopted by the Virginia Department Of Emergency Management (VDEM). Replicating the same approach used in Pennsylvania, the AHC worked with VDEM and the private sector to create ENDEAVOR - VIRGINIA. In it's first year, the ENDEAVOR - Virginia program established their governance structure and initiated three use cases in the areas of information sharing, evacuation planning, and transportation situational awareness during storms that cause road closures. Additionally, they conducted the first ENDEAVOR-Virginia annual workshop that focused on progress made, state updated for industry, sand several new use cases including cybersecurity. At present, the ENDEAVOR programs in Pennsylvania and Virginia are developing a new business sustainment model which it plans to launch in 2025 |