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Ontario Community Emergency Assistance Program (OCEAP)

Communities Assisting Communities

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Welcome to the OCEAP web page!

The Ontario Community Emergency Assistance Program (OCEAP) is a new vision in community education and participation in both local and provincial emergency and disaster services. OCEAP provides this service thru the creation and management of local Community Emergency Assistance Teams.

These community teams affiliate with local government management and emergency services to provide them with a professional, multi-role, community-based surge capacity/response to major incidents.

In addition, each local OCEAP team is plugged into a larger network of neighboring teams whom support each other by following a ‘communities helping communities’ philosophy.

Who developed OCEAP?

The personnel behind the development of OCEAP each have over a decade of experience with effectively utilizing volunteers during emergencies. This same expertise, including some of the most diversified community-based incident managers in Ontario are participating in the continued development of OCEAP.

The focus for this new program has and continues to be providing a professional multi-role approach to training and providing community volunteers that can provide a variety of types of assistance in times of need.

What is different with OCEAP?

OCEAP supports providing both administrative and operationally deployable volunteers in a variety of emergencies including but not limited to search services (missing people), volunteer registration, residential assistance service teams (disasters), various evacuation center roles and pandemic assistance.

Fundamentally OCEAP has been designed as an adaptive program, which can easily change with the times and provide the types of assistance that community leaders and government officials require. OCEAP does this by not supporting ‘specialized’ groups or services such as a K9 unit. Instead, the strength of the program remains providing a single type of either administrative or operational volunteer who is experienced and well trained as a ‘multi-role’ specialist.

OCEAP also supports working closely with local government officials to assist with providing community educational services in affiliation with their own local emergency services.

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