Beacon Emergency Dispatch Platform

Since the murder of George Floyd, communities across the country have
been increasingly reexamining the proper role of police, fire and EMS in responding to 911 calls. As a result, many community-based groups are recognizing that they often have more appropriate training and expertise to deal with a range of 911 calls than traditional response agencies, including for mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence crises. However, while these community-based groups may have the specialized training and tools necessary to provide more appropriate interventions, they often
struggle to understand how to best organize and manage their personnel
and resources within a functioning response network. In the classic
marketing funnel, these customers have problem awareness but little
product awareness - that's to say, they know what they can do, but they
don't know how to package it into a mission-ready product. Thus, when
presenting themselves as a viable alternative response provider, they
often overlook basic organizational and operational principles that
ultimately keep them from delivering the essential services they have
to offer.

Beacon is a mobile phone-based dispatch platform designed specifically for emergency response organizations that can't afford and/or don't need the legacy dispatching technologies used by 911 dispatch centers. Beacon works by alerting, coordinating and tracking community responders on any mobile device, with or without Internet.

While Beacon offers a turnkey-ready dispatching platform for community-based networks, our experience working in 20 countries across the socioeconomic spectrum has demonstrated that organizations often lack clear technical guidance and practical resources, creating a unique opportunity to provide best practices, training, and case studies related to the implementation of these networks.

To support the wide-scale deployment of our Beacon platform within alternative response systems, we propose to develop and distribute a digital toolkit to guide the design, launch and management of community response networks. This toolkit would ensure that organizations can build the full capacity needed to utilize our Beacon platform and deliver emergency care.

Beacon is currently by used by a range of different organizations in 20 countries, including:

• Ambulance and fire departments
• Search and rescue
• Mental health crisis
• Domestic violence counselors
• Harm reduction/street outreach workers

Generally speaking, established emergency response organizations are able to take advantage of Beacon's do-it-yourself design to get set up and start using Beacon in live response organizations in less than 60 minutes. However, these groups are overwhelmingly experienced emergency responders who have all the necessary components in place and already understand the principles of emergency response operations.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case with many of the newer community-based groups, who typically excel in their understanding of the intervention phase of response, but often lack understanding of how to build, organize and manage a reliable operation. We're certain that a well-developed digital toolkit will help these groups remove the guesswork, avoid common mistakes, and get to impact much quicker.