First responders play a crucial and integral role in today’s civil society. Among the plethora of services they provide, one may find law enforcement, firefighting and emergency medical services (EMS). In all three of the aforementioned services, time management could play an important role in order to assist first responders to reach their maximum potential and effectively and efficiently deal with the crisis. For instance, crime rates could significantly decrease if a police officer has the complete situational awareness picture to hinder criminals; fire fighters could be able to save more lives in less time from burning buildings and EMS could act in a proper and quick manner in order to treat medical conditions (such as cardiac arrests) that could result in death. The same applies to larger-scale crises that need even more effort on the proper coordination and communication among multiple interdisciplinary teams. As a result, their everyday activities involve a large amount of stressful situations. These situations could be better handled with a set of soft skills such as decision making, teamwork or stress resilience are of great importance in dealing with such situations. Digital advancements like satellite image analysis can tremendously contribute to First Responders’ daily activities. Therefore, they have to be under continuous training in order to be able to make use of these new tools.

STRONG steps in to propose a series of online courses that will fill in this gap and provide First Responders with the training they need. These courses will be grouped by theme and not by the type of First Responder in order to achieve a more transversal solution, as the challenges they face are not usually restricted to one territory. Through these courses, First Responders will be able to acquire some basic skills that will equip them with proper and effective response solutions to a broad series of events. These online courses are going to be complemented by a digital tool that will pave the way towards the creation of a European Network of First Responders. Through this communication tool, First Responders will be able to connect with each other; share past experiences and lessons learnt; best practices and encourage cooperation among First Responders on a European level.