40 Survival Skills To Trade For Emergency Supplies or Services
Survival skills that can be traded for supplies or services can come in handy during local emergencies, disasters, and economically challenging times. Communities survive and thrive when individuals are willing and able to work together. Having a skill you can trade for a service or for needed supplies could mean the difference between life and death for you and your family.
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In her book, The Art of Barter, co-author Shera Dalin said the following about our current economic hardship:
The economic hardships people are coping with are driving the rediscovery of bartering. The same thing happened during the Great Recession. When times get harder, people turn to barter.
Shera Dalin
Consider
What skill(s) are you prepared to barter in an emergency?
Perhaps you’ve taken an interest in sewing or gardening, carpentry or first aid.
What skills might you learn now to better prepare for future challenging times?
40 Survival Skills
- Bake bread
- Barter and trade
- Basic car, house, and yard maintenance
- Basic safety
- Basket weaving
- Call 911
- Canning
- Communication Skills
- Cooking from scratch
- CPR and basic first aid
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Emotional resilience
- Firearms training
- Fishing
- Food origin and preservation
- Foraging
- Harvest and preserve garden produce
- Herbal remedies
- Disinfecting
- How to survive without a cell phone
- Hunting
- Midwifery
- Navigation skills
- Nutrition Skills
- Plant garden
- Repair basic appliances
- Seed harvesting (I love this book!)
- Sewing and simple repairs
- Set up a tent
- Signaling for help
- Slingshot skills
- Split firewood with an axe
- Start a fire
- Street smarts; how to know when you are in danger
- Swimming
- Tie and untie knots
- Use a fire extinguisher
- Water purification
- Whittling
- Woodworking
If you believe you can accomplish everything by “cramming” at the eleventh hour, by all means, don’t lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining.
max brooks
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Spiritual Blessings and Promises
In addition to the practical uses for skills are the spiritual ones. The more skills one develops, the more one can bless the lives of others. We are God’s hands. The opportunity to serve our fellowmen is a blessing.
Adversity and tribulation are a natural part of life that can induce fear. Thankfully, we have been promised:
“If ye are prepared ye shall not fear.” (Doctrine & Covenants 38:30)
Invitation
Choose today to learn new skills that will bless you and others throughout your life.
Preparedness Quotes
Quotes to inspire a preparedness mindset:
“The more survival skills an individual has that have been practiced physically and otherwise, the better odds they have for those skills coming to the forefront during a stressful emergency.”
Cody Lundin
“Plan ahead: It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”
Richard Cushing
“Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their year’s supply of food…and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year’s supply of debt and are food-free.”
Thomas S. Monson
“Too often we bask in our comfortable complacency and rationalize that the ravages of war, economic disaster, famine, and earth quake cannot happen here. Those who believe this are either not acquainted with the revelations of the Lord, or they do not believe them. Those who smugly think these calamities will not happen, that they will somehow be set aside because of the righteousness of the Saints, are deceived and will rue the day they harbored such a delusion.”
Ezra Taft Benson
“Now I think the time is coming when there will be more distresses, when there may be more tornadoes, and more floods…more earthquakes…I think they will be increasing probably as we come nearer to this end, and so we must be prepared for this.”
Victor Brown quoting President Kimball in Ensign, May 1976
““The need for preparation is abundantly clear. The great blessing of being prepared gives us freedom from fear.”
L. Tom Perry, “If Ye Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear,” Ensign, Nov. 1995, 36–37.
“The Lord will not translate one’s good hopes and desires and intentions into works. Each of us must do that for himself.”
Spencer W. Kimball, Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, (1969), 8.
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More Preparedness Quotes
More quotes to help motivate you to prepare to take action in the event of an emergency:
“Don’t limit yourself, discover new areas of expertise.”
Sunday Adelaja
“Be Prepared… the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.”
Robert Baden-Powell
“Make preparations in advance … you never have trouble if you are prepared for it.”
Teddy Roosevelt
“Preparedness, when properly pursued, is a way of life, not a sudden, spectacular program.”
Spencer W. Kimball
“There are no guarantees in life, but after any major disaster two separate and distinct groups will emerge – the Prepared and the Unprepared. It’s up to you which group you’ll belong to.”
Richard Duarte
“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
Alexander Graham Bell
“What we think or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.”
John Ruskin
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my saw.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Joseph gathered up all the food of these seven years, which occurred in the land of Egypt, and put the food in the cities.”
Genesis 41:48
“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforseeable and the unpredictable.”
Gen. George S. Patton
Conclusion
The development of survival skills today will be of benefit to you and those in your community in the event of an unforeseen emergency.
What survival skill are you interested in developing?
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