As they seek to reduce exposures and speed recovery from various natural disasters, many public entities are finding benefit collaborating with the local private sector.

Such public-private efforts are part of the city and county of San Francisco's Resilient SF initiative.

“That's a piece of it,” said Matt Hansen, director of the city and county's risk management division. “We're taking approaches on all different fronts.”

The public-private approach stems from “the mutual goal of wanting to be a resilient city in every facet of the community,” Mr. Hansen said. “There's a value proposition for everybody.”

In the San Francisco area, there's a shared awareness of the earthquake risk facing the area that helps make the case for the mutual goals, the risk manager said. “It's not if, it's when. Everybody's pretty aware of it.”

Public-private groups chaired by San Francisco's city administrator meet on a regular basis to focus on disaster resilience. The keys to benefiting from such arrangements in local continuity efforts and disaster-recovery planning are communications, leadership and being straightforward about the mutual goals, Mr. Hansen said. “Not to say there aren't hurdles, but you work through them,” he said.

Seattle's emergency management leaders have had longstanding relationships with several public-private efforts, said Barb Graff, director of the city's Office of Emergency Management.

One is the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region, which focuses on promoting economic vitality and growth in the region and Canada. Among other things, each year the group holds “critical interdependencies exercises” focusing on the potential effect of disasters on elements of the regional economy such as the power grid, communications and supply chains, Ms. Graff said.

Seattle also advances local resiliency efforts through Washington First, an organization that includes local banks, insurance companies, risk managers from area businesses and others, Ms. Graff said. “They are members of our disaster management committee at the city level, as well as the county level,” she said. “They bring that private sector voice to our discussions.”

Those public-private efforts can allow large local companies to help smaller local businesses with their own business continuity efforts, Ms. Graff said.

“The large entities like Target and Microsoft and Starbucks and such can devote full-time staff to continuity,” she said. “But they're also able to bring in some of the smaller suppliers to talk about continuity.”

In South Florida, Miami-Dade County's emergency management efforts include the Business Recovery program, a public-private collaboration aimed at promoting private sector emergency preparedness, response, recovery and risk mitigation, and minimizing the number of businesses unable to reopen after an emergency or disaster.

“For the last several years, we've been focused on the whole community approach, which includes all sectors of the community, and certainly the private sector is an important part of that approach,” said Curtis Sommerhoff, director of emergency management for Miami-Dade County.

A primary part of that effort is the Business Continuity Network, a software tool created by Florida International University. The opt-in network provides a vehicle for pushing information to businesses and allowing them to share information with the city and county and one another.

“The main thing is kind of a free flow of information coming in and out,” Mr. Sommerhoff said. “We want to hear from (businesses), too.”

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Paul Vitro, emergency planner for Miami-Dade County, does outreach to local businesses as part of the business recovery program. “We have regular meetings to talk about a lot of topics,” Mr. Vitro said. Last year, Miami-Dade County also held a business recovery symposium, and the city and county also have worked with Florida officials to push the business recovery program statewide.

Across the country, Small Business Development Center networks are including disaster preparedness and recovery in their offerings to small businesses. Funded by the Small Business Administration, 63 such networks offer consulting services and workshops to small business owners at little or no cost to help small business loan recipients avoid defaulting on their loans.

The University of Houston's Hurricane Business Recovery Center, a specialty center of the university's Small Business Development Center network, is one example of using the networks to help promote business continuity.

“Florida has been doing hurricane recovery efforts through the small business development center network for a long time,” said Terri B. Parris, public relations manager of the Houston hurricane business recovery center. “Louisiana created theirs after Katrina. Ours was created after Ike.”

And, Ms. Parris said, the university's recovery center has tried to expand beyond hurricane-related risks. “We've tried to expand people's thinking to all the risks that they need to mitigate,” she said.