Welcome to The Resilient Living Summit
A six-day virtual event – September 14-19, 2026
Featuring four core topic areas:
- Disaster Preparedness
- Grow & Store Food
- Community & Family Care
- Self-Reliant Home
Practical, accessible preparedness for real life from presenters with years of experience.
HOSTED BY
Amber Bradshaw of My Homestead Life and Laurie Neverman of Common Sense Home
Laurie Neverman
Founder of Common Sense Home and author of Common Sense Preparedness, Laurie helps families build resilient, abundant lives through gardening, food preservation, emergency preparedness, and practical self-reliance. With a calm, no-fear approach and decades of hands-on experience, she makes preparedness feel approachable and empowering.
Amber Bradshaw
Founder of My Homestead Life and Milk & Honey Publishing; author of Survival on Shell Mountain and several homesteading books, Amber inspires others to embrace simple living and everyday preparedness. Her down-to-earth teaching style and real-life experience help families feel more confident and capable, no matter what life brings.
learning by doing – together
Don’t Just Watch. Practice Real Preparedness.
One thing that makes the Resilient Living Summit different is that it’s not just about watching videos. We want attendees to leave the week feeling more capable, more connected, and more prepared in real life — not just inspired.
Here are some of the interactive experiences we’re building into the summit:
“My One Thing” — Simple Steps That Matter
No overwhelm. No 57-step preparedness lists.
Throughout the summit, speakers will share:
The single most useful thing someone could do today.
Maybe it’s:
Store extra water
Learn one new recipe from pantry staples
Back up important documents
Start a small herb garden
Buy a flashlight for each bedroom
Meet one neighbor
Small actions add up over time. This feature helps attendees move through the event with clear next steps they can actually accomplish.
Practice Drills — Real Skills for Real Life
Preparedness works better when you’ve actually tried it.
Summit discussions will include simple hands-on “practice drills” designed to help attendees take immediate action at home.
These aren’t complicated survival exercises. They’re practical, everyday skills like:
Finding your home’s water shutoff
Flipping breakers safely
Testing emergency lighting
Building a basic car kit
Checking pantry readiness
Identifying weak points in your home systems
Creating a family communication plan
Each drill is designed to help turn information into confidence.
“What’s In Your Pantry and Garden?” Live Segments
Real homes. Real food. Real life.
Instead of polished “Instagram-perfect” presentations, we’re including casual live segments where hosts and guests share what preparedness actually looks like in everyday life.
You might see:
Pantry tours
Food preservation projects
Bulk storage setups
Gardening harvests
Lessons learned from mistakes
The goal is not perfection — it’s practicality.
Resilience is something ordinary people build a little at a time. Your plan should fit your life – not some idealized image on social media. This is how we take care of our families, and we’re sharing it with you.
Fiction Meets Reality — Could YOU Handle the Scenario?
Sometimes fiction hits too close to the truth.
We’ll introduce a fictional preparedness scenario and give you an opportunity to share what you would do.
Books fuel the imagination and give us new perspectives, but the author’s solution might not be a best fit for your situation.
That’s where fiction gets interesting.
It gives us a chance to think through difficult decisions before we’re faced with them in real life.
What resources would you have available? What would you do differently? And what might work perfectly well on the page—but not so well in the real world?
Fiction Meets Reality
What would you actually do if everyday life suddenly changed?
One of the most unique experiences inside the summit is our Fiction Meets Reality series, inspired by Amber Bradshaw’s Survival on Shell Mountain stories.
Together, we’ll take realistic situations from the books and walk through them as practical preparedness exercises:
How would you handle this situation at home?
What supplies would matter most?
What mistakes would create bigger problems?
What skills would make life easier?
How could families prepare before stress hits?
Instead of fear-based scenarios or overwhelming survival talk, these sessions use storytelling to make preparedness approachable.
Rooted, Ready, and Resilient
Common Sense Preparedness by Laurie Neverman
Preparedness doesn’t have to look extreme to make a real difference in your life. Common Sense Preparedness is a practical, grounded guide to helping your family handle everyday disruptions — from storms and power outages to rising costs and supply chain hiccups — with less stress and more confidence.
Built around real-life experience, this book focuses on the kind of preparedness that fits naturally into everyday living: building a reliable pantry, creating backup systems, strengthening home resilience, growing and preserving food, and developing practical skills that serve you year after year.
At the Resilient Living Summit, Laurie’s sessions expand on the same philosophy found throughout the book — calm, capable preparedness rooted in practical action instead of fear. If the summit inspires you to take the next step toward a more resilient home and family, Common Sense Preparedness gives you a roadmap to continue that journey long after the event ends.
