The manual incorporates the knowledge gained by the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA) at crisis and disaster scenes and is designed to accompany NOVA's National Crisis Response Training Institute, which serves as the training center for NOVA's Crisis Response Team volunteers. The opening sessions focus on the nature of catastrophe, including time and space dimensions of a catastrophe, the crisis reaction, types of crimes and catastrophes, and impacts on communities. Additional topics include common long-term stress reactions, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, death notification, fears of death, dealing with loss, grief reactions, methods of commemoration, integrating tragedy into the future, and helping with long-term coping. Further topics include crisis intervention techniques, post-trauma counseling, spiritual issues related to trauma, group debriefing techniques, managing the media in crisis situations, coordinating the community crisis response, and case studies of communities in crisis. Other topics include crisis reactions and different responses to different age groups, cultural issues related to crisis intervention and counseling, local crisis planning, and stress reactions of caregivers. Case examples, exercises, figures, forms, checklists, list of catastrophes used as reference points in the training curricula, and reference lists