You can not accomplish anything good once SHTF. You should join your county’s emergency response team and help your county plan before things go bad. Once things go bad, it is too late to strategize and plan.
Once SHTF, your best bet is to lay low. Don’t volunteer, don’t leave your home/family. Don’t let LEO’s onto your land. If it is a regional event, the US can handle it, help will start trickling in the next day, live on your preps, everything will be fine. If it is an EMP, nuclear strike, pandemic, etc that takes out most of the country, you are pretty much screwed, prepper or not.
Let me tell you what your community and your leaders are going to do:
Unless your sheriff and county board of supervisors are preppers, and they most likely are not, they are going to gather all resources somewhere central, like the county fairgrounds. “For the good of everyone” of course. This means they will come to your home and search for items they are told to search for, like food, guns, etc. If you turn the polite LEOs away, the SWAT team will be there the next morning at 4 am to request your preps.
Once some kind of command center is set up at the county fairgrounds, people are going to be given food and water, at least until it gets scarce. Priority people, like LEOs and the board of supervisor members will obviously fair best in this situation. Same with their families. They will have the guns and the trained officers.
If you really think your county officials and LEOs who are not preppers are going to let their families starve because they didn’t prepare, while you have food because you did prepare, you are truly stupid. They will do whatever is necessary to save their families, even if that means stealing your private property under martial law, for the common good. It will happen.
Sorry, but continent-wide SHTF is going to be ugly. Every little government with a PD or sheriff is going to declare martial law, your rights won’t matter unless you can convince them that it isn’t worth what you got to come and steal it. God help you if you mistake a regional SHTF for the big one, once law is restored it probably won’t go well for you.
I am not saying don’t prep, but be smart, the local government is not going to be your friend, you are going to be their “resource”, and your preps are going to go to the “common good” under martial law. The only way you will keep your preps is if you are somehow able to hide them. And cops know how to find contraband, that is basically all they do these days.