Most of the hobby is not prepared to help with emcomm. And I think you (and a lot of people) overstate how helpful amateur emcomm is. In the past couple decades, local officials have gotten pretty good systems for getting high priority traffic out of the local area (which is what HF was previously for).
Amateur volunteers relaying things in the local area are helpful in keeping disaster logistics running smoothly. Radio skills are not a big part of it, for the most part.
I'm a teacher and passionate about radio. I don't know how to get my students into radio and make it into a good experience for them. They're way too likely to face hostility, racist political rants, etc. So I haven't pushed on it.
As for emergency preparedness... No. Hams don't really play a role anymore. Satellite texting/Starlink, digital repeaters for agencies, generally available idiot-proof radios are all things that would have to fail. There's a reason that the volunteer SAR team near me just buy off the shelf stuff from Motorola instead of trying to recruit Hams. Even in some sort of failure like that, I would rather have an air band or marine band radio than a Ham radio.
Our local CERT makes big use of amateur emcomm. But it's the non-critical stuff: neighborhood liasions to go out and spot things, or volunteers in a truck to relay supply needs at peripheral stations.
It's a parallel line of communications (with a separate set of humans making a judgment of what's important to escalate), which is useful when administrative and decision-making capacity is constrained. And it has different failure modes, which is nice, too.
Even little things: visible volunteer patrols by amateur operators for fireworks laws violations just helped my city tamp down the normal dozens of fires to only two and hastened the firefighting response.
There are still lots of old guys in these parts of the hobby, but ones open-minded enough at least to learn new things, and I've not had any issues with them despite having a distinctly female first name.
WSPR is the best place to start, in my opinion - lots of results for really low capital investment (5W is high power), really lending itself to DIY.
Licensing is ultimately going to be important to transmit, etc.
WSPR is amazing, but there's a certain "so what"-- I can send a packet over there, too, via the public internet. Radio doesn't make sense to kids anymore: like they really don't get it.
