Forging Something That Works From What Hasn't Been Working

I was going to spin off my last couple of posts – the disasters that compounded in the Philippines late last year, and Venezuela's cautionary tale for US FEMA reform – with more analysis: a rundown of articles about FEMA reform at the state, county, and (especially rural) local level, how disasters impact voting, and how voting impacts disaster relief.

The new article was going to be called "Reform, Resources, and Resilience". I planned to write about some very cool ideas I learned about from Bluesky and LinkedIn, community-level disaster preparation, mutual aid at scale, the power of relationships versus plans; mapping community defense and care, how libraries create community through food, and even the birth of the climate doula. I wanted to point out this fascinating art collaborative about disaster preparation, response, and relief.

To be clear, I may still find homes for deeper explorations of these ideas. But I woke up that morning with a tired brain. I remembered how my analysis habit had burned me out. I thought about some of the other ideas that have come to me while I work at my day job, and while reading, that I'm not writing about.

And I thought about why I'm so drawn to analysis; what I'm trying to avoid when I go down that path. Turns out, there's a thread that connects that reason to all these ideas.

Tl;dr: the sense of community I don't feel connected to

Food chains, fundraising drives, and seed share meetings are examples of simple things people can do to organize neighbors, get things done when systems fail, and instill the kind of sense of community that can be valuable in disaster response and recovery.

For some people (like me!), though, it's not the what to do, or the how to do it, so much as the where to start.

I don't have a lot of experience in community. As a child, I moved around a lot with my family. Each new school came with its own new social landscape: new peers, teachers, personalities, and their ways of communicating. I'd walk into a class full of already formed connections, the "weird new kid" struggling to find a place of my own.

I didn't learn to manage the emotional or informational overwhelm any more than I learned to put down roots. I learned to strive to excel academically, believing I could connect with others via my intelligence. That isn't how it works, of course, but I didn't realize it at the time.

Of course, this pattern repeated itself straight into adulthood. In every community I've ever tried to join – workplace, neighborhood, online – I've felt awkward and weird, "too much" for "normal" people, and thus unable to connect... much less influence and organize.

That may be changing now that I work in civil service, in a public-facing role. I've learned that making the time and room to listen deeply to people goes a long way toward defusing potential conflict. Listening also helps others to be more likely to receive information from me.

On a limited basis, I've even started to build some professional relationships with local business owners and other civil servants. My goal and approach is to solve problems rather than punish infractions.

Even so, these are building blocks, not fully fledged projects or initiatives. That makes me feel disingenuous writing about FEMA reform, disaster planning and preparation (never mind response and recovery), or any of the other cool ideas I've read about. Each requires community, or the organization of people and ideas into relationships and plans and actions: things I've never done and wouldn't know how to do, not at the levels needed to be effective. (Hell, most of the time I can hardly organize my own brain.)

That's not to say I couldn't rely on the journalistic skills I've built over years. I know how to research and interview. It's just that I've been on a years-long break from those skills, unsure they're how I can best contribute to society.

Forming new neural and community pathways, maybe

Well worn writing advice is to write what you know. What I know is, of course, feeling awkward and weird – feelings I'm told a lot of people are familiar with, even if most of us hide them well.

These feelings have a lot of implications for emergency management.

During a disaster, there isn't a lot of room for awkward and weird. Lives and homes need saving. And yet, those efforts require communication. Even before a disaster, communication and relationships (ideally) solve for logistical and financial and communications problems before they happen.

But people rub each other the wrong way all the time. Common personality conflicts and different communication styles can trigger insecurities and affect decision-making, no matter how much we insist we're all professionals. In my experience, it's a rare person who's healed enough to be able to rise to a truly "professional" standard.

Often, instead, our beliefs about ourselves and others can't help but leak out around the sides of our words and actions, showing up as tones of voice and facial microexpressions and the things we do, refuse to do, or screw up.

I'm finding I have these thoughts every time I read a new article or book about emergency management or community care. "But what about..." I find myself asking, still analyzing, but in a way that draws less on research and more on my own lived experience feeling unheard or misunderstood.

Another blogger, Leigh Hendrix, wrote earlier this month:

I am thinking about a few lines from Margaret Killjoy's The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, the third book in her excellent Danielle Cain series (you should buy her books from Firestorm Collective). A character we have followed through a pretty harrowing and transformative adventure is reflecting on how he lives, how he acts in his world:

He'd found strength in providing for others. In hours spent on the phone with friends in crisis, in facilitating meetings and mediating conflict. He did those things because they were the things that would be done by the man he wanted to be.

When I read those lines, I paused, put the book down, picked it up again and underlined those words with my pen:

He did those things because they were the things that would be done by the man he wanted to be.

This, to me, is one way we live and one way we move toward changing ourselves and contributing to changing our worlds. What does the person you want to be do? How can you show up in that doing right now? What resources and support do you need to help you do that?

Hendrix then aligns with Mariame Kaba, telling us, "... anything worth doing is done with other people," and honestly, for me right now, that feels like a bridge too far. I've experienced a couple of recent "community" failures, one online and one in person, that made me wonder if I'll ever find "my" people.

But I think if anything, those experiences made me realize that the person I want to be makes room for the experience of feeling awkward and weird among people who would like to tell us it isn't the time or place: planning sessions, mass care shelters, volunteer spaces, and other elements involved in emergency management. Those feelings can keep us from ever speaking up, much less creating space for our ideas that can make for a more inclusive response and recovery process.

In a few weeks I'll be back in school, starting the introductory class for my Trauma Informed Emergency Management graduate program. Our texts include a book on disaster ethics and one on disaster leadership, and I'm keen to find out how those translate to community care among (to draw on a Christian concept) "the least of these."

Till then, one foot in front of the other.