Trauma : Disaster :: Healing : Recovery
Learning emergency management after personal calamity

Featured articles

Have Our Online Lives Eroded Our Communities?

Have Our Online Lives Eroded Our Communities?

If FEMA Goes Away, Could Communities Step Up?

If FEMA Goes Away, Could Communities Step Up?

If Disaster Response Shifts to States, How Can Communities Respond?

If Disaster Response Shifts to States, How Can Communities Respond?

Organizing in Community, Also When You Have No Experience

Organizing in Community, Also When You Have No Experience

Taking Experiential Training When You Have No Experience

Taking Experiential Training When You Have No Experience

Twenty Years After I Wrote About Emergency Management Topics, Where Do Things Stand Now?

Twenty Years After I Wrote About Emergency Management Topics, Where Do Things Stand Now?

What's a Girl Have to Do to Get Into a Graduate Program?

What's a Girl Have to Do to Get Into a Graduate Program?

How I Updated My Resume to Move Towards a Brand New Career

How I Updated My Resume to Move Towards a Brand New Career

Following the Action Steps in Navigating the Chaos

Following the Action Steps in Navigating the Chaos

Leadership, Trauma, and the Space for Connection Between Them

Leadership, Trauma, and the Space for Connection Between Them

What Does Intentional, Human Centered Disaster Response Look Like?

What Does Intentional, Human Centered Disaster Response Look Like?

The Importance of Human Response to Systemic Failure

The Importance of Human Response to Systemic Failure

A reintroduction

A reintroduction

Five Years After My Dystopian Fiction Was Published, I’m Afraid It Might Actually Be Coming True

Five Years After My Dystopian Fiction Was Published, I’m Afraid It Might Actually Be Coming True

Finding Community and Building Solidarity for Socially Exhausted Introverts*

Finding Community and Building Solidarity for Socially Exhausted Introverts*

How to Heal When Life Feels Like the Environment That Harmed You

How to Heal When Life Feels Like the Environment That Harmed You

Asking for Help When You Don’t Conform to Social Expectations

Asking for Help When You Don’t Conform to Social Expectations

To Protect Our Children, We First Need to Heal Ourselves

To Protect Our Children, We First Need to Heal Ourselves

How American Hero Narratives Keep Us From Solving Social Crises — or Healing

How American Hero Narratives Keep Us From Solving Social Crises — or Healing

5 Things “Stranger Danger” Education Got Wrong, and 1 It Gets Right

5 Things “Stranger Danger” Education Got Wrong, and 1 It Gets Right

How Generational Trauma Compounds Child and Intimate Partner Abuse

How Generational Trauma Compounds Child and Intimate Partner Abuse

Why It’s More Critical Now Than Ever to Tell Our “Not That Bad” Abuse Stories

Why It’s More Critical Now Than Ever to Tell Our “Not That Bad” Abuse Stories

Asking for Help When Help Feels Few and Far Between

Asking for Help When Help Feels Few and Far Between

Asking for Help When You Can’t Pull Back Any Longer

Asking for Help When You Can’t Pull Back Any Longer

Reaching Out for Help When Everything Tells You to Pull Back

Reaching Out for Help When Everything Tells You to Pull Back

Latest

Dec
18
Have Our Online Lives Eroded Our Communities?

Have Our Online Lives Eroded Our Communities?

And can we bring ourselves back from collapse?
9 min read
Nov
29
If FEMA Goes Away, Could Communities Step Up?

If FEMA Goes Away, Could Communities Step Up?

Three books offer a vision of future disaster recovery – if we can come together in mutuality
9 min read
Nov
17
Men in red lifejackets and helmets paddle a rubber boat full of rescued people through brown floodwaters

If Disaster Response Shifts to States, How Can Communities Respond?

Waiting for rescue probably isn't sustainable for any of us
7 min read
Nov
04
Volunteers organizing food distribution at a long table filled with canned and fresh foods. Their faces are not in frame, only their arms and gloved hands.

Organizing in Community, Also When You Have No Experience

Stepping up isn't just about collecting training or experience. It's also about healing past trauma.
4 min read
Nov
03
A group of five men wearing hardhats and safety gear discuss plans in a ramshackle house.

Taking Experiential Training When You Have No Experience

Learning as much as I can from people who know a lot better than I do... and my own instincts
6 min read
Oct
24
A photograph of a rear view mirror reflecting the road and sunset scenery behind the traveling vehicle, whose windows are partially open.

Twenty Years After I Wrote About Emergency Management Topics, Where Do Things Stand Now?

The more things change, the more they've stayed the same, only maybe with more political urgency
8 min read
Oct
02
What's a Girl Have to Do to Get Into a Graduate Program?

What's a Girl Have to Do to Get Into a Graduate Program?

There's explaining why I want to get this degree. Then there's bleeding on the page.
3 min read
Sep
16
How I Updated My Resume to Move Towards a Brand New Career

How I Updated My Resume to Move Towards a Brand New Career

The way I was able to see and appreciate just how much I've accomplished over the years, and to frame it all in a way that felt the most authentic to me
3 min read
Sep
08
Following the Action Steps in Navigating the Chaos

Following the Action Steps in Navigating the Chaos

Now that I'm rebuilding my entire life from the ground up, I'm more feeling my way along than planning my steps
12 min read
Sep
06
A person wearing all black clothing lies curled in a fetal position on a wooden bench.

Leadership, Trauma, and the Space for Connection Between Them

Rarely can we admit that our carefully crafted structures may not always be the right ones for the circumstances
5 min read