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Hello. I’m Ana-Marie Jones, chief resiliency officer at Interpro.
I’m delighted to be speaking with you today about the intersection of three
important topics – unequal risks, diversity, and the solutions to those
very issues. My request is that we all be open and courageous
and really be willing to face the different challenges that are ahead.
And please answer all questions. Whether you answer them in the chat
or you share your answers with others, please answer them, even if it’s just
in your own head, so that, by the end of this workshop,
we have a different level of understanding.
Also I’m going to ask that you accept that
change is needed, necessary, and quite normal.
My first question is, what’s at stake for the greater earthquake community
if we were to solve our unequal risks and our diversity issues?
If you’ve been involved in the earthquake community for any length
of time, or if you just access Google, you know that, after every disaster,
we talk about the different threat levels and risks for certain groups.
And we understand that various diverse community members
have always been left without the resources they need.
So I just ask you to really ponder that.
What would happen for the greater earthquake community if the
earthquake community is the group that solves this issue?
If we look at just some of the major disasters – and let’s just
pick a few of them. And this is obviously a very short list,
but if you look at the 1906 earthquake, Loma Prieta, Y2K, certainly 9/11,
and now we have even more disasters to add to our list of disasters to consider,
and it’s everything from COVID-19, the Capitol attacks – the truth is,
we have an ever-growing number of disasters, and resources that are
going to be needed to address these issues, and we know that the U.S. has
spent over 100 documented years and many billions of dollars
preparing and trying to engage the public,
but always using the fear and threat of disasters as the framework.
It hasn’t worked. And we need to address that moving forward.
The traditional approach is very clearly a message wrapped around thinking
about disasters, engaging with disaster-focused agencies, and then
telling people what they should do because these disasters are happening.
And, even when we do campaigns that are much more appealing than others,
we get a slight temporary bump in the number of people
who engage in this conversation.
And, very honestly, if we want earthquake anything –
mitigation efforts, preparedness – to reach the audiences we need
and to get the funding – the political funding, the financial, all of it –
the supports from all different sectors,
we have to have a different approach to this conversation.
I want to also put in that any of you who are involved in creating
campaigns, supporting campaigns, talking about engaging the public
in earthquake efforts, fear- and threat-based messages do not work
for long-term volitional behavior change.
There’s tons of research on this. You can just research – very quickly,
just look up fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and what it does
when people actually are making their choices based on short-term fears.
And we really do have billions of dollars invested in this.
If you think of the campaigns, like the DARE campaign, Scared Straight,
abstinence-only – all of them are about trying to scare people into change.
And, for those of you who are still using pictures of collapsed buildings
and such as part of your consumer education,
you should know that that just helps people to stay in denial.
It makes people want to avoid the conversation.
As we move into really looking at the people who face the greatest risks
and the level of diversity we have, these two slides – really, it’s still
even a short list. As large – as large as this list is, it’s still
actually not as complete as it could be. I’ll point out just a few things because
we really have a very short time together.
The limited English proficiency community.
If you think from the perspective of somebody who is living in this country,
and they have limited English proficiency, they have all kinds
of extra risks, right? The information that is put out
is generally put out first, and sometimes only, in English.
Members of this community have faced increased levels of hate crimes.
Their level of trust for the messenger would certainly be different.
And also, honestly, if you are struggling in any area of your life,
the willingness that you might have for engaging in
an earthquake-related conversation may not be there.
Let’s look at the next slide. And I put in – in the bullet that
talks about cultural isolation – because there are so many communities
where they have chosen to interact only with one particular community,
or they would only have trusted conversations inside their
own community. Think of religion. If you think of the coverage that
different religious groups have had over just the last year, you can – you can –
you can understand why we need messengers to speak directly
to what people care about inside that group.
And, honestly, I’ve done multiple classes just on these two slides
going deeper into what works, what doesn’t work, why certain
conversations are absolutely rejected inside these communities.
And this is what we have to deal with. We need to reach more people.
We need to reach them in ways that will make them take action.
And that is why I want to focus on the solution end of this.
If we look at this little graphic, it lays out the traditional message.
We have told people to get ready for disasters. That’s the what to do.
The how to do it has always focused on the classes, the trainings, the kits,
the supplies, and to do exercises and drills.
In the earthquake communities, this is what we have always done.
And we actually skip over quite a lot of the why.
We make certain assumptions that people are going to embrace this
conversation because disasters happen – because of the level of devastation.
Well, that’s just not a good enough motivator, especially when we are
dealing with so many other issues. If you look at the poorest members
of your community, if you’re struggling to put food on the table, you don’t know
whether or not you’re going to have a roof over your head, or if you can’t
put shoes on your children’s feet, then the earthquake that may happen
sometime in the next 20 or 30 years is really not your most pressing concern.
The messages that we have found make a greater difference
really do focus on more aspirational goals.
So, for example, engaging providers in conversations about how they can
actually bring more resources to their community.
Helping agencies look at how their clients and how their agencies can have
more resources and be better partners and help fulfill on their mission.
Those are all conversations that are easier and much more fulfilling
for them to embrace. I feel passionate and confident
about this because I spent 16 years as the executive director of an agency
called CARD – Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters.
And it was created by community agencies because of the Loma Prieta
earthquake. And we learned then, and we always keep re-learning this,
that the traditional disaster service agencies – Red Cross and FEMA
and Homeland Security and all of the different agencies where their missions
are related to disasters, not one of them has the ability to do that ongoing,
everyday influence of our most vulnerable communities.
So, at CARD, we worked with the agencies that provide direct
service, and for them, and our job was to create those tools.
And ultimately, prioritizing future possible disasters over your everyday
needs is just not compatible with the people or the institutions
that support them. CARD’s philosophy was
that we are helping our communities prepare to prosper.
And we literally lived to be an incubator for community-driven solutions.
Everything from how do you make ICS something that agencies want to do, to
how do you engage your clients, how do you apply for grants to take this on.
Since we are an earthquake community, I wanted to give you one of our favorite
earthquake-related success stories. This is with an agency called
Becoming Independent. They serve adults with intellectual
disabilities in helping them to stay independent in their
own community in their own home.
On August 24th, 2014, at 3:20 a.m., there was a 6.0 earthquake.
Within 30 minutes of the earthquake, the staff had already secured
their own households. They had staffers who deployed to respond
to the clients in the impact area. They actually had things like maps,
so they knew exactly where the clients were living in relationship to where
their staff – where they lived. So they even had it down to
the level of, if you had to bicycle over to that client’s house.
And the clients were spread out over Napa, Vallejo,
American Canyon, Sonoma Counties.
The staff made contact with over 200 clients in the impact area
immediately after the disaster, either face-to-face or by phone.
They went and they helped with picking up broken glass and,
you know, picking up toppled furniture and basically making sure
the house was safe to occupy. Only one person had to be removed
because the house was unsafe.
What I’d like you to think about is, what would it mean if, in your
community, you had agencies that embraced earthquake awareness
and earthquake response like this, where readiness is part of their culture,
it’s how they serve the community, and it’s woven into how they
empower staff, clients, and their extended community.
If you multiply that by the nonprofits, the faith agencies, that serve in
the sector, how many different gaps would that fill?
Imagine what it would mean if, when you reached out with information,
classes, needing to get a message boosted into the community,
you had this type of interest, this type of support.
There are other solutions. Even if you don’t have direct influence
with your preparedness or your campaigns or your outreach because of
your job, you can still have that sphere of influence inside your communities –
your personal communities. You could do it on social media.
Some of the things we always talk about are, you could use books.
I’m a reader. So any one of these books – I can’t even tell you how many
different individual lessons there are to be learned from these books.
Here are two stories that I think absolutely everyone who is trying
to engage our publics in embracing disaster resilience, disaster readiness,
basically for any disaster – but these are two 9/11 stories.
And almost everyone you talk to, they know horrible disaster stories –
the terrible and the horrible and the things that would be hard to forget.
I suggest giving them beautiful stories – beautiful stories where regular people
are the heroes. Beautiful stories that show that, together,
we can make almost anything happen. And, if you have the opportunity,
these are two stories that I really highly recommend for engaging people
in what is best about humanity and what is best about
who we are when we face a disaster.
Another thing to champion, and I – this is one of the
most important – is championing connected communities.
Everything you ever want to do in terms of engaging your communities
for earthquake-related matters, if you’re absolutely interested in
supporting closing the gaps related to our unequal risks,
if we want to serve diverse communities, we have to champion
them being connected and resilient as their own community.
What I believe is that, if we, as an extended earthquake community –
if we take on that we can have earthquakes make us stronger,
then we could embrace these diverse solutions and make it so that earthquake
education, earthquake mitigation efforts, and earthquake anything
because a rallying point and a way for our communities to become stronger,
more united, and better able to withstand virtually anything,
whether it’s earthquakes, but certainly any other disaster.
I think that would be one of the highest ways for our
earthquake efforts to serve our greater community.
I am freakishly passionate about this topic, so if there is anything I can do
to support you or help you in understanding how we can reach our
most vulnerable communities, how we can empower the agencies
that serve them, and how we can make earthquake efforts be
the thing that leaves us stronger and better, I’m happy to do that.
I want to thank everyone who made this workshop possible, and I look forward
to speaking with anyone who is interested in this particular topic.
Thank you so much for having me be part of this.