Day 2: TALK STORY: Caring for Kids: Effective Strategies for Supporting Children After Megafires

 

“The biggest component of it is making sure that everyone’s talking as much as possible, that there is collaboration and you’re working together in order to make sure that kids have the support that they need.” —Henry Meier

 

“If I don’t feel emotionally safe, physical safety means nothing.—Kasey Earnest

 

“When we imagine trying to help kids in our community, become that age again.” —Alfy Basurto

 

2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT

 

Children are often the forgotten victims in the aftermath of disasters, their needs and trauma overshadowed by the overwhelming task of rebuilding physical infrastructure. Yet, supporting the mental health and resilience of young people is crucial to the long-term recovery of any community. 

Rebuild Paradise Executive Director, Jen Goodlin, leads a powerful discussion with Kasey Earnest of the Malibu Boys & Girls Club, Henry Meier of Project:CAMP, and Alfy Basurto of Rebuild Maui

Discover how communities can empower the next generation to heal, grow, and lead in the wake of unimaginable disaster as these inspiring leaders share creative youth-centered approaches to disaster response, the importance of collaboration, adapting engagement strategies for kids, and guiding youth through trauma rather than shielding them.  

 

Highlights:

  • 01:03 Paradise: 5 Years Post-Fire
  • 06:09 The Problem with Lack of Dedicated Child Care Assistance
  • 10:58 From Disaster to Future
  • 19:05 Providing a Safe and Fun Environment
  • 29:17 How to Help the Children 
  • 33:17 How the Community Can Help

 

Twitter:

Collaboration and compassion are key to supporting our youth. Join in to hear creative ideas to put children at the center of recovery as Rebuild’s Paradise’s Jen Goodlin sits with Malibu Boys and Girls Club’s Kasey Earnest, Project:Camp’s Henry Meier, and Rebuild Maui’s Alfy Basurto. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #ChildrenInDisasters #CommunityResilience #YouthMentalHealth #CollaborativePartnerships

 

Quotes:

01:22 “When you hear numbers over and over, it totally takes away the humanity of our recovery.” —Jen Goodwill 

04:07 “We have gone through fire. It has made us stronger.” —Jen Goodwill 

07:29 “Without funding, none of this stuff happens. You can’t just say, ‘We should do it’. You have to say, ‘We should do it, and here’s how to fund it’.” —Henry Meier

09:15 “Having something for children in the wake of disasters is to mitigate the trauma of them.” —Henry Meier 

12:09 “Kids are always suffering, and they always need support and access to services.” —Kasey Earnest

16:10 “How do we support communities? It’s by supporting our kids.” —Kasey Earnest

16:16 “Our kids are very apt to move forward, but their family systems can’t. So while our kids can heal from the trauma, they get dragged back into it because their parents can’t deal with their own mental health until the physical components of what they’ve gone through have been stabilized.” —Kasey Earnest

16:57 “Our long-term care and the social resiliency that we have to build within our communities starts from disaster to the future.” —Kasey Earnest

20:11 “If the parents are in crisis, it puts kids in crisis. They get neglected. They get overlooked.” —Alfy Basurto

24:14 “We’re innately born with an ability and a desire to play.” —Alfy Basurto

29:17 “Talk to kids about a lot of this stuff ahead of time… It takes away some of the scariness of a disaster if you’ve kind of gone through it ahead of time.” —Henry Meier

30:11 “If you have a strong social, emotional IQ, you have more tools to help you navigate future traumas; to deal with your past.” —Kasey Earnest

31:41 “Don’t shield your children from life. Life is the best teacher. This is when you get to guide them through life with your advice and your experience.” —Alfy Basurto

34:08 “The biggest component of it, is making sure that everyone’s talking as much as possible, that there is collaboration and you’re working together in order to make sure that kids have the support that they need.” —Henry Meier

35:41 “If I don’t feel emotionally safe, physical safety means nothing.—Kasey Earnest

36:11 “When we imagine trying to help kids in our community, become that age again.” —Alfy Basurto

 

Meet the Moderator:

Jen Goodlin, Executive Director, Rebuild Paradise Foundation

Jen Goodlin is the Executive Director of Rebuild Paradise Foundation. She and two other mothers founded Rebuild Paradise after the devastating Camp Fire in 2018 that destroyed the town of Paradise. Under Goodlin’s leadership, Rebuild Paradise has focused on supporting the community’s recovery, with a particular emphasis on involving children and youth. Jen spearheaded an innovative project to capture the handprints of over 2,500 local students, which were used to create a large-scale mural representing the growth and resilience of the Paradise community. Her commitment to engaging young people in the recovery process has made Rebuild Paradise a model for other disaster-affected communities.

Connect with Rebuild Paradise: 

 

Meet the Panel: 

Kasey Earnest, CEO, Boys & Girls Club of Malibu

Kasey Ernest is the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club in Malibu, California. Through her leadership vision, she has led the Boys and Girls Club in Malibu from a modest beginning of a staff of three and membership of 30 young people in a single trailer to an expansive community for youth, with four locations, 30 staff, 300 volunteers, and has grown the membership from 800 to 1600 young people. The Malibu Boys and Girls Club Wellness Center provides licensed mental health and counseling services to all Malibu public school children and their families. 

Kasey came to the aid of the community during and after the 2018 Woolsey fire, she created and set up the Malibu Emergency Relief Fund in less than a week to provide disaster relief and emergency aid, and then raised $2 million that went directly to fire survivors. Kasey and our team host the annual Malibu Chili Cook, where for four days the club welcomes 25,000 guests to Malibu for a carnival, chili competition, food, and artesian festival. One hundred percent of the proceeds raised from the cook-off support the programs and services provided by the club.

Connect with Malibu Boys and Girls Club

 

Henry Meier, Director of External Affairs, Project:Camp

Henry Meier is the Director of Xternal Affairs for Project:Camp. He was the Editor-In-Chief of the Los Angeles Business Journal and a journalist from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Daily Journal. AtProject:Camp, Henry helps champion the stories of children and families to ensure that their needs are met during disasters. He focuses both on preparedness and response fronts, where he works with emergency managers and children impacted by disasters.

Connect with Project:Camp

 

Alfy Basurto, Executive Director and Founder, Rebuild Maui  

Alfy Basurto is the executive director of Rebuild Maui, a Lahaina-based nonprofit dedicated to creating community resilience programs, adolescent mental health initiatives, and midterm emergency housing solutions. Alfie his wife and their five children, are survivors of the recent Maui fires, having lost their home in three businesses, He previously served as Secretary on the executive board of the Maui long-term recovery group. Currently, Alfie and his team are constructing two emergency houses in Lahaina for Maui fire survivors. His extensive work on trauma in childhood traumas drives his commitment to teen events and community programs.

Connect with Rebuild Maui: 

 

Transcription:

Jen Goodlin: Hi, I’m Jen Goodlin, Executive Director of Rebuild Paradise Foundation in Paradise, California. Is there anyone in this room that has not heard of the Camp fire? All right. Then we’ll start at a really good place here. I’m really excited because we’re gonna be talking about kids. So at one point, we were all one. We have them, or we have grandchildren. So people outside there, you should come and listen because I think we all have something really important to say. Can you hear me out there? Wave if you’re outside and you can hear me. I may or may not have a prize for you if you come inside. Still, no movement. Okay, so Paradise, California. We just had our five year anniversary for our Camp fire, and we got this question of all questions, which you probably are all asking, How far have you come? Everybody wants to know this. Everyone wants some answer that I actually don’t know what they want to hear, because most of it is numbers. And when you hear numbers over and over, it totally takes away the humanity of our recovery. 

So at Rebuild Paradise, we are three mothers, and we have children, and so we really stepped back and thought, how far have we come? What does this actually look like? So we came up with this idea that the best way to show how far we’ve come five years post-fire is the growth in our young families and schools. So we have exploded. We needed a new school yesterday, which is a testament to our recovery. It’s greater than the 3,000 homes that were rebuilt. So we decided, how do we take a picture of this moment in five years? And we decided to capture all the handprints of the kids living on the ridge. Have any of you come up with a really good idea, and then you realize that you’re the one that has to actually follow through with it? So I came up with an idea. Our team did, and we actually had no idea what we were doing. I am not an artist. I actually don’t know much about construction. I knew nothing. But we all had this really big dream as mothers, and we wanted to show the world how far we’ve come. So we worked really hard, and we gathered 2,500 handprints from Ridge Students with over 13 schools in our small little community, and we are creating a sunset themed mural to display this. On your table, we have a small brochure. You can look at it, and it kind of captures what we have done. So this is an extremely intentional project in every way. I don’t know about you, but most of us won’t live to see our communities fully recover, and we are doing it for our children. They are our futures. And sometimes, we lack the opportunity to involve them in our recovery. 

So with our project, this is the kids. They have their handprint on the wall with their initials and age, and it suddenly became this very beautiful community wide project that I had to stop asking for funding. I told people to stop giving me money that I needed elsewhere, because everyone wants to fund kids. We’re really excited. We had to start by getting all the handprints taken, like loads and loads of airborne. The three of us in our little foundation multiplied somehow, like Jen said, into 12 people. And then when you get other mothers involved, somehow it’s hundreds of people. So we took all these handprints. We fired them in kilns in our local college. I don’t know if you know, but when you fire ceramic through a kiln, it becomes stronger. So this is like a very big reflection of our community. We have gone through fire. It has made us stronger, just like these tiles of these children’s handprints. We didn’t want to stop there. We didn’t want it to be random. We had an artist design the tiles to make them into a sunset theme. So each, we have six murals with 2,500 handprints, with 47 rows each. 

I’ve never done so much math in my life. I’ve never fallen asleep with so many numbers running through my head, praying that none of the tiles would break or get messed up in any of this process because we wanted to capture each child. So it was a very complicated process. Once we had the tiles fired, we worked with a local contractor to construct a wall along our bike trail. And on that bike trail, there are three cinder block walls being constructed right now. We have a tile list that will then place all of the handprints that will display world’s largest tile paint by number mural ever. I just want to encourage you in the process of when we’re dealing with our kids. Don’t forget, they are our actual WHY. You know they are our future when we’re building a more fire resilient home. When we’re doing all these things, what is our true WHY? So with that, I’m going to lead into these wonderful other humans that are also doing really creative things. And on a side note, I don’t think it’s mentioned here. But Lahaina did a really, really cool kids art project. I saw a picture of it from Paul, the Fire Chief. You should see it, because it’s really incredible. 

So first, we have Henry Meier. He’s the Director of External Affairs Project Camp. He was the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Business Journal, and a journalist from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Daily Journal. At Project Camp, he helps champion the stories of children and families to ensure that their needs are met during disasters. He focuses both on preparedness and response fronts, where he works with emergency managers and children impacted by disaster.

Henry Meier: Thank you. Thank you. Jen, I’m Henry. I work with Project Camp. We pop-up trauma informed day camps for children who’ve been impacted by disasters all across the United States. I want to start with a question for anybody who has worked in an EOC. Fair number of people. Who is here working in an EOC, has there been a dedicated child car seat in that EOC? This is a very typical response. The disaster response ecosystem was not designed with child care in mind. It does a lot of incredibly important things, but it doesn’t see or meet the needs of children. I think that there needs to be a  wholesale reimagination of that ecosystem to take those needs into consideration. I think everyone here today has seen that, and has worked to meet those needs of children. I think that’s something that we need as a community, as a group of professionals to start thinking more about, and taking steps to implement actual solutions within our own communities. And that’s a long and hard process, and it requires something that I think people don’t like to talk about very much, which is money without funding. None of this stuff happens, and you can’t just say that we should do it. You have to say that we should do it, and here’s how to fund it. So you know that that requires top down policy level stuff, that requires grassroots fundraising, requires all the things that are not fun to do. Grant writing. 

And I think we, as a community, start talking about that, that type of work, the fun stuff of that is hugely important. I get to go out and play four square with kids sometimes. That’s my favorite part of the job. Getting out and being able to do finger painting, play dodgeball, whatever it is that’s amazing and great. What do the kids need in these scenarios? They need a sense of safety. They need a sense of routine. They need a sense of normalcy. They need to be able to process what they’ve been through in real time. But WE as emergency management professionals, WE in the emergency management space need to do all the stuff that can make that happen. So I encourage you. I would love to talk to each and every one of you here about that, and how to do that. It’s a lot of what my work is about. So come up, shake my hand. I have a ton of business cards. I will give them out to all of you, and I’d like to talk about that more. I’ll pass it back to Jen.

Jen Goodlin: I do have one question. I saw something on your website that really caught my eye, and it talked about how kids don’t remember going through, maybe in their fire escape. But they will remember it like a camp. Is that kind of one of your missions? 

Henry Meier: There’s a quote from a parent. I think that’s from the Dixie fire. It’s not an isolated response that we’ve gotten from parents. We try to talk to parents about how this impacted their kids lives, their lives. But the idea of having something for children in the wake of disasters is to mitigate the trauma of them. And so this parent said, my kid’s not going to remember being evacuated from our home for two weeks. They’re going to remember the friends that they made at camp. The idea is to have things in place that make their experience appreciably better. I think that’s great when we get that feedback.

Jen Goodlin: Awesome. Next, we have Kasey. Kasey Earnest is the CEO of the Boys & Girls Club in Malibu, California. Through her leadership vision, she has led the Boys & Girls Club in Malibu from a modest beginning of a staff of three, and membership of 30 young people in a single trailer to an expansive community for youth with four locations. 30 staff, 300 volunteers, and has grown the membership from 800 to 1,600 young people. The Malibu Boys & Girls Club Wellness Center provides licensed mental health and counseling services to all Malibu public school children and their families. Kasey came to the aid of the community during and after the 2018 Woolsey fire. She created and set up the Malibu Emergency Relief Fund in less than a week to provide disaster relief and emergency aid, and then raised $2 million that went directly to fire survivors. Kasey and our team host the annual Malibu Chili Cook. For four days, the club welcomes 25,000 guests to Malibu for a carnival chili competition, food and artisan festival. 100% of the proceeds raised from the cook off support the programs and services provided by the club. Here’s Kasey.

Kasey Earnest: I didn’t actually realize that it was in there. Yeah, it actually just ended. And these are the crazy things that we have to do as community based organizations to literally fund accessible resources for kids and communities. It’s crazy, right? So I’m hearing all about accessibility of funding, federal and state. We don’t want to be reactive. We want to be proactive in our communities. We all do. And for us, the 2018 Woolsey fire was a combination of preparedness met with disaster equaled a certain higher percentage of mitigation. I would probably, for us, focus mostly on mental health and social emotional learning resiliency. We do have a Wellness Center. We were really fortunate that myself and my team had started that kind of groundwork in 2015 before what we now all call the mental health crisis. Newsflash, it was happening before covid. It just got worse. So for those of us that work in the kids’ space, trauma is not a new term. It’s an ever evolving, ever changing term. Kids are always suffering, and they always need support and access to services. Our motto is Access to Services With NO Barriers. And what does that mean? It’s what we do in a disaster response scenario as well. Meaning our community knows what’s available to them. They know how to access it, and they’re not afraid to ask for help. So disaster and mental health trauma are kind of in the same pocket. There’s a lot of stigma around those who are impacted in low socio-economic statuses because of disaster and the inability to recover. 

So one really interesting component that we experienced in the wake of Woolsey was we triaged into an Emergency Relief Center. We did all of the things that you’ve all done. Like Maui’s been doing, we provided the food, the clothing and grants. Reva was my city manager at the time. Part of my preparedness is having an amazing relationship with the local government that has extension of relationships within the county and the state. And literally in one phone call receiving contacts that I needed access to make things happen. That was tremendous. Definitely could not do it on my own. It took a network of really engaged and caring people within the community. But as an offset of the Woolsey fire, because we do have our mental health services, and we’re able to transition those into crisis counseling for the community at large. So typically, we’re serving kids now. We’re serving multi generational families. We’re serving seniors who have been living on properties that have been bestowed to them over 50, 60, 70, 80, years that don’t have home insurance. I don’t know what your perception of Malibu is. The majority of people who lost their homes were low income in our community, or they didn’t have homes. They were living in very creative living establishments. They were ranchers, worked on somebody’s property, and their family got to live there, and then they were immediately displaced. These are the people that are really, really hard to reach and access, and probably already have compounding trauma. And because we’re a Boys & Girls Club, they’re in our network. Their kids are in our clubhouses. They’re receiving services. 

And therefore, we were able to access and find them to the point that during the disaster, the Red Cross came up to me and said, you have so many people in your line, and we don’t have very many in ours. What are you doing? I’m like, well, we know their names, so they’re going to come to our line first. So the point is partnering with your local CBOs in advance of a disaster, so that those resources can be streamlined. But the last thing I want to share right now is in an offset of Woolsey. We applied for a grant through the federal government, the only federal grant I’ve ever received. It was a ton of work. I don’t know if I could do it again, but it was great. And it was titled for community based organizations providing clinical mental health services in a school setting post disaster. I’m like, that’s me. They wrote a grant for me. Maybe they can get around the fact that I’m from Malibu. And they did. I got to be in this phenomenal cohort with the Sonoma County Department of Education, the Butte County Department of Education. We had representatives from all of the hurricanes and the floods that had happened in Mississippi and Nebraska, and all of these areas at this time. Essentially, the outcome that we got to learn, because we were all doing the same scope of work. It was the first time the federal government had ever invested in long term care recovery versus the acute format that we all are accustomed to. How do we support communities? 

Well, it’s by supporting our kids. And our kids are very apt to move forward, but their family systems can’t. So while our kids can heal from the trauma, they get dragged back into it because their parents can’t deal with their own mental health until the physical components of what they’ve gone through have been stabilized. So it could be 5, 6, 7 years before a family system can actually fully start to heal. And I think we all know that. But going through that all together with all these different disasters, it was good to hear that we all had the same reflection, I guess, because it helped focus the work. Just being prepared that we know that our long term care and the social resiliency that we have to build within our communities starts from disaster to the future. So that’s a lot. I have a lot to say, so I’m going to pass.

Jen Goodlin: Thank you so much, Kasey. Next we have Alfy. Someone told me last night that you’re one of the heroes in Maui. One thing that I want to say is from one Paradise to another. Rebuild Paradise was asked many times what we were going to do to help Lahaina, and I think we knew our best response was to wait. We’re just a very different small foundation. I think one thing we do in the background that people don’t see that doesn’t cost us anything is to offer hope. And last year, we created this image of our community in Paradise connecting a heart to yours. It said, from one Paradise to another. And our high school students made this shirt and wore red and white on their first home football game to honor your community. And I think this is like another great example of how you involve kids. It is healing and important for our kids who’ve gone through trauma to be connected and help other kids. And then it was mimicked back also by the Lahaina High School. It just didn’t cost anything. Alfy Basurto is the Executive Director of Rebuild Maui in Lahaina based non profit dedicated to creating community resilience programs, adolescent mental health initiatives and midterm emergency housing solutions. Alfy, his wife and their five children are survivors of the recent Maui fires. Having lost their home in three businesses, he previously served as Secretary on the executive board of the Maui long term recovery group. Currently, Alfy and his team are constructing two emergency houses in Lahaina for Maui fire survivors. His extensive work on trauma in childhood traumas drives his commitment to teens events and community programs. Welcome, Alfy.

Alfy Basurto: Well, hello, everyone. Aloha. My name is Alfy Basurto. I am so grateful to be here. I woke up at 1:47 this morning, and I could not go back to sleep. I realized what it was. I have an opportunity to share what we’re doing on Maui. I absolutely hate when people cry when they talk. It’s so annoying. I was invited to come speak at an event we hosted for teen mental health. Now, as you heard, we were involved in the fires. We had, I guess, the blessing of living in the hotel shelters. I’m going to say a quick thing about the hotel shelters, their blessing, and it’s a curse. It’s like living in a bad bar where all the same characters show up talking about the same things, complaining about the same things without any solutions. And what’s awful about that is they have every right. They just lost everything, and so that’s what’s terrible. Usually, the guys at the bar have no right to talk about it. But these guys, of course, they did. And so it was very toxic. It was a very, very difficult place to heal. And so we all know that if the parents are in crisis, I’m sure there’s some of you here today who are fighting with your significant other. And what that does is it puts kids in crisis. They get neglected, get overlooked. That’s what was happening on Maui. Obviously, in any disaster, that is what’s going to happen when we are allowed to return back to Lahainaluna. 

So three of my kids were attending Lahainaluna High School during the time of the fire. One of my sons is a wrestler, so we got to go back. And finally rustle up. I was at a tournament. I’m sitting with some mothers, and I lean over to one and say, hey, how’s the family? It’s okay. Everybody’s good, which is the typical answer. And then it was, do you think that they’re getting enough mental health help? Instantly, the mother begins to weep. She says, nope. He really needs to talk to someone. He needs to talk to someone. So what we saw was, I said this yesterday, we have a ton of kids who need mental health resources. We got a ton of therapists who would love to service those kids. They’re just not coming together, and we haven’t thought of any ways to effectively get them together where kids are actually happy to be there. 

So I know nothing about mental health, I’m a parent, and I have teenagers. I’m like, listen, we’re going to create this huge dance, the biggest dance Maui’s ever seen. We’re going to do it at the Ritz Carlton. It’s going to be a really exciting event. We’re going to have greeters in front. Because it’s very intimidating if you’ve never been to the Ritz Carlton, by the way. Many of our kids will never attend an event at the Ritz Carlton. They’ll work there, they’ll valet there, but they’ll never attend. Then we’ll be invited to an event there, it’s going to be very intimidating to pull up. We have gregarious greeters there. Oh, my gosh, that outfit is amazing. Oh, my gosh, you guys look great. Just loving those kids. As soon as they arrive, they feel welcome. They’re ushered to this red carpet entrance. We wanted to make this really special for them. Keep in mind, this is a mental health event. What we did to promote this event is we tried to partner with schools. I’m going to go back and talk about the event. But we try to partner with the schools. Very difficult. Very, very difficult to partner with the school, by the way. So instead, we said, that’s not going to work. We went to every school, every child who had the biggest social media following at the various schools all across Maui. 

I reached out to them and said, hey, we would love to hire you as an influencer. Just repost, post and promote this event. And by the way, it’s a mental health event, but it’s not going to look like one. It’s going to be a huge dance. I promise, it’s going to be cool. Yeah, sure. I’ll do it. How much is it? Whatever. We paid like 50 bucks. If they had a huge following, it was 100 bucks. Okay, I’m just dropping ideas. Because if you don’t have something to address the teen mental health in your community, borrow this. Use it. I would love to help you. So now, we are advertising this via influencers. Because what does every big brand do right now? They leverage influencers. That’s all we did. We promote this big dance. We didn’t have the money for it, by the way. Zero money. It got canceled the week before the event. Ritz Carlton’s like, hey, man, we haven’t gotten that check. I’m like, well, I don’t have money for this. Canceled the event. My wife became instantly sick. We finally found the money. It was back on the calendar. Everything was fine. But what I share is I’ll never plan this again where I didn’t have money stashed away for this, or we got grants. But I was just so optimistic. I knew how important this was. We just wanted to do it. 

Here’s the event, the red carpet. They’re met with professional photographers. These wonderful backdrops. They’re taking photos, super special once they get in. There’s a bunch of games for these kids to play. The games are really important. We initially brought the games in for kids to, instead of using alcohol and drugs, to become playful. All of us here, we’re like, hey, I need to go dance. Give me a shot. Someone else was saying, give me all the tequila, then I’ll become playful. Listen, we don’t need that. We’re innately born with an ability and a desire to play. Any two mammals you drop on the ground, they’ll just start playing, right? So we put all these games, we just wanted kids to become playful and not use drugs and alcohol. But what that did, it lowered all of their barriers, their walls. So now, these kids are able to play and interact. It was pretty freaking cool. When we were planning this event, everyone said, what about the fighting? What if these kids fight? You’re getting kids from all over the Island. By the way, there were kids from every school all over the Island. Not just Lahaina. There were over 600 kids in attendance. These are teenagers willing to be at a mental health event. Pretty freaking cool. So to get in, there’s a bunch of games. 

One thing we realized very quickly is many of our kids have never been to a luau. Many of us have. Many of our kids will NEVER attend a luau. We threw a luau for these kids. Super special. Okay, the mental health part. All of our tables had signs and ways to connect with mental health. Anonymous phone numbers. There were 200 contacts made by the mental health professionals that were stationed at the back of the event. Okay, they were working at the photo booth. Photo Booth is a really popular activity, by the way. They had 12 clinical interactions in that event, kids who needed help. Can we go to the video?

Alfy Basurto (video audio): Aloha, everyone. We are here at the Inaugural Flow Fest Event. Never has there been a party this big for all the high school kids on Maui to just come, be celebrated, and be loved, and be chairs in a safe, fun, healthy environment with all of the support that this island has to give. So thank you, everyone. If you’re a high school kid, this is the place you need to come and party. We would love to see you here. So if you weren’t here for this, come out. Come in with me, guys. I want to show you what this place is about. 

Alfy Basurto: Anyways, I wanted to share a number of quotes from the parents, quotes from the therapist, quotes from the participants. They’re just amazing. There’s one from a parent. I’m going to share it. My parents saw me the very next day. She said, Alfy, thanks so much for doing that event. Absolutely awesome. My son did not want to go. He said it was going to be another boring school dance, and I didn’t want to attend it. I was like, we got that a lot. It was just going to be another stupid dance. It’s a senior year, and I wanted him to participate in one last thing before he graduated. And so she encouraged him to go, and he said, nope. Not going. And then she said, okay, listen, you can stay home with me and do laundry. Because now, they don’t have their house so they have to take the laundry to the laundromat. You can do chores, or you can go to the Dance Flow Fest. He goes, fine, I’ll go. He ended up going. She said he came back with friends he hadn’t seen in years that moved to the other side of the island. He asked if he could sleep over. He said, I heard them talking about Flow Fest and laughing all night the next morning. When they woke up for breakfast, that’s all they were talking about. About how much fun they had at the event. And she said, thanks, my son needed this. Thank you for inviting me here. Thank you, Jennifer and their crew for putting this together. And thank you for letting me be here. guys.

Jen Goodlin: I feel like that. Set up an expectation for your welcome party for next year. I don’t know if we all have that little bit of kid in us for a dance. We’re out of time. I have a couple questions I’m going to ask. The first one is, what are some lessons learned on how to help children be prepared for disasters? I’ll answer first because my situation is very different. I did not live in Paradise during the Camp fire. I lived in Colorado. Paradise was my hometown, though it took a fire to bring me home. I intentionally moved my children into a place that was a disaster, because I feel like one of the best ways to prepare them for life is to live through and help others. So with that, what are your thoughts on how to prepare children for disasters?

Henry Meier: I would say that you can talk to kids about a lot of this stuff ahead of time. I think there’s a lot of great resources out there to talk to kids about disasters. Cal OES in California. I know Cal OES and the California Department of Education all have curriculum materials that you can use to talk to kids about disasters. And it can also be a good thing for families to do all together, create a sort of emergency plan to figure out your emergency exit route, and make a go-bag with kids. You can do all this type of stuff, and it takes away some of the scariness of a disaster if you’ve kind of gone through ahead of time.

Kasey Earnest: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Even with my own child. Making sure that they are action oriented. So if they know what they’re supposed to do, then they do it. It’s the same model that we have in our schools. For us, specifically in Malibu, we’ve taken it a little bit deeper. If you have a strong social, emotional IQ, you have more tools to help you navigate future traumas to deal with your past. And if you haven’t had trauma, to deal with your future traumas. So unlike a lot of the entities that have a very difficult time partnering with their school districts. I’m very intertwined with my school district, and it’s been probably the most easy partnership. But we’ve done the best that we can. And one thing that I’m really proud of, if you can get to the point where you’re working in partnership together, my clinical team actually goes into the classroom every week. K through 12, works with the teachers and provides age level appropriate psycho education. We like to say that physical education is mandated by the state. While there is going to be a certain requirement demanded by the state for mental health education starting in 2025, we want to be ahead of that. We want the same expectation for mental health, social, emotional IQ in the classroom. So hopefully, when that next disaster or trauma related event comes around. Our kids know how to support each other emotionally, and they also know how to go internally into themselves to process what’s occurring, ask for help and be a support system for others. So that’s the preparation piece for us.

Alfy Basurto: I think the best advice I can lend is, don’t shield your children from life. Life is the best teacher. For us and my family, we have been doing super well as an entrepreneur, and then we’re homeless. Literally homeless. So when our kids lost our house, they were like, we’ve been here. That’s what they said. We checked in with them and they’re like, we’ve been here. We’ve lost our house before, right? And the best advice I can give from one parent and another, don’t shield your kids from life. This is when you get to guide them through life with your advice and your experience. So when they let them scuff their knees, I believe it will best prepare them for huge disasters. If you shielded them all their lives and then you throw a disaster at them that you no longer can shield them from, well then you’re going to have a big mess on your hands. 

Jen Goodlin: Well said, Alfy. Yep, our job as parents is to guide them through, not always protect them from every little thing. So the next question is, how can other parts of the recovery community support children during a disaster? So in our community, one thing that has arisen post-fire and in response to covid is an online Facebook group called Mothers of the Ridge. And actually, the Executive Director is my colleague, and she created this group in her own need to find connections. And now has over 2,800 members. And this group hosts all kinds of community wide events for families. It’s a support for women and children, and it has exploded. So that is one of the ways that our community, and they worked hand in hand with our handprint mural.

Henry Meier: I’m making this up, but maybe more than any other sort of group of like demographic groups. Children are touched by so many agencies and organizations that have some part of child care or some youth facing component, and so it really does take, I think, a collaborative effort in order to make sure that every kid is getting the attention they need after a disaster in the recovery phase. It’s not just the Emergency Management Department, it’s not just the Department of Education, it’s not just behavioral health, it’s not just social services, it’s not just Boys & Girls Club, YMCA. All these organizations have to work collaboratively if you’re going to make sure that no kid falls through the cracks. So I think that’s the biggest component of it. Making sure that everyone’s talking as much as possible, that there is collaboration and you’re working together in order to make sure that kids have the support that they need.

Kasey Earnest: Yeah, agree. I was just reflecting during the Woolsey fire. And if anyone’s ever worked with Reva, one resounding comment or that statement that she always makes, it’s like, you’ll call or be like, hi, how are you? And she’s like, great. How can I help? How can I help? It’s like, well, since you asked, but that really is an important question for anyone who is a service provider. Knowing that there are people like, how can I help? I want to ask the same question to other agencies. And sometimes, we just have to remind ourselves to let other people know that we’re available to help. Because when we’re in that stressful response moment, you’re like, I have to do this. I have to get it done. And then it’s like, oh, they can help. So it’s that collaborative spirit and making yourself available. I think also in reflection for us almost six years ago in November is our ability to formalize groups that are now needing more regularly to address these types of problems for kids. So one shift that I saw that we made as a community of adults caring for kids is when you talk about safety. It used to be just physical safety. What does physical safety mean for kids? I kept saying, well, what about emotional and mental like, what about the other side? If I don’t feel emotionally safe, physical safety means nothing, right? So making that shift is like a community of adults who we’ve all now been. All of us here have been through some type of collective trauma, because I know everybody here went through covid. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t go through a disaster. So coming to the table with solutions as adults, how can we support one another? The collaboration piece is huge.

Alfy Basurto: I agree with both of those. I think, spot on. And I will add that when we imagine trying to help kids in our community, it’s like becoming that age again. And for example, for us in this event, I tried to become that teenager again. And you remember, what did you want as a teenager? You wanted your own identity. You wanted your own space. You wanted your own friends, your own music, your own clothes. You wanted your own stuff, right? Become who you’re trying to help, not dispense something that you are supposed to dispense without consideration of who is receiving. This product, this thing, become them and do that thing that you know that they absolutely want that’s absolutely attractive to them, and then you will get a buy in.

Jen Goodlin: I thank you guys so much for coming in. I realized that everybody came inside.

How to disaster logo

Recent episodes: