Day 1: PANEL: Enduring the Crisis: Ensuring Personal Sustainability for Leaders in Disaster Management
“Allow yourself the best you can to just release into all things in due time.” —Jacqui Jorgeson
“It’s important as leaders that we show those who we are leading that we also need breaks. We are not gods.” —Matt Henderson
“Whatever people needed, everybody stepped up to make sure that needs were met to the best of our capability under horrific and insane conditions. And we can do it. There’s no reason not to. It’s not rocket science. It’s just Aloha.” —Noelani Ahia
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Disaster recovery is a grueling work that can quickly lead to burnout for even the most dedicated leaders. Taking regular breaks is crucial to avoid mental and physical exhaustion, yet many struggle to prioritize self-care amidst the pressing needs of their communities. Therefore, maintaining resilience requires intentional strategies to recharge and prevent compassion fatigue.
In this discussion, Jollie sits with three bold disaster recovery leaders, Jacqui Jorgeson, Matt Henderson, and Noelani Ahia. Dive in as they share powerful stories, practical tips, and holistic approaches to help disaster leaders avoid burnout and foster post-traumatic growth within their teams and within themselves and their families.
Highlights:
- 00:29 Meet the Panel: Matt, Jacqui, and Noelani
- 05:50 Origin Story: Volunteer Fire Foundation
- 09:21 Change Your Socks
- 12:11 How Trauma Gets Stored In Our Bodies
- 20:37 All In Due Time
- 23:50 Take a Break
- 26:24 It’s Just Aloha
Tweets:
Disaster recovery is tough, but leaders can’t pour from an empty cup. In this powerful podcast, disaster response leaders Jacqui Jorgeson, Matt Henderson, and Noelani Ahia share hard-won lessons on self-care and community resilience. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #DisasterRecovery #DisasterResponse #CommunityResilience #SelfCare #MentalHealth #TraumaInformed #VeteranSupport #VolunteerFirefighters #SustainableLeadership
Quotes:
04:30 “When our brains are full and energy and time is scarce, we need to have our learning and our tools and resources easily accessible under pressure.” —Jolie Wills
06:56 “I have to find the existing nonprofit that understands all of the varied needs of the different fire volunteer fire departments, and I learned that that did not exist in Sonoma County.” —Jacqui Jorgeson
10:46 “As volunteers, we don’t ever want to go home until we’ve taken care of every person and until every mess is cleaned up. But as a leader, you need to take that time off so that you’re ready to serve that community as best possible, knowing that everything else that you’re normally dealing with in life is all taken care of.” —Matt Henderson
13:13 “Trauma is not a mental health disorder. Our responses to trauma are natural and normal. But if we don’t release and discharge those emotions from our body, they turn into disease later on, and this is part of what we’re trying to protect against.” —Noelani Ahia
18:07 “Sometimes, we just have to set the mind down for a minute because it’s so full. And let your truth be your guide.” —Noelani Ahia
23:41 “Allow yourself the best you can to just release into all things in due time.” —Jacqui Jorgeson
25:39 “It’s important as leaders that we show those who we are leading that we also need breaks. We are not gods.” —Matt Henderson
29:29 “Whatever people needed, everybody stepped up to make sure that needs were met to the best of our capability under horrific and insane conditions. And we can do it. There’s no reason not to. It’s not rocket science. It’s just Aloha.” —Noelani Ahia
30:10 “When it comes to disaster, it is the locals on the ground. They are the glue in the communities. They are the people who drive recovery right. And when we lose them because we burn them out, we lose something really precious.” —Jolie Wills
Meet the Moderator:
Meet Jolie Wills, CEO of Hummingly
Jolie has a Masters of Science in Cognitive Psychology and is a leading psychosocial expert in disaster and disruption. Jolie has studied how the mind works under prolonged pressure, how we make decisions and how our reactions and behaviors are impacted by stress. Jolie is a survivor of the Christchurch earthquakes and has lived disaster recovery with her family first-hand. She led the psychosocial recovery program for New Zealand Red Cross in response to the earthquakes and has supported those working in disasters around the world. Jolie is a Winston Churchill fellowship recipient, a Leadership New Zealand alumna, an Edmund Hillary Fellow, and is an advising member to the global Counter Terrorism Prevention Network. She is primary author of New Zealand’s Psychological First Aid Guide and is a co-author of Leading in Disaster Recovery: A Companion through the Chaos.
- Website: https://hummingly.co/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hummingly/
Meet the Panel
Meet Jacqui Jorgeson, Founder and Executive Director, Volunteer Fire Foundation
Jacqui Jorgeson is a writer and fourth-generation Californian. A trip to Greece at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis propelled her into grassroots nonprofit work. In the spring of 2016, Jacqui became the first Associate Director of Schoolbox Project, which delivers trauma-informed care to the littlest victims of disasters around the world. Now a mother, Jacqui feels deeply called to serve her community at home. She lives in Santa Rosa with her husband Kevin and their young son Edsel.
Website: https://www.volunteerfire.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/volfireorg/
X: https://twitter.com/volfireorg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/volunteerfirefoundation/
Meet Matt Henderson, NorCal Communications Lead, Team Rubicon
Matt Henderson is a United States Navy veteran, wildlife photographer, and Team Rubicon leader. He has been a dedicated volunteer with Team Rubicon, a veteran-led disaster response organization, serving as the NorCal communications lead and often stepping up as incident commander on operations. Matt has been instrumental in organizing and executing several disaster response projects, including a significant operation in Grizzly Flats that saw 70 volunteers working daily for a month to support a community devastated by wildfires. In addition to his work with Team Rubicon, Matt has 17 years of experience covering wildfires as a photojournalist and has consistently been at the forefront of relief efforts, offering his time, skills, and compassion to support affected communities.
Connect with Team Rubicon: https://teamrubiconusa.org/
Meet Noelani Ahia, Founder, Maui Medic Healers Hui
Noelani Ahia is a healer/activist who works to protect what we love: ‘āina, kai, wai, iwi and each other. Trained in Traditional East Asian Medicine, she has been delivering acupuncture and herbal medicine to the Maui community for 15 years. In 2017 she co-founded the Mauna Medic Healers Hui with Dr. Kalama and in 2019, spent 8 months on Mauna Kea tending to our lāhui.
Website: https://mauimedichealershui.org/
Transcription:
Jolie Wills: I want to introduce the three panelists, and I want to just give you a quick introduction to the topic before I really dig in with them. So let’s start with Matthew Henderson. Welcome Matt. So Matthew Henderson, a United States Navy veteran, wildlife photographer and Team Rubicon Leader. One of Matt’s most remarkable contributions is his work with Team Rubicon, a veteran led disaster response organization. Matt has been a dedicated volunteer filling the role of NorCal communications lead, and often stepping up as incident commander on operations. On operations, he has been instrumental in organizing and executing several disaster response projects, including a significant operation in grizzly flats. This project saw 70 volunteers working daily for a month supporting a community devastated by wildfires. Matt’s dedication to helping people impacted by wildfires extends beyond his work with Team Rubicon. In addition to his 17 years covering wildfires as a photojournalist, he has consistently been at the forefront of relief efforts offering his time, skills and compassion to support affected communities. So welcome Matt. Who we got next?
Jacqui. So Jacqui Jorgesen is the Founder, next Executive Director of the Volunteer Fire Foundation, a FEMA funded Sonoma County nonprofit devoted to recruiting volunteer firefighters to retain the ones we have, and supporting their health and wellbeing along the way. As a survivor of illness that stemmed from her exposure to toxic chemicals at Ground Zero in New York City following 9/11, Jacqui is particularly invested in helping firefighters reduce their chemical burdens and cancer risk through her leadership. The Volunteer Fire Foundation is a co-sponsor and administrator of the groundbreaking firefighter detoxification pilot program, which has produced extremely promising data in its first two rounds. A fourth generation Californian, Jacqui lives in Santa Rosa with her husband and five year old son, who is, of course, thoroughly obsessed with firefighters. Welcome.
And Noelani. Noelani Ahia is a healer and activist who works to protect what we love. Aina, kai, wai, iwi and each other. Trained in traditional East Asian medicine, she’s been delivering acupuncture and herbal medicine to the Maui community for 15 years. In 2017, she co founded the Maui Medic Healers Hui with Doctor Kalama. And in 2019, spent eight months on Mauna Kea tending to our lahui. Genealogically tied to Lahaina Maui, she founded the Maui Medic Healers Hui after the devastating 2023 fires. Building communities of care is central to how she walks in the world, always guided by ancestors and the whispers of an ancient murmur. I’m thrilled. I can’t wait to turn it over. I just want to give just a little bit of the background to the session.
We’ve got some support resources over on the side table. We talked before about the four areas that we are extremely passionate about. One of them is sustaining the supporters. So in my disaster, we tried everything we could to sustain and prevent burnout of our teens, and the reality was we were still burning people out. So that led to some research looking at other communities, others working in disaster, and really highlighting some of the risks. It’s really sobering. The impacts are very, very real to those leaders working in this, to their teams, their organizations, and especially to the communities that we support. But in terms of the hopeful piece, there’s a lot that we have learned that we can do better and differently. So all of that is packaged up for you. There’s a resource that you can take away on the side table. So I just wanted to give you that little background. And then lastly, just how we’re going to go about the session a little bit differently.
So again, as a cognitive scientist, I think about the fact that when our brains are full and we have energy and time, we need to have our learning, our tools and resources easily accessible under pressure. And so I’ve asked the panelists to really think on these three things, or to come up with three of these. One of each a story around sustaining themselves as leaders, and disaster recovery, a mental image. Something practical tip that they can take away, because these are the things I know that will stick and will be easily accessible, especially when you’ve got this amazing conference full of a wealth of information and great speakers. So what we’re going to do is I’m going to hand to each one at a time, obviously to the panelists, and it’s the panelists’ pick. So they’re going to pick one of these stories, an image or a strategy, something practical. You might get elements of all three, and we probably won’t get time to hear all three from each person. So I’m going to encourage you to tap everyone on the shoulder. Some of these amazing panelists over the course of the next couple of days, and ask them what they didn’t get to share. All right, so let’s go with panelist picks. Let’s start here. Jacqui, you’re the closest. Story, image or strategy?
Jacqui Jorgeson: I’m a storyteller, so we’ll start there. The story that I wanted to share with you is just how the Volunteer Fire Foundation came to be. As many of you know, Sonoma County has been on fire more often than not in the last several years since 2017. The first round, it was kind of like, okay, what can we do to help the firefighters? I was just outside of New York, and indeed in New York through 9/11 and watched what happened with the firefighters there. I call it the heroification of them. The upwelling of really genuine gratitude, and then the quick forgetting. And so during our first major fire, I reached out to a firefighter friend. He said, if you’re serious about wanting to help them, when the smoke clears, remember the volunteer firefighters because they are doing everything the paid firefighters do, but they’re trying to swing it on a pancake breakfast a year. And so I started planting seeds and putting things in motion. I thought, hey, we could do a fundraiser. But like, who gets the giant novelty check on stage at the end of the benefit concert? It’s like, I just have to find the existing nonprofit that handles this, that understands all of the varied needs of the different fire volunteers in fire departments, and can calibrate their needs and the discrepancies in resources and funding. And to my shock and horror, I learned that that did not exist in Sonoma County. Indeed, it doesn’t exactly exist anywhere in the United States for an entire region of volunteer fire departments. And so it was kind of like, how many people have accidentally started nonprofits in the last? That’s how most of them begin. Oh shit moment, forgive my language. And here we are. I was like, okay, we’re gonna start with a fundraiser. And then covid slammed the door shut, and I went into fetal position for months until our third fire in three years began. And you would think like that, that was my moment. That was my most activating moment. And instead, I thought, oh, my God, life is no longer sustainable here. I have a baby, and I can’t raise him. He can’t even go outside, and here we are again. First time, lightning in a bottle. Second time, what are the chances? Third time, we gotta move.
I was sobbing every day, just grieving, mourning to leave this place that I love so much. Every day, I’m looking on the purple air out for the little pocket of the most breathable air to get my son outside. And I found it in a place in a park that I’d never been to, and I couldn’t figure out why the name was familiar. It was in a town. It was kind of yellowish green. And okay, let’s go for it. And I took him for a walk, and we got to the top of that first hill, and we were surrounded by burnt Manzanita. And looked around and remembered, and I knew instantly why the name of that park was familiar. It’s because it was Foothills Regional Park in Windsor, and it’s the place where, just one year prior, our volunteer firefighters swelled the ranks of our paid firefighters. And together, they held the line that otherwise would have been nothing to stop that fire from burning the entire town of Windsor down, and indeed burning its way all the way to the coast. And so it was that galvanizing moment of like, we stay, we fight.
Matthew Henderson: The last activity that we did was super interesting because I got to hear from a couple people that have been living on adrenaline for quite some time. How many people out here have ever heard the term, change your socks? Anybody? Okay, if you’ve been in the military, you’ve probably heard that term. And if you’ve ever watched a Vietnam movie like Forrest Gump, you probably heard it. Lieutenant Dan tells Hills Forest, there is one piece of grunt gear that can save your life, and that is socks. So in that scenario, they were talking about socks. If they get wet, they can cause disease. So for Team Rubicon, we’ve kind of adapted that to change your socks for us. Means that it is a meaningful, purposeful break from what you’re doing. I’m sure everybody in here knows that we will go, and go, and go, living on adrenaline for months at a time, and that starts to wear on you. Your mental faculties start going down. You haven’t seen your family in a while. So we actually have rules on how long we can stay in the field until we have to take a break, and it’s scheduled. And as a leader, it’s very important to make sure that you schedule those breaks for the people who are following you. In my case, for the volunteers. Because as volunteers, we don’t ever want to go home until we’ve taken care of every person, until every mess is cleaned up. We don’t want to leave that. But as a leader, you have to go and say, hey, listen. You’re going to be out in the field for 10 days, and then you are going to leave this place for two days. You’re not going to get called. You’re not going to think about it for two days because you need to go and take care of your family, take care of religious needs, your mental needs and just de stress. It’s incredibly important to make sure that you take that time.
It’s not just a regular, I’m going to go home at night and get some sleep, and then I’m going to be back up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning. I’m taking a couple days off to take care of all of the things that I’ve been pushing to the side. It’s just as important for you as it is to your family members. Who a lot of times, we’re off working. They’re sitting at home wondering where mom or dad is, and it can make a huge mental difference. That time is used so that you can then return to the field. And even as a leader, you need to take that time off. But you can return to the field, back at 100% so that you’re ready to serve that community as best possible knowing that everything else that you’re normally dealing with in life is all taken care of, and you’re coming forward and helping at 100%.
Noelani Ahia: Thank you so much. Aloha, I’m Noelani. I just wanted to start by acknowledging my ancestors that I bring with me from all sides of my genealogies, my mother and my father. I wanted to acknowledge the ancestors of this. You know that we’re on here because those ancestors are so much a part of how we resource ourselves, and how we can resource ourselves if we’re connected and turned into their voices. Thank you so much for having us here, and for inviting us to share with you folks. It’s really an important part of the healing process for us to be with other people. And I have to say, this always happens to me. I’ll be in go, go, go mode. And as soon as I travel and get somewhere else where I kind of breathe a little bit, I get all emotional. So if I’m emotional, that’s part of WHY because this is an opportunity for us to discharge. One of the strategies that I wanted to talk a little bit about is how trauma gets stored in our bodies. I’m trying to move away from the term mental health. Because trauma, first of all, is not a mental health disorder. Our responses to trauma are natural and normal, and we need to let our folks in our communities know that what they’re feeling is normal. Of course, there are mental health diagnoses that have to be addressed as well. But many of those things live in our bodies and in our physiologies.
In the teachings of Peter Levine, he talks about how wild animals, when there’s a prey and another animal is attacking it, but it survives afterwards, it shakes itself off. It literally discharges those stress hormones. It literally moves those hormones out of their body, and then they carry on, and they’re fine. But humans in modern day, I don’t think our indigenous ancestors did this so much. I think they had practices and protocols to do this work. But in the modern world, we’re told to push it down. In Hawaii, they would say, just keep your mouth shut. Don’t share. Don’t be a sissy. Don’t be a girl. Don’t cry. But all of those things are ways that are contributing to our increased trauma. And if we don’t release and discharge those emotions from our body, they turn into disease later on, and this is part of what we’re trying to protect against. So I’m gonna have everybody to just stand up for a minute and just shake it off. You’ve been sitting for a long time. I don’t know about you, but my body is stiff, especially from flying. Just shake it off a little bit. Just stretch out, yawn if you have to. Yawning is a way of discharging too. So is laughing, so is getting mad. Getting mad is normal. It’s okay, as long as you don’t hurt people, whatever you’re feeling. That’s part of the message.
So just stay standing for a minute. Just rock if you need to. Part of the thing that we have to do when we’re in our healing mode is sometimes change our perspective. And that sometimes just means looking around, looking up at the ceiling, connecting into the earth. We do a lot of breath work in our clinic. So we have a medic healer who has a clinic that is open seven days a week. Folks are trying to talk me into bringing it down to five days a week so I can have more rest. We’re still negotiating that. But part of the model is that not only are we treating fire survivors, but we’re treating each other. So I get acupuncture every single week. Let me tell you, for the 16 years that I practiced as an acupuncturist, I rarely got. But my body is telling me now that you better go, get on that table or in that chair and regulate yourself, or you’re not going to be able to keep going. I go to therapy every single week, and I do Talk Story. We stopped calling it therapy in the early days because of the stigma, especially in our Polynesian community, so we just called it Talk Story. It’s a little bit gentler and easier for people to receive. We do walk story, and I heard you say something about that before. A walk and talk. These are all the kinds of practices that help stigma away, and allow people to connect into their bodies where the trauma is actually living.
So sit back down for just a second. I’m gonna do one quick thing before I pass the mic around. I want you to just put one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart. In Hawaiian, thinking your belly is called your (inaudible), and it’s a source of wisdom. It’s where our ancestors speak to us. And a funny thing in western medicine, they’ve just discovered this thing called the enteric nervous system. It’s a second brain in your gut. So our kupuna, our ancestors, were onto something. I want you to just close your eyes, and I want you to breathe into your belly, free from judgment, if there’s a message, if there’s inner guidance. I want you to breathe into your heart center, just notice all the things that are there, all the feelings, memories, emotions, all the Aloha you have for your ohana, your family, the people in your community. And then I want you to connect those to your heart, let them talk to each other. Let them inform you. Let them inform your decision making. And then gently, just bow your head to your (inaudible) and to your heart. Sometimes, we just have to set the mind down for a minute because it’s so full, and let your truth be your guide. Let your ancestral wisdom be your guide. Let your heart and your Aloha be your guide. You can stay like this as long as you live. I’m going to pass the mic. Thank you so much.
Jolie Wills: Thank you. I just want to share a story that came up as you were talking. I think between the three of you, I think how important it is for us to be able to just normalize and realize how challenging this work is. Jennifer said before, I’ve not come across a recovery leader who has found this work easy. So with part of that research, I remember thinking, is it just us? And of course, the answer was NO. Indigenous people do it much better. They have a holistic approach to health and well being. They are white people in New Zealand. We have a saying, a number eight wire. The idea that we should be so self sufficient, that we can fix anything with a piece of fencing wire. We don’t ask for help. It’s just not in our DNA. Australia has something similar. When I came here to the US, I heard about John Wayne. Went to Japan after their tsunami, and people there said, we have the samurai complex. We don’t show weakness. And when I sat and talked with someone in Japan, I was really worried that culturally, I might get it wrong in this interview. And I was asking around saying, this is what we’re experiencing. It is something your team or you are experiencing also. And she started jiggling around the room and chanting. I thought, what have I done wrong? Maybe I’ll put my foot in it somehow. And the interpreter said, no, no. She’s saying, I am human. I am human. Once she settled down, she said, I had all this energy and this motivation, and I was just so desperately driven to support my community in what they’re going through. And the second year, I had the passion and the motivation. But I’d lost the energy. And by the third year, I think, what is wrong with me? Where has all this energy, passion and motivation gone? I’m losing it. And I thought I was alone. She asked me to dinner, and she invited her team to tell them what you told me. So just knowing that it’s normal, you’re in a room full of people that have been through and have gone through something just as challenging, so you’re not alone. I want to pass again. Story, image or strategy?
Jacqui Jorgeson: I think the strategy, especially when things are brand new, is acknowledging the fact that we’re probably mostly cut from a very similar cloth. Which is, we feel called to do all of the things precisely at the same moment. It’s like trying to eat an elephant in a single bite. And the first meeting that I had, I was brainstorming with the fire chief. It was the moment when the dots connected like, oh, no, this isn’t a benefit. This is a nonprofit. What now? The only thing that kept me going was that I had found my person who was going to help me fuel this. Because within a few moments of speaking, he switched from saying, you should really do that. Well, the first thing we might want to look at, and that we meant everything to me. And so we started mapping out what our objectives were, and what a dream scenario would look like. What do these volunteer firefighters need? Because I’m not from the fire service. I’m very much an outsider, and I was never going to come in and dictate to them what their needs were. And so he’s like, it’d be incredible. We need training reimbursement or subsidization because these trainings are really expensive, but they’re supposed to check all the same boxes as the paid folks, and they’re doing it out of pocket.That’s not fair, like the mental health piece. I’m coming at it from my 9/11 chemical sponge experience of understanding weight.
There’s a way to get this stuff out of our bodies, in what dream scenario would I be able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a research pilot for firefighters using the same detox protocol that got jet fuel out of my body? What about a documentary film that tells the story of the volunteer fire service in the US, and how critical and simultaneously tenable and tenuous it is right now. And what if we did that? We were riffing and riffing. And of course, I wanted to do everything from the jump with no money, no team. And so having to actually submit to the flow of what this was going to be, and it’s great unfolding. And what’s wild now is we’re four years in. We’re running the pilot. We’ve done two rounds, and the results are beyond what we ever thought. We’re getting PFAs from the highest level back into normal range, these forever chemicals. We got a FEMA grant, which is funding all of these training, certifications and mental health resilience. It’s the first FEMA grant that’s ever been awarded. The FEMA C for grant, which is for staffing of adequate response for firefighters. First time they ever funded mental health resilience was our grant. We’re actually doing it. The documentary hasn’t happened yet, but I’m just holding that it’s going to happen in due time. And allowing yourself the best you can to just release into, truly, all things in due time.
Matthew Henderson: So I recently responded as the incident commander to my first high level incident. It was going to be a 30 day operation where we had 70 people on the ground per day flying in from all over the country. And when we respond, we’re seven days a week. And while we’re developing this, I was really pushing to take over this operation. I said, I’ll stay the whole 30 days. I’ll work it out with the family. I just want to do the whole thing. I’m very passionate about the operation. .Of course they said that you absolutely cannot stay for 30 days, working 30 days straight. So I said, okay, let me do the first third of it, and then I’ll go home, and then I’ll do the last third. And they agreed with that. We are full stream people flying in from all over the country. I’ve got dealing with the media and with all of my section chiefs. We run on the incident command system. I had all my section chiefs, and also dealt with Team Rubicon at the national level, and reported back to them. And I’m going and going, and you’re awake until 2:00, 3:00 o’clock in the morning. And you’re up again at 5:00, 6:00 o’clock in the morning.
And that last day, I’m actually wearing my, if you ask me out there, I’ll take my shoes off and you can see that they actually say, change your socks there. It’s Team Rubicon socks. And they say, change your socks. I always wear them on my last day before I go home just to remind myself. So it wasn’t until I’m driving home and I’m going, oh, that was crazy. The whole thing going up into the area where we were and seeing the destruction, and dealing with all of the other things. It wasn’t until I started going home that I realized, wow, I really do need this break. And I think that it’s important, again, as leaders that we show those who we are leading that we also need breaks. We are not gods. We are just like them, and we also need breaks. So it was a big learning experience for me. I went home and spent 10 days with my big Great Dane, and we snuggled on the couch. When I got time to go back, I was fired up. And following along on some of our communications with what was going on, not trying not to intercede in them. But on the way when I got back there, man, I was 100% again and fired up. And just as a leader, you have to show people that I need breaks. And it really worked out. So I learned a big lesson on that one.
Noelani Ahia: Thank you for that. Yeah, breaks are important. I’m still learning that one. I wanted to just share a little bit of a story about community care, and it’s so important to me. Because like everyone has said, none of us can do it alone. And I think in the midst of disaster, we really find that out on the most primal level. Our people came from community living. We have what’s called an (inaudible), which is a land division from the mountains to the sea. We live together. Not to romanticize. But in some relative harmony with infrastructure, for feeding ourselves, for clothing ourselves, for making sure we had shelter, and pretty much everybody in that system was taken care of. We didn’t have unsheltered people. We didn’t have the things that are perilous today under a Western capitalist, imperialist system. And so when the fires happened and the hubs popped up, this was an opportunity for folks to remember what it’s like to be cared for by a village in this modern world. Everybody goes home at night after work and cooks dinner. These people have the skills, they cook the food. These people have the skills to grow the food. These people have the skills to provide the medicine. These people have the skills to do childcare. We got to see that in action. And while everyone was in incredible trauma, there was also something very, very joyful. And there was a remembering that happened of how the world could be different. How we could reimagine a modern world using this ancient technology of care. It wasn’t rocket science. It didn’t require anyone with a PhD. It was simply people caring for one another.
And this community of Lahaina already had that infrastructure. This community was so strong to begin with despite all the colonial trauma which still exists. I just wanted to point out, Jennifer, thank you so much for acknowledging that our community had that language. Most indigenous communities have that language and have that infrastructure, but most of those things were made illegal up until a few decades ago. So we’re still people who are remembering who we were, and putting that back together and still being challenged to this day. But the pieces of community care where we took care of one another, where we didn’t ask for your insurance card, we didn’t care if you had a license, we just knew if you needed care, and we were going to take care of you. And if I needed food, the kitchen was going to feed me. Whatever people needed, everybody stepped up to make sure that needs were met to the best of our capability under horrific and insane conditions. And that is the vision of what many of us in the community are trying to work towards building. And we can do it. We can all do it in every community. There’s no reason not to. It’s not rocket science.
Jolie Wills: I want to thank each and every one of you, Jacqui, Matthew, Noelani, for sharing your thoughts, your insights, your hard won learning through all of this. We say that when it comes to disaster, it is the locals on the ground. They are the glue in the communities. They are the people who drive recovery right. And when we lose them because we burn them out, we lose something really precious. Not only because they are precious people, but we lose that for our community. So in New Zealand, we talk about a (inaudible). Your meeting house is held up by the pole in the middle. When that falls over, we lose something incredibly important for the community. So making sure that we keep a focus on very good externally, focusing on the community, which is vital. But making sure that we look after those, and sustain those that are vital to a community along the way, and ending on a hopeful point. Post traumatic growth. It’s not just about preventing damage. If we put the right support in place, then we end up with growth to our community, to those that are responding. So huge thank you.