Future Here Now: Bravery -->Resilience
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Bravery is hard to write about, but this contributor to my 2015 book Why this Work Matters wrote about the real secret to resilience better than I ever could. That little volume remains possibly my favorite of all the things I have published, because the 10 writers who contributed to it gave us incredible reflections like this. I’ll introduct you to the author at the end of this post.
Speaking of people with powerful insights, my conversation with two mental health and emotional resilience experts is available here:
Here’s what Kimberly taught me about resilience many years ago.
Professional Detachment is Over-Rated: Lessons in Resilience
by Kimberly Miller, AICP
During my senior year in high school, my family and I were displaced by a devastating house fire. We were fortunate to have good insurance that replaced our belongings and provided us with shelter, as well as friends that kept us stocked with love and casseroles during the months our kitchen was out of service. But even when you are not cold or hungry, losing your home is guaranteed to strain your personal resilience.
Through it all, I never heard my parents complain. We celebrated when the firemen found our puppy unharmed in the bathroom, we discarded damaged possessions and, when we moved back in, we adopted the contractor who was rebuilding our kitchen as a new member of the household.
In what could have been a year of quarrels and grief, I learned how life can move forward with grace, even when its foundations are shaken. This was my first lesson in resilience, and one that has shaped my career as a planner.
What makes a person, and a community, resilient in the face of natural disasters and manmade catastrophes?
The community of professional planners in New York demonstrated its resilience after the terrorist attacks of September 11 by directly engaging in the process of recovery. My husband and I were among the league of hollow-eyed, silent survivors, descending into the subways for work while fires still smoldered overhead. Surviving family members posted picture of their loved ones, and waited days, weeks, months for news.
Unable to lift those beams ourselves, we planners learned that at least we could point others in the right direction. Many of us worked nights as map-makers for search and rescue missions at the Hudson River Pier command center. New York Fire and Police rescue teams desperately needed maps of the World Trade Center complex as they combed through the wreckage for survivors.
In the downtimes during those long nights, we talked, making grim jokes about the horrors that we’d seen. The empathy of our colleagues helped us trudge through another day, until gradually, our burdens lightened.
In the initial aftermath of a disaster, people are often at their kindest and most empathetic. During the rush to recover, however, people in positions of authority can lose perspective on how their decisions might affect survivors.
I arrived in coastal Mississippi nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the homes and livelihoods of the area’s historic communities. Just as family members in New York began arguing bitterly over the September 11 memorial design in the years after that tragedy, tempers in Mississippi were flaring over the state’s temporary and permanent housing assistance programs. At a Mississippi Senate Hearing that I helped organize, one woman testified before a crowded panel of Senators how the gaps in the State’s recovery program had left her, aging and suffering from multiple disabilities, ineligible for assistance and living in a home with a blue tarp for a roof.
Her words reached the senators in ways that repeated letters and phone calls to state officials had not. Senators who lived far away from the center of the storm’s destruction began to understand her plight and that of countless citizens like her. That hearing, and others like it, catalyzed reforms to state recovery programs that the best policy analysis had been unable to accomplish.
If we are engaged and empathetic, we can use our unique knowledge of urban and environmental systems to rebuild their communities and help them become resilient, while also embodying their deepest values. When we take a hand in digging out from the rubble, we can contribute to rebuilding while helping the community lay a new path, a brick at a time.
When we can build empathy into even routine work, it allows us to break down the unwieldy obstacles that arise from grief, strong beliefs and misunderstandings. Our professional skills, applied with an open heart and personal commitment, can help us mold the world in ways that ease the impacts of catastrophic events.
New York City, New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi will never be the places they were before the tragedies that befell them. But because of the work that you and I, and other compassionate people from around the world do, they are being renewed, and they are becoming ever more resilient to the changing world around them.
Remember that when you start to wonder why your work matters.
Kimberly Miller, AICP is the Gulf Regional Resilience Planning Lead for Black and Veatch. Kimberly is one of those rare people who has worked for cities, for consulting firms, and for humanitarian organizations… and done so in the aftermath of natural and human disasters more times that most of us would imagine experiencing such things. She specializes in helping communities in fragile environmental contexts strengthen their resilience, and during her years with Oxfam she helped more than 30 nonprofits, doing everything from organizational strategies to developing more resilient systems for taking care of the dispossessed. Can you do social services policy *and* write a manual on shoreline erosion management? I didn’t think so.