Women in EM Panel
Join me for a special Preparedness Month panel discussion focused on Women in EM! This virtual event will be held on September 30, 2024 at 7PM EST.
Q&A: Lessons Learned During a Decade of Emergency Management in Washington, DC
"When it comes to emergency management, we need to continually be learning from what we've experienced, and then evolving that to answer, ‘How are we going to respond this time? Or what lessons did we learn from before? Are the conditions the same as they were? If they're not, how did they change and what should we do with that?’"
Interesting Read | The Disaster Diplomat
Coincidentally, those charged with anticipating, responding to, and mitigating the domestic polycrisis de jour – our nation’s emergency managers – possess a similar skill set and operate akin to international diplomats, but are drastically under-resourced to fulfill their mission. We offer the following assessment and examples to correlate the work of emergency managers to the international diplomatic enterprise. And in doing so, assert that America’s emergency managers should be seen as Disaster Diplomats, and prioritized, empowered, and resourced to meet their mission accordingly.
Real Talk with Jerica Shackelford
I stumbled into emergency management quite unexpectedly. On September 11, 2001, I was in my 11th-grade physics class, clueless about this profession. It wasn’t even a defined career path then. It was in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States that certain laws and grants paved the way for emergency management jobs to [deal with] these tragedies. While in college, I worked for a company that FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] supported, and my exposure grew. I studied broadcast journalism in college, and feel that good communication skills are at the heart of emergency management. Each day is different. One day, I could focus on administrative work. Another day, I’m out in the field.