Tagged With "wildfires"

At the end of 2017, Community Foundation of Sonoma County and Napa Valley Community Foundation enlisted the Center for Effective Philanthropy to conduct a survey of local nonprofit organizations about the impacts of the wildfires on the people they serve and on their organizational capacity to provide services in response. While reading CEP Advisory Services " 2018 Wildfire Response Survey " report through an ACEs and trauma-informed lens, the following findings jumped out at me: 1. Mental...

SANTA ROSA - Teacher Linda Severs lost her school but not her house. Parent Matt Todhunter lost his home but not the school his children attended. And Debra Sanders, who has spent the last six years providing school services for homeless families, suddenly found her own family in that same classification. Northern California’s Oct. 8 wildfires were among the most destructive in U.S. history, and in Sonoma County, they uprooted an entire school system. As the fires raged, nearly all of the...

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/mental-health/what-wildfires-do-to-our-minds-20180807

Thanks Lena! This data is surprising and sad (to me) in that it appears that the most vulnerable populations had the greatest negative impact in terms of receiving services during the post-fire period. Karen

Thanks for posting this Lena! I'm not surprised that agencies literally prioritized "bricks & mortar" projects over less tangible outcomes such as mental health. Still, it's sad that we do so. The data on populations served is surprising: I get that persons who lost their home in the fires might have been persons previously more likely to give to causes than to seek assistance from them. Still, you would expect that some who lost homes would be seniors, veterans, LGBTQ, women, etc., so...

By the way, I agree will Karen's comment, forgot to mention it in my previous post.

Thank you, Lena, for sharing this real-time response survey. The level of suffering, from those who're now homeless, to those who received less services due to service providers stretched so thin, is staggering. Mental health awareness, education, and implementation cross-sector is so critically imperative. The suffering permeates through all those impacted. Your 2018 Wildfire Response Survey highlights the paramount community needs and frames this reality in a succinct, profound way.

What helped Sonoma health center staffers navigate one catastrophe after another was what they had learned about trauma in the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative.