Resourceful and Resilient

A common theme I have witnessed over the past 15 years is that emergency management professionals are resourceful and resilient. They work with what they have, driven by sheer determination to support their communities and to constantly do it better. A great friend and colleague once described monumental flooding in her country, sharing that her team worked non-stop for days fueled by loyalty, love, and pride for their nation and their peers. She said, "You would do the same thing." Having the opportunity to serve your community in dire circumstances is something sought out by the most resilient people.

The relationships I have had the opportunity to sustain, the vast majority of them spanning over a decade, reflect this same commitment. The people who dedicate their lives to this work do so full out, as we say in dance. While the challenges vary widely across regions and organizations, limited resources and limited capacity surface as consistent themes.

These realities are never far from my mind. Our core mission at Generation NYX is to make technology accessible. How do we help remove the financial barriers that keep agencies from accessing collaboration and coordination software? And yet the software is only as valuable as the capacity to use it. Often organizations are stretched so thin that even when they have access to the right tools, they don't have the time to train on them, integrate them into their workflows, or reach for them confidently in the face of an emergency. Because when a real event happens, these extraordinary leaders will use whatever is easiest and most effective. That is resilience and resourcefulness in action.

I don't have answers to all of these questions, but we are actively working to understand how we can better serve the community. NICS was built by responders for responders, and that responder-driven design is something we are deeply proud of. But we know we need to go further, to better understand and remove the obstacles that stand between the right tools and the people who need them most.

-Steph