Disaster Emergency Management: The Emergence of Professional Help Services for Victims of Natural Disasters

7. Administration and Community Collaboration in Disaster Management

Professional Helpers in the Service of Disaster Resilience The aim of this chapter is to take a more practical step in striving toward the ideal of professional helper in practice. The focus of the chapter is on public administrators and what they need personally and professionally to be the best helpers possible in the face of adversity. Thus, this chapter introduces public administrators to the attributes of an effective helper. There is no one set of characteristics that identifies professional helpers, but we encourage pubic administrators to reflect on the characteristics they possess that can either help or hinder them in their resilient efforts and work with affected communities. This chapter thus underlies the need for professional helpers to consider that their personal cultural network is the starting point for how they engage disaster events and for the methods they use in their professional work. The theory of communitarian-based resilience management and the analysis that followed seem to establish a normative model and distinguish it from others. Communitarian-based resilience management is difficult to establish without linking community and administration. A comprehensive community perspective on resilience management involves three levels of intervention: (1) advocacy, (2) inclusion, and (3) competency. These attributes emphasize deep social and community transformation rather than merely helping people adapt to risks and crisis circumstances. To embrace these roles, professional helpers need to acquire distinguished professional ethics based on understanding themselves as cultural beings. Culture is referred to here as insertion in a community 7 Administration and Community Collaboration in Disaster Management 165 166 Disaster Emergency Management as a means of belonging. Culture is a way of life, a group of beliefs, traditions, and techniques. Culture varies according to communities, societies, or ethnic groups.1 Public administrators become cultural beings by learning to participate in the cultural activities and practices going on around them. Tomasello2 defines cultural abilities as a uniquely human social-cognitive skill for understanding others as intentional agents who, like the self, attend to things and pursue goals in the environment. Professional helpers need to consider that their personal cultural network is the starting point for how they engage disaster events and for the methods they use in their professional work. Professional Helpers as Advocates Professional helpers must meet the physical survival needs of the affected communities from the outset. In times of emergency, victims often do not have the luxury of seeking alternative options for obtaining needed goods and services.3 This is by no means a call for establishment of client/customer and business relations that respond to short-term interests of customers served by government programs. Public servants need to go beyond short-term interests and to assure that disaster response and recovery efforts are consistent with norms of justice, fairness, and collective shared notions of public interest. Treating communities at risk as clients degrades their effectiveness, commitment, and responsibility for what happens in their communities. Therefore, public administrators need to respond not just to customers’ needs, but focus on building relationships of trust and collaboration with and among community members. In times of disaster, the primary task of professional helpers is to “serve” rather than to steer by empowering citizens to articulate and meet their shared interests to enhance immediate coping capacity. The role of professional helper is to assist vulnerable people in identifying a network of resources available to them, such as family, friends, and community. Professional help needs to connect the affected individuals to community resources such as schools, churches, and other natural support systems existing in the community. These community agencies provide an initial safety network based on the sense of social connectedness needed in times of crisis. Arranging such connections creates the opportunity for vulnerable people to learn what the community has to Administration and Community Collaboration in Disaster Management 167 offer them in the future, to manage their own lives in the face of adversity . Engaging in community resilience activities may serve not only to intervene in disaster management but also to prevent people from entering into a poor state of functioning at the initial stage. Communities with accessible agencies and services designed from the bottom up offer opportunities to become involved there rather than drowning in acts of despair. Thus, for the initial encounter with communities at risk, professional helpers need to help in a manner that reflects maintaining personal networks with community members who may be in a position to...