SBP Resilience Fellow: “People have to feel that you believe they will recover”

Meet Sara Hambrick, one of SBP’s Fellows who worked with community partners in Eastern Kentucky to help build long-term disaster resilience

An increasing number of extreme weather events impact more Americans each year, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Small, low-income communities across the United States are often hardest hit by natural disasters and climate dangers. Accessing critical federal assistance in advance of and after a disaster can become challenging without adequate resources, capacity, or expertise to manage the preparedness and recovery process. The lack of prompt assistance can lead to stalled recoveries for the most vulnerable survivors and prolonged devastation for individuals and communities. 

To address these issues, SBP created the Resilience and Recovery Fellows Program. The aim is simple: (1) Ensure that at-risk, under-resourced communities have greater capacity to mitigate against and prepare for future disasters; and, (2) should these communities experience a disaster, provide expertise to successfully navigate the complex disaster recovery system and secure timely, effective assistance. 

We recruit, hire, and train qualified Fellows in high-risk communities, where they work alongside local, state, and federal officials to support recovery and efforts to mitigate risk. These partnerships help build resilience to future disasters and ensure that the voices of community members are prioritized in the planning and recovery process.

Our locally based Fellows collaborate with local governments, leaders, and community networks to access funding to anticipate future climate threats and secure the recovery assistance they need when disasters strike.

Connecting with the community

One of SBP’s first Fellows, Sara Hambrick, demonstrates the power of this innovative program. 

Six months after historic floods ravaged Eastern Kentucky in late July 2022, killing 45 people and wiping out entire communities overnight, the region was just starting to get back on its feet. Residents and local officials were having a difficult time navigating the recovery process. Many survivors had received insufficient awards or outright denials from FEMA. Some had left the area for good. Those who remained—the ones determined to rebuild their lives there—were still seeking a path to recovery.

To assist in this journey, SBP partnered with the Kentucky Area Development District (KRADD), a multi-county planning organization that focuses on community and regionally driven economic development, to place a Resilience Fellow in the region. 

Hambrick is no stranger to disaster recovery: Six years earlier, when floods hit her home state of West Virginia, Hambrick volunteered in shelters and quickly became a volunteer case manager for a long-term recovery group. So when she saw an opportunity to help a neighboring community with similar struggles to get back on its feet, she signed up to be a Fellow.

In addition to her technical expertise, Hambrick is from what she describes as a culturally similar area, making her more of an insider than an outsider. She invested her time in building relationships with key stakeholders—most importantly, survivors—which has been crucial to her success in helping residents recover.

Community engagement is an important component of Hambrick’s role as a Fellow, along with assisting the local government and agencies with grant writing, project development, and FEMA disaster case management. 

Hambrick jumped right into problem-solving. She knew local officials had been “thrown into the pool and were learning to swim,” overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation. A self-described “dot connector,” Hambrick quickly surveyed the recovery landscape and began guiding people toward the appropriate resources.  

Impacting survivors: “Getting people to dream about what recovery could look like”

“People in Eastern Kentucky had had a really bad experience with trying to get assistance, so they needed to be seen and heard—especially people tucked away in the mountains who felt invisible,” Hambrick recalled. 

So she worked with KRADD and Brushy Fork officials to host community meetings, in partnership with local, state and federal agencies such as FEMA, HUD, FAHE, Kentucky Community Action and their regional agencies, HOMES, the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), Housing Development Alliance, local Long-Term Recovery Groups, Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky (FAKY), etc. The initial meetings were designed to inform residents about grant opportunities and their cycles, introduce community partners, and highlight available resources. The goal was also to facilitate activities that fostered community visioning. The organizers worked one-on-one with survivors to make sure that they got connected to the resources they needed and to solicit their insights on what they still needed and their vision for the future.

As Hambrick explained: “People have got to feel like you care about them, and that you believe they will recover.”

By the end of a packed community meeting in Virgie, Kentucky, for example—a small town almost entirely destroyed by the floods—Hambrick had spoken with all 60 attendees and shared resources that were available to them. Each person left with a much clearer path to recovery and a sense they hadn’t been forgotten. “It’s so inspiring to me that we can take under resourced communities and get them not only to feel hope but to dream about what recovery could look like,” Hambrick said.

Aside from her initial partnership with KRADD, Hambrick worked with the Big Sandy and Middle Kentucky area development district organizations and community action programs to support their FEMA disaster case management grants. She gave advice on disaster case management services, offered structure to programs and policies, and even conducted an informal audit in advance of FEMA’s formal review of their programs. 

These collaborations between SBP and local agencies impact some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in Kentucky. For example, the Big Sandy Area Community Action Program in one of the most impacted and destroyed counties resulted in: 

• 132 households (396 individuals) files
• 792 referrals to community partners (home repair, legal aid, clothing, FEMA appeals)
• 121 homes were assisted with FEMA appeals
• 72 individuals who were considered total loss received permanent housing
• 3 families received new homes
• The total monetary value of goods and services provided through DCM totals: $1.5 million.

Building a more resilient future

It has been a year and a half since Hambrick landed in Eastern Kentucky as a Resilience Fellow and signs of renewal are visible throughout the region. Houses are being rebuilt from the ground up, storm-resistant FORTIFIED roofs are being installed, and infrastructure projects are underway. 

Hambrick simultaneously has one eye on the future and one on the now—how, in the present, she can help give people a sense of normalcy, even joy. 

Installing gardens at senior centers through an AARP grant is just one example of this ethos in action. “Sure, it’s a fun activity for the seniors and maybe doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s one step closer to home for them.” She feels strongly that providing opportunities for healing through community-based projects is in some ways just as important as getting roofs over people’s heads.

She is especially enthusiastic about helping establish a community resilience hub in Floyd County, an area that will receive an infusion of federal dollars as a Community Disaster Resilience (or CDRZ) Zone—an important new designation that funnels assistance to high-risk, high-need jurisdictions. In fact, these new designations will allow SBP to expand the Fellows program into more states, delivering quality resilience and mitigation programs to even more communities—an initiative that FEMA supports.  

Looking to the future, Hambrick is passionate about ensuring Eastern Kentucky and other similar communities are fully prepared for the next big weather event: “My mantra is ’keep making progress, keep moving forward, keep being ready.’” 

Her next assignment brings her back home to West Virginia. As a Resilience Fellow, she will work with the State Resiliency Office on securing grants to develop a recovery infrastructure aimed at enhancing communication and collaboration, offering training and technical assistance, and increasing overall capacity.

“Change needs to happen all throughout the system,” Hambrick says. “But I also want to see a grassroots change in these smaller communities so they know how to get the help they deserve for themselves, their families, their neighbors.”  

SBP’s Resilience Fellows program is generously funded by partners such as the Walmart Foundation, the Musk Foundation, Liberty Mutual and Toyota.