Preparedness Matters with Vincent Davis
Vincent B. Davis is the Founder of Preparedness Matters Consulting and serves as Director of Disaster Services for Feeding America. Prior to joining Feeding America in January 2020, he served as workplace resiliency manager at Amazon, where he developed disaster frameworks to support the company’s 175 corporate offices. Before joining Amazon, Vince was senior preparedness manager for Sony PlayStation in San Diego, and manager of preparedness and response at Walgreens Co., where he developed disaster programs for their 8,600 U.S. stores and distribution facilities. Following a distinguished 23-year career in the U.S. Air Force and Illinois National Guard, Vince served as external affairs and community relations officer at FEMA, managing field teams for 11 Presidential disasters. After leaving FEMA Vince served as regional preparedness manager for the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, where he led research and development of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning Go To 2040 Report on Emergency Preparedness, a 30-year planning effort to improve community disaster resilience. Vince was principal developer of the FEMA Regional Catastrophic Incident Coordination Plan for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, a plan for mass care of a million residents of the Chicagoland region. Vince is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM). In 2019, he completed the FEMA National Emergency Management Advanced Academy (NEMAA) for senior leaders. A passionate advocate for disaster literacy and underserved community preparedness, Vince has authored three books, Lost and Turned Out, A Guide to Preparing Underserved Communities for Disasters (Amazon 2012), and The Native Family Disaster Preparedness Handbook (Heritage Publishing 2017), and the Emergency Guidebook for Broadcasters Serving Indian Country in collaboration with Native Public Media. Vince is a lifetime member of the Black Emergency Managers Association International (BEMA), an Advisory Board Member for the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM), Honorary Chair for the International Council for Women’s Leadership in Emergency Management and Business Continuity (ICWL), and Advisory Board member for the Homeland Security Center of Excellence, Pierce College, Washington.This interview is an excerpt of a longer podcast that you can find at Riding the Wave: Project Management for Emergency Managers
Andrew Boyarsky
I have my guest today, Vincent B. Davis, who is the Director of Disaster Services at Feeding America, which supports a network of over 200 food banks in the United States. He is also a seasoned consultant, author, and speaker with extensive emergency management planning and development experience. His portfolio of success includes 23 years in the U.S. Air Force and Army National Guard. It also includes emergency management roles at the Federal Emergency Management System, American Red Cross, Walgreens, Sony, and Amazon. Vince, I just want to say how excited I am to speak to you and to welcome you on the podcast.
Vincent Davis
Well, thank you, and it is great to be here. We really appreciate you reaching out to us to be a part of the podcast.
Andrew Boyarsky
I want to start off with reference to an open letter that you posted recently to the nominated FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell, the current commissioner of the New York City Emergency Management Department. You cited in your open letter the need to improve on FEMA's poor record on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). You called on her to appoint an independent committee to review and make recommendations on how to improve EDI at FEMA. If she were to appoint you as the head of that committee, what immediate goals would you set?
Vincent Davis
One of the reasons that I decided to send that open letter was to bring attention to what's already been an ongoing dialogue and discussion around EDI in a general sense. 86% of all director-level emergency managers in the United States are white males, according to the CDC and Department of Commerce records. It's an appalling record of the lack of diversity and inclusion in this profession.
I reached out to Deanne to give her an opportunity to decisively address these issues, which FEMA and other outside organizations that support emergency management have skirted around. I’ve prepared for her a 10-point program of specific things that I would want and expect that commission to do.
One is to establish a request that the International Association of Emergency Management, with which FEMA is very closely aligned, collaborate with native organizations like the National Tribal Emergency Management Agency and others like the Black Emergency Managers Association. It has been more of a competition rather than a collaboration, and that has to stop. Another is to introduce a resolution through the National Emergency Management Association to increase the number of people of color in EM positions at the state and local agencies as well as at the director level. I think FEMA has a responsibility to lead the way on this.
Andrew Boyarsky
I realize that it takes time for federal bureaucracies to move and take action at the state, county, and local levels. An emergency manager has a greater amount of influence, not only in the nonprofit and governmental sectors, but also within corporate environments and a variety of sized firms. How do we meaningfully engage communities of color and marginalized communities in emergency preparedness and management?
Vincent Davis
We've got to meet people where they are and stop telling people a mixed message which Homeland Security and FEMA, in particular, have been guilty of. We have to tell people, decisively, that they are on their own. Beyond just telling them, we also have to equip them to be on their own. We have to start having a meaningful dialogue with these marginalized communities to make sure that we demystify the disaster system.
Andrew Boyarsky
We have the resources we need to respond, but they are just unevenly distributed. I’m referring to developed nations like the United States, although one could question whether that is absolute for certain states and communities. Where do you feel we need to invest our emergency management budgets at the federal, state, and local levels?
Vincent Davis
Well, for years, we poured billions of dollars into response, and I think that that was necessary. There was a time, going back into the era when FEMA was created, when emergency management was sort of fragmented into regional kinds of operations. The intent was to get the state and local governments up to speed, so everybody was on the same page. 9/11 galvanized that with the creation and the organization of Homeland Security and the National Response Framework. I happened to be on a panel back in 2002 that reviewed some of the first drafts of what became the national response plan. The problem there was that we didn't know what we didn't know.
To some degree, we understood response and recovery. However, we didn't understand preparedness and lack of diversity, which led us down the path of failure in terms of the preparedness end of it. To answer your question, I think now is the time we need to focus seriously on preparedness versus response.
We keep making the same mistake over and over again, no matter the disaster. I think we need to focus our resources on preparedness and not just in a general sense. We need to focus our efforts on preparing the least prepared because those are the people we're going to have to rescue when things go south.
The Conservative Heritage Foundation, after Hurricane Sandy, came out with a report that said, “do no harm.” The system cannot erode the ability of people to take care of themselves. We have to do a better job preparing people, and we have to stop talking about preparedness as though it's some kind of commodity.
Andrew Boyarsky
I want to address some immediate areas of concern around the pandemic. To quote a recent CDC report, a study of selected states and cities with data on COVID-19 related deaths by race and ethnicity showed that 34% of deaths were among non-Hispanic Black people. However, this group accounts for only 12% of the total U.S. Population. Personally, I find this appalling to be the case. We also know our government and society have a terrible record of medical research and vaccination programs going back decades. How do we address these issues, and where do we go from here to improve this record?
Vincent Davis
I’m so glad you brought that up. That has been the subject of many studies, as you cited, concerning the disparities among race and ethnicity. We have to start looking at this in terms of people and how it's impacting them. When I think about this, I think about my dear brother Carl who lost his life last September to COVID-19, and I think about more than a dozen friends and family who have lost their lives. I think we like to put numbers to things when we're talking about problems that are huge and enormous. But, I believe we need to get this down to pavement level when we're talking about people because that will make us change our behavior.
In his 1969 album The Light Side and the Dark Side, former comedian and activist Dick Gregory qualified the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders following the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The current commission report said that to solve the problems in the black community, you're going to have to bring $80 billion into the black community. Gregory, who was a comedian at heart, replied, “I hope they don't bring $80 billion into the black community because they're going to have the ‘darndest’ four-day craps game you've ever seen in your life.” Then, he became more serious and said that the problem is not money and not the number of financial resources. To solve the problems in the black communities dealing with these healthcare disparities and all kinds of racial and social injustice, we're going to have to create an atmosphere where black and white people can trust one another. The black community itself has to (also) take some responsibility and ownership for some of the problems they have.
We have to take some ownership regarding misinformation and disinformation that goes on in the black community. Early on, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was hearing friends and seeing people on Facebook talking about things like, “Well, we don't have to worry because black people can't get COVID-19.” A lot of that misinformation led to a lot of careless behavior and death surrounding COVID-19. So, we have to take some ownership of the misinformation that goes on in our own communities. I'm very much pointing to things like the role of the African American church and faith community which used to be the clearinghouse. When I say, “I used to be,” I speak from a person who was a 16-year-old high-schooler when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. The black church was the “hub” for all things social justice in the black community to now, being a shell of itself, where it really has little or no influence over what goes on in the community. The black church has to step up and take its rightful place. Black communities themselves have to be disaster-literate so that we’re not as susceptible to rumors, propaganda, falsehoods, and misinformation that flows during disasters like COVID-19 and regular disasters. I've seen it firsthand as a community relations officer for FEMA where I've been out in the field and into these communities.
Andrew Boyarsky
Before I get to my next question, I just wanted to express my personal condolences for the passing of your brother and those people that are close to you from COVID-19.
Vincent Davis
Thank you, it's been a difficult time. These are difficult situations for everybody, but I think if we dehumanize the impacts of these things on people, that's when we tend to make really poor decisions about how we're going to approach and attack what's going on.
Andrew Boyarsky
Speaking to the next generation of emergency managers and disaster recovery specialists, don’t lose sight. There's the big picture and the little picture, and that big picture is painted with tiny strokes, and each of those strokes is an individual. It's often difficult because, as you've experienced, you pursue it with passion and with a particular ethical approach, and it's hard. Right? Sometimes you can't save everyone. It's something that every emergency manager needs to be aware of, which is that psychosocial component.
Vincent Davis
Absolutely.
Andrew Boyarsky
I want to touch upon something you talked about before, and that's the title of a recent blog that you published this year, titled, Why I Became an Anti-Disaster Kit Advocate. In your blog, you say pushing individuals to build a household or a family emergency kit for disasters is just not adequate. Socially vulnerable households cannot afford it. It is better to focus on communities and neighborhoods. Can you elaborate on what areas should be the focus of community preparedness?
Vincent Davis
Absolutely. To expand on that part of what I said earlier concerning the doctrine, it stated a bunch of emergency managers deciding that preparedness had something to do with a disaster kit. It became the mantra, if you will, of what preparedness was supposed to be, and it has failed miserably. I quote former FEMA administrator Brock Long, who I've known for several years and is one of the finest and most qualified emergency managers in this business, who said after Hurricane Maria, we have failed to create a culture of preparedness. My response was, “no kidding,” because, by FEMA's own admission, more than 60% of people have done nothing to prepare. In reality, that’s probably more like 90-95% of people.
Preparedness is not a disaster kit. A disaster kit is a convenience item at best and it is not going to save your life if your house is floating down the street and you're on the rooftop. A disaster kit would not have helped the 1,800 people who drowned in Hurricane Katrina. The tool that would have helped is disaster literacy. They needed to have accurate knowledge of the real risk that they were under. I guarantee you that those 1,800 people who drowned in Katrina from the 30-foot wall of water that came through following the disaster would have gladly walked out of New Orleans had they understood the real risk to their lives, not the risk of being inconvenienced.
Preparedness is more related to what you are doing, not what you have. I say to people, “Talk to a single mother and say to her, ‘Yeah, I want you to take two cans of tuna and some extra cash and put it in a plastic tote and shove it under your bed because you know you'll be ready when the next disaster comes.’” She's going to tell you that if she has any extra tuna, it's going to be dinner for her children for the next couple of days. The question is: do we have the knowledge that's necessary to survive? Each neighborhood should be equipped with this knowledge.
A great example of this happened when I was out in Washington, D.C., working for Amazon. One of the local emergency managers there had prepared these neighborhood carts. They were literally metal carts with communications equipment on them with some disaster supplies and first-aid kits. He had one of these carts on wheels, stored in the homes of people in every neighborhood in his community because he understood that everybody in the community was not going to have a disaster kit or a ham radio to communicate with the outside world. He clearly understood that preparedness was a community effort, not an individual effort. I think, as Americans, we get too far off into the “me,” and we get too far away from the “we.”
For links to what we discussed in our interview:
Mr. Davis’ open letter to nominated Deanne Criswell:
Citations on health inequities:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425845/
Chart of hierarchy of systemic areas to address:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425845/bin/img-130.jpg
Original research with the data
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/12/4322
Why I Became An Anti-Disaster Kit Advocate
http://www.preparednessmatters.net/blog/why-i-became-an-anti-disaster-kit-advocate