By Julia Maniccia
“We are so focused on responding and getting a job done, but that isn’t how you touch peoples’ lives. You do that by listening to them, talking to them, letting them tell their story and finding out what they need. Then you help them,” is a sentiment that has guided Briana Taylor, first by a career in psychology, and later by two decades of service with the American Red Cross.
Briana’s introduction to disaster response was happenstance. In her professional role in mental health, Briana had spent many years working to alleviate human suffering on an individual level, tending to the needs of her patients in their darkest hour. In 2004, Briana was vacationing in Phuket, Thailand with her family, briefly taking off her psychologist hat, when a tsunami took to the island’s shores. Six weeks later, her drive to alleviate suffering took flight on the community-level, as she returned to Thailand to support islanders in their recovery.
One year later, as Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on Louisiana and Florida, she joined the volunteer ranks of the Red Cross to jumpstart her tenure as a disaster responder. She has since deployed to more than 20 disaster relief operations (DROs), fueled by her capacity for human connection and inspiration to build community in times of disaster.
While Briana is a mental health professional by trade, she deploys in an External Relations role, contributing to Red Cross efforts in working with government and community partners to identify and meet the needs of those impacted by a disaster. In this capacity, Briana leverages the heightened sensitivity and awareness she developed as a psychologist to forge connections with the impacted communities. This dual expertise was in high demand after Typhoon Mawar struck the island of Guam on May 19, 2023.
Many times, Briana has answered the phone to a fellow Red Crosser asking if she is ‘ready, willing and able to deploy,’ and many times her answer has been not ‘if’ but ‘when.’ After receiving the ask to deploy to Typhoon Mawar, like many previous deployments, she found herself on a plane less than 24 hours later, ready to work for that disaster relief operation. While no two disaster deployments are the same, Briana was aware even before leaving the mainland that the response to Typhoon Mawar would be an exceptionally unique experience.
After a nearly 18-hour travel day across the International Date Line, Briana disembarked from the plane in Guam, yearning for fresh air. She was met with a thick, lingering humidity that she soon became well-acquainted with. Despite limited power, food and water supplies, she was welcomed to the island by locals, who, notwithstanding their tumultuous last few weeks, remained warm and welcoming – emblematic of their unwavering values of compassion and community.
While there is a significant military presence in Guam, the island has seen little Red Cross sheltering and disaster response, and there were even fewer volunteers – specifically trained disaster responders – on the ground. In the early aftermath of the Typhoon, Briana and her team sought to build partnerships with local community members and organizations who could help them center local cultural values and norms in their mission delivery. These partners shared insight into Guam’s matriarchal and social structures, emphasizing the high value placed on family links and the strong sense of community, kindness and connection to one another.
In Red Cross shelters, leveraging the cultural insight from these local partnerships looked like turning down the air conditioning as it was much too cold for folks be comfortable in an environment much colder than their typical tropical climate. The shelter workers used their understanding of how large family sizes are and how deeply they value togetherness in their recovery. Red Crossers moved the nightly headcount time to later in the evening, allowing families to maximize the time they were able to spend in each other’s company while staying under the shelter’s roof.
Briana also shared her most moving memory from this deployment, one that paid homage to the matriarchal structure that leads Chamorro culture in Guam. When her team learned there would be three new mothers who – with their newborns – were being released to the hospital and staying at the Red Cross shelter, they sought to create a nursery, separate from the dormitory to protect the health of these new mothers and their children. In conjunction with other organizations, both local and on the mainland, the space was equipped with bassinets and mobiles, new clothes and diapers, and volunteers to help watch the newborns when the mothers needed rest.
Beyond the walls of the shelter, the feeding operation had to continue delivering food and water to locals who preferred to stay with their full families in their own homes. Despite much of the island still being without power and debris being strewn about the streets – most of which were unmarked or unnamed – Briana and her team used community insight and knowledge of a key partner to execute this element of mission delivery. They were able to connect with a local, who served his community as a bus driver for the local school district. Since school wasn’t in session, he offered to repurpose his bus to carry food and leveraged his navigational skills and knowledge of where the families with children in school lived so Red Crossers could efficiently deliver meals to those in need.
Briana’s deployment in Guam centered the need to ‘meet people where they are,’ sometimes literally, and the Red Cross attitude of flexibility, to tailor a disaster response to meet the unique needs of the affected community. She returned home after three weeks on the island, deeply moved by the resilience of the people of Guam. A few weeks later, as a second Typhoon was positioned to impact the island, she was offered the opportunity to return for a second deployment.
She was on the plane back to Guam the next morning, ready to pick up where she left off.
Briana’s two deployments to Guam navigated challenges and sought solutions she hadn’t seen in her 20 previous disaster deployments, and nearly 20 years of service to the Red Cross. In reflecting on her experience, she shared, “I don’t know any other organization that can do what we do. We’re not perfect, and we don’t always get it right, but I don’t know anyone that can do what we do.” As she marches forward in her Red Cross journey, she keeps this sentiment top of mind. What we do as Red Crossers matters.
Our programs change communities. Our mission changes lives. And the Red Cross has certainly changed Briana, too.
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