course material

1. humanitarian assistance, recovery phase
Unformatted Preview Teaching Points This week our discussion will focus on recovery and
by extension resilience. Recovery, from the emergency management perspective has long
been overlooked. The causation of this could be argued but it should suffice to agree that
recovery as an emergency management activity is not done well. To begin the discussion,
we should start with a foundational question what is recovery? It would be rather easy to
have a “textbook” definition of recovery. Unfortunately, the textbooks differ. FEMA is
challenged with providing an effective definition of recovery and largely defers to Core
Capabilities to define it (Recovery is composed of the core capabilities necessary to assist
communities affected by an incident to recover effectively). A reasonable definition could be
to return the impacted area to “normal”. However, this begs another question. What is
normal? Normal would be dependent on the area that is impacted. For example, a farming
community’s return to normal would be vastly different than a large city’s return to normal.
There is also a pragmatic approach when discussing recovery and returning to some state of
normalcy and that would be defining a new normal. Given the understanding that some
incident has occurred that has impacted a community, geographic area, or even business to
such detriment that normal has been disrupted an opportunity now exists to recover to
something different rather than pre-incident conditions. This idea leans towards resiliency.
Although, developing resiliency does not have to occur only following a detrimental incident
it is simply an opportunity to impart resiliency in the recovery efforts. So, looking past these
circular references of recovery, resilience, and normal what IS recovery. Essentially,
recovery is putting the pieces back together with the understanding that some untoward
incident will occur in the future and taking the opportunity to put steps into place to lessen
or remove future impacts. As Emergency Managers we must be realistic in our
understanding that there will be disasters and we need to prepare our respective
communities for those disasters and by better preparation we lessen the need for recovery.
This does not mean that recovery is managed solely by active preparedness. Recovery goes
beyond the emergency management perspective of saving lives and property and lessening
impacts. Recovery, in large part, is measured by the health of the community. For example,
take any disaster and breakdown the impacts of the incident. Once the winds fade, the
water recedes or the violence ends, what is left of the community. How do you rebuild the
community? Building flood walls or improving security are sound approaches but what
about local businesses, schools, infrastructure. How are these rebuilt? Who does the work?
Who pays for the bills? SOCIAL MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY ASSIGNMENT 2 These questions are

2. some of the challenges of recovery. Current emergency management models are heavily
response focused and the long-range work such as recovery, mitigation, and resilience are
oftentimes underfunded and undervalued. I will offer to the future emergency managers a
question. Should our response models shift to be more recovery/resiliency focused? If so,
how? I look forward to your thoughts on this complex topic. Assignment: Recovery is an
essential part of disaster management. However, it is not well supported. I am an elected
official that sees far more value in response assets than recovery needs. Change my mind on
the need for recovery. What role does community and economic development play in
recovery? Reading: Introduction to International Disaster Management Coppola – Chapter 7
Recovery Please remember to use the chapter above and provide a convincing answer, use
your opinion supported by couple of references. A minimum of 250 words needed.