On the Topic of Resilience: Community Connectedness, Better PR Campaigns & Preventing the Next Crisis
Interview with Lindsay Call, Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Santa Monica
November has been a busy month of personal and work travels. Some of the highlights include:
Being stopped in my tracks by folks who said they were avid Futurisk readers at the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) conference in Long Beach, CA. These interactions made my day, so if that was you — thank you :)
Seeing one of my favorite authors, Adam Grant, in conversation with Jennifer Garner, talk about his new book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Great Things.
Spending Thanksgiving in the Bay Area visiting family and friends and now gearing up to speak at the Western Association of Independent Camps (WAIC) conference in Monterey, CA, on “Building Resilience: Navigating Crisis & Promoting Wellness in the Face of Climate Change.”
For the second installment of the Futurisk Expert Interview series, I chose to stay close to home and dissect a role that has long intrigued me: the Chief Resilience Officer.
Happy reading!
Thanks to Hollywood, the City of Santa Monica is known around the world for its iconic beaches, its landmark amusement park, the Santa Monica Pier, and its well-known oceanfront walkway that extends along the coastline, providing a scenic route for running, biking, and rollerblading.
(Personally, I love Santa Monica most for its warm and bustling pickleball community! 😉)
But along with breathtaking coastal views comes risk. Risk stemming from sea level rise, nearby wildfires, and other hazards brought on by Southern California’s geological makeup. So to learn more about the nexus of climate change and crisis management, I spoke with Lindsay Call, the City of Santa Monica’s Chief Resilience Officer since 2017.
During the interview recorded in October, we talked about:
The evolving role of Chief Resilience Officers
The power of being a force multiplier
How you can’t pour from an empty cup
Lorraine Schneider: Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me today on this interview to learn more about your work as a Chief Resilience Officer. I would love to kick it off by asking you how you define resilience in your line of work.
Lindsay Call: Resilience to me is community connectedness. I have seen that community connectedness is that integral, defining piece of how a community is resilient and can endure a major disaster or emergency event. And I've seen that at all levels.
From a very ground level, the families connected to families, a neighbor helping a neighbor… that connectedness and that ability to quickly mobilize a response, even within a family unit or within an apartment building, makes a tremendous difference.
Then, if you go to the policy level, it’s our ability to be connected and to quickly mobilize our own response and policy efforts, even on blue-sky days. Having that level of trust has been what I have seen as the defining success of response efforts, and that can even be when it comes to things like climate change or hazard mitigation planning.
We create a stronger product, and we are doing it collectively. So, in my mind, connectedness is the core of being able to be resilient and being able to endure.
Lorraine Schneider: Have you seen the role of a Chief Resilience Officer and its need evolve over the years?
Lindsay Call: Yes, my role as Chief Resilience Officer was a tad different than others with the title. It primarily started as the 100 Resilience Cities Project (100RC) and individuals that had grant funding tied to building that project and aligning with that work.
My boss, several bosses ago, loved the phrase Chief Resilience Officer and the fundamental ideas behind it, but Santa Monica was not tied to the 100RC project, so I was a bit unique in that I was hired to have three hats.
First, I oversee the 911 dispatch for the City of Santa Monica, then I oversee our traditional emergency management programs and Emergency Operations Center environment, and then I am also the voice of resilience for the City of Santa Monica. And because it is not a standalone role in the city, I have seen it be very much an advocacy role.
I am really striving to bring all of the departments together to have thoughtful conversations when it comes to how we can build sustainability and resiliency into our everyday programs.
For example, when we are implementing new projects, we consider how we can keep things like climate change and earthquake readiness and mitigation in mind.
Government loves silos, and I hate them. I think that a benefit of growing up in a workforce in the emergency operations center environment is that when you have a disaster, there are no divisions. We’re one team, one city.
And so, another role of mine as a resilience officer has been being a matchmaker, bringing city departments that don't usually work together on the same Zoom meeting or the same conference room to say, “Hey, I know you have expertise in this and you have an expertise in this… let's talk about it so we can solve this common goal.” A current example is homelessness.
Our homelessness team was facing a data collection and dashboard challenge. So I was like, have you met these people in the city that are doing something similar? Could we bring all this together? And that is definitely not the typical Chief Resilience Officer role.
And I will say that one of the most challenging parts has been my other workload that I have. I was Emergency Operations Center director for three years during the COVID-19 response. During that time, it has definitely been challenging to focus and dedicate effort to the resilience officer component while maintaining the other two operational workloads.
Lorraine Schneider: It’s certainly a broad definition of resilience and scope of work that you have. I often classify emergency managers as the expert coordinators bringing people together. In what ways would you say that your role is very similar to that of a classic emergency manager? In what ways is it different?
Lindsay Call: I definitely am that coordinator. I keep seeing “collaborator” being the new buzzword when it comes to emergency management, getting people in the room to collaborate with one another.
Yes, that is in my DNA, and it always has been. How I differ is that I'm doing it for various topics, not just for emergency or disaster response.
I am doing it for everyday occurrences when it comes to public safety or dispatch and bringing police, fire and utilities together for even a small incident.
I also think emergency managers have taken on a scope larger than just traditional emergency and disaster incidents. We're now engaged in topics like homelessness and climate change. It's not necessarily bringing people together to coordinate only on bad days but also having a leaning forward posture on mitigation and preparedness on topics like homelessness, climate change and extreme heat events, which didn't play as much of a role before.
Lorraine Schneider: Could you describe a unique or special resilience project that you and the city worked on that was near and dear to you?
Lindsay Call: One of the things that I'm really proud of is our seismic retrofit success, and that's largely in part due to our planning department’s and our community development department's incredible work.
I have served as the community educator on that project and tried to highlight the criticality of seismic retrofit.
In every single preparedness presentation, website, you name it, I think it is absolutely the most important thing we can do to save lives and property during an earthquake. That's our largest, most acute hazard. We already have over 50% of Santa Monica residents and businesses in compliance with the very strict retrofit standards that Santa Monica sets.
We have put forward requirements that were even beyond LA City’s, so I'm really happy and proud that we've made our community that much safer through those mitigation measures and that people have taken it seriously.
It comes down to many more lives being protected and hopefully not being impacted as greatly during an earthquake.
Lorraine Schneider: How receptive do you think residents and stakeholders are to resilience and the evolving needs and priorities of the city to make sure that we are prepared for what's coming next?
Lindsay Call: I think that it's still a struggle. We need a better PR campaign. People are very much concerned about it either right before it's happening, when it's happening, or right after it's happening, and then they forget about it three days later.
We see that every single time there's a storm, a heat event, or an earthquake, there's just a flurry of activity.
We have a huge uptick in everyone, from our department heads, our residents, and our businesses, all looking for information and being concerned about it, but on a typical blue sky day, people forget that it even rains in Southern California.
That is a huge challenge that's definitely reflected in the amount of budget that emergency managers receive and resilience projects receive.
Santa Monica has been very fortunate in that we've had incredible community investments in projects like rainwater conservation, seismic retrofit, and things of that nature.
However, we're still challenged with not having enough resources dedicated to keeping focused on it at all times.
Santa Monica suffered a lot of staffing losses during COVID-19, and while we have been able to make a lot of our other departments whole again and bring staff back, we're still not recognizing the fact that the department that got us through it should probably be up-staffed a little bit more.
We have to make sure that we are focusing our attention and our funding on preventing the next type of pandemic impact.
Lorraine Schneider: What would you say are the main equity and social justice considerations when it comes to resilience planning?
Lindsay Call: There are two things. On a day-to-day level, we have been very focused on language access.
Emergency managers and resilience leaders want one thing, and then the reality is something else. When it comes to language access, I would love to be able to do all of these translations and present all of this information via video and social media. But the infrastructure needed to make that happen in a cost-effective way on a resilience budget is not a reality.
And so you have to think through how we can be most impactful with the resources that we realistically have and try to make sure that we are meeting as many needs as possible.
The other piece of it is that we're being very purposeful in including marginalized communities and folks who didn't often have a voice in our work from the very start.
Because we're trying to unravel years and years and years of institutional, systemic racism, that is very challenging to do.
And we just have to keep going step by step and piece by piece to dismantle it.
Lorraine Schneider: For people who are interested in pursuing a role as a Chief Resilience Officer, what advice would you give them?
Lindsay Call: I took a very unconventional path to emergency management and resilience. So I guess my advice would be to keep your options open and just make those connections and take chances on your career.
You might not have what you think is the perfect resume for a position. If you take a chance, work hard, and are willing to learn, it may end up being a really good fit.
I studied international development and African studies in college and then went straight to grad school. Thinking I wanted to do international disaster response, I studied emergency infectious disease control and did bioterrorism work.
I joined the bioterrorism field when it was a very hot topic, and then the recession ended that funding and broadened my scope from anthrax and botulism to earthquakes, floods and wildfires.
You have to be nimble, and you have to pivot in a field that is hazard-based.
You have to adjust as the hazards adapt.
Be also willing to try a pay cut. I definitely have taken positions where I took a pay cut to be able to get a couple of years of experience in a specific sector to really build out my resume and my experience and lived experiences.
I think that made me stronger as an employee and gave me a holistic view of resiliency, disaster response, and emergency management.
But hopefully, people will pay more for our level of expertise and services in this field. This field is only growing.
Lorraine Schneider: I feel the same way. Sad to say, but with the rise of disasters due to climate change and social upheaval, we often say that there is job security.
I also hope that salaries are going to rise along with that and that more positions will pop up.
So my final question for you is, it's very easy in our field of practice to feel overwhelmed or feel blue because of the eventualities of so many possible hazards and scenarios...
So what is it that keeps you going? What keeps you optimistic?
Lindsay Call: That is a good question, and honestly, it's a hard week to ask that question with the events that have been happening worldwide and in Israel and the Middle East; you do sometimes get a little bit disheartened with the constant bad news and the challenges that we face not only in America but across the world.
The thing that keeps me centered or not feeling too, for lack of a better phrase, underwater is realizing that I am one person. I can only do so much myself, and my job is to act like a force multiplier. I can’t singlehandedly change the world. That's too much for me to bear as one person, but perhaps I can spark change in other people so that they can be that force multiplier. That is what I have hoped to achieve in my career.
When I worked for a hospital as their director of emergency management and public safety, I could work 24/7 and still not get everything done for the day, and I could do that in this job too.
There was a time when I would drive myself crazy and thought, “If I don't get this done, is anyone going to get hurt? Is anyone going to die? Am I going to miss a deadline? Are those checkboxes checked? Okay, well, then we're going to start again tomorrow.”
I try to keep the perspective that when we have our long to-do list, we are just trying to do the best that we can for that day and be that force multiplier.
You need your rest to be able to be the most productive person you can be.
I'm pretty good about setting limits for myself. I am not the person who checks email 24/7. If it's really that bad, you can call or text me.
But I just need to compartmentalize things in order to have a little bit of breathing room and a break.
Otherwise, you know, it never stops.
In December, I will release a Q&A. Got burning questions? Ask away, and I will do my best to answer!