Emergency Preparedness, Community Resilience & Sustainability: Same Idea, Different Timescales
A panel featuring Jeremy O’Leary, Charla Chamberlain and Leif Brecke, 11 AM, Room 236
Jeremy O’Leary will be speaking from his experience working with federal, state, and local programs that are meant to help communities prepare for disasters. As a permaculturalist, his methods for disaster preparedness integrate general community resilience and not solely emergency preparedness, or what he calls, “the long emergency”. Charla Chamberlain will speak to her experience having been a community organizer with City Repair in Portland for over a decade. She will discuss the successes and challenges she found in getting neighbors to work together towards common goals. Leif will be discussing how the formation of a Cascadia Resilience Network is taking place the direction he envisions it going.
BIOS: If there is an organization in Portland that has to do with livability and sustainability issues, chances are Jeremy O’Leary is involved with it to some degree. With prior experiences with the city’s Peak Oil Task Force, along withTransition PDX, overseeing TheDirt.org, Portland Permaculture Guild, participating with the City’s Local Energy Assurance Plan (LEAP), and also the FooDiversity group that looks at food and garden issues in East Portland. Jeremy is also an IT staffer for Multnomah County, for which he served on the steering committee for the Multnomah Food Initiative.
Charla Chamberlain grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington as a mixed race woman in a primarily white population in the 1970′s. She was a founding Board member, Co-Director, Intersection Repair Program, T-Horse, Volunteer, and Earth Day Celebration Coordinator with The City Repair Project from 1997-2004. She studied Community Development at Portland State University and is passionate about neighborhoods and cities building collaborative networks of relationship. She is currently the Development Co-Manager, Communications at Sisters Of The Road, a nonprofit cafe building authentic relationships to alleviate the hunger of isolation in Old Town/Chinatown. She enjoys making her own yogurt, kimchi, and shrub, singing in the sunshine of her backyard, and talking to strangers in restaurants.
Leif Brecke is a long time activist and fifth generation Cascadian forest worker. He is a veteran of the bioregion’s forest defense and anti-corporate globalization movements. Leif is the Program Coordinator of the Resilient Communities Project and the Social Systems Facilitator at the Cascadian Resilience Network. A graduate of the University of Oregon with a B.S. in Cultural Anthropology, his research interests are network theory, complex systems, community resilience, and community resistance.
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