Earlier this year, I did a Q&A with Andrew Barley and Ben Hirsch of West Street Recovery (WSR), a grassroots, non-profit organization based in Texas that focuses on community involvement and empowerment.
You can read the full Q&A from April here
At the time, they mentioned WSR and a few other grassroots groups in the area were working on a paper that would center the experiences of Hurricane Harvey survivors navigating the disaster response and recovery processes. Earlier this month, the groups published that report, titled “
Survivors as Experts.” In an accompanying panel that walked through some of the key points from the paper (I embedded the recording below), Mal Moses, one of the survivors, addressed a question about how journalists could do a better job of covering disasters.
“Let them see us,” he said. “Let them hear from us.”
So, for my last issue of the year, I wanted to do just that: direct you to hear from disaster survivors themselves. This newsletter will be off for the next three weeks as I prep for some 2022 changes and features (good ones, I promise!), and I hope you’ll take the time you normally dedicate to reading these dispatches to hear from Mal and others that shared their stories.