Partner Spotlight

Alma Bowen had just sat down to a late dinner on October 8, 2017, when she received an emergency alert instructing her to report immediately to her job as a 9-1-1 dispatcher for Sonoma County. The deadly Tubbs Fire, the most destructive wildfire in California history, was sweeping through her community. As soon as she sat down, she began taking back-to-back reports of hundreds of fires and people asking to be rescued – frantically describing their emergencies and asking what they should do. Soon there were no more resources to send out, no more help they could offer.

A few months later Alma started to build the nonprofit organization that would become Nuestra Comunidad (NC), the premiere disaster preparedness organization in Sonoma County (founded in November 2018).

Hear first-hand how Alma started Nuestra Comunidad and her new career as a Disaster Preparedness Outreach Educator.

Today, NC works to build a culture of preparedness in Sonoma County to ensure that more people are ready to respond and help themselves and their neighbors during natural disasters. Their programs – including 9-1-1 awareness, Listos California outreach and workshops, and cultural, social and health-focused events – are inclusive of the immigrant, Spanish-speaking, and elderly community members who are often most vulnerable to impacts from disasters. They aim to normalize disaster preparedness so it becomes part of people’s habits, planning, and decisions 365 days a year, rather than only in the wake of a crisis.

As a Listos California subgrantee of Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa, NC interacts very intentionally with multiple communities and groups in Sonoma County. The outreach the NC team does is highly interactive and based on personal connections made in their communities. They meet with agricultural workers both in the vineyards and fields as well as during health and wellness fairs that employers set up for their workers. They go where people live, meeting with seniors in the community rooms of mobile home parks and other residential communities. They present to faith communities, businesses, and schools. Following the presentations they make, NC team members are frequently approached by folks asking for more – a presentation to a mothers group, or their neighborhood, or another organization they are part of. The answer is always yes!

This ripple effect is evident in all their work. The NC team also annually offers a train-the-trainer disaster preparedness class for local high school students using the Listos California Disaster Ready Guide as the core curriculum for their training. Following the training, each high school student then offers their own preparedness course to a group of people of their choosing–family members, a school club, neighbors, or anyone they can reach. The student who trains the most people receives a fully stocked Go Bag. The students get very creative and competitive. One student even trained the entire football team! Through the efforts of the 120 students trained by the NC team, more than 800 people were taught how to prepare for disasters.

In addition to their wide range of disaster preparedness and response work as a Listos California partner, NC also has programs that support the physical and mental health of the communities they serve, including their Nutritional Cohort Program that promotes healthy eating habits and health maintenance, and a youth program that offers mental health education, self-care techniques, disaster preparedness and pathways to first responder career opportunities. With their multi-layered approach, Nuestra Comunidad is building a culture of preparedness in Sonoma County, actively engaging their community members with a focus on individual resilience and empowerment, two key qualities that enable people to recover more quickly during and after a disaster.