This is the part nobody puts in the report

Eleven sessions of Nourishing Resilience are done. I think I was supposed to sit down and write something happy and proud. Instead I have spent a week doing anything else.

Now that it is over, I feel sad. I still feel wounded, still carrying where all of this began. And I feel not done. The hurricane was so horrible that I do not want it to happen to anyone else, and I still see, every day, how unprepared we are.

Brandi put it better than I have managed to:

That is roughly where I am too. It is also why we keep doing S3C.

This Tuesday (today): come and tell us how it actually is.

We convene SAFE Support and Strategic Core every quarter for the people doing this work on the ground. This one is deliberately informal. The series just ended, it is World Breastfeeding Week, and mostly we want to sit together and talk about what the work actually looks like right now.

Bring what is happening where you are. Bring what is stuck. Bring the part you would not put in a report.

I have started writing it down

This week I am starting a series about what actually happened after Helene, and what it has cost the people who did it. The first piece is called One Cloth, Many Hands.

It will not be a tidy account. Some of it is mine and some of it belongs to the volunteers and coordinators who were there, told in their own words and with their permission. I am writing it because the honest version is more useful to the next community than the proud one, and because I do not want us to forget the details while they are still fresh enough to hurt.

Pieces will go up on the site as they are ready, and I will send them here.

Where the SAFE Team will be:

Dates and details are on our new events calendar.

It is World Breastfeeding Week, which feels like the right week to say this plainly. Normalising and supporting breastfeeding is a preparedness strategy. The reason our communities could respond at all is that some of that work had already been done, quietly, for years before anyone needed it.

Thank you for being part of it, especially the parts that were hard.

See you Tuesday.

Love Anderson
President & CEO, Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities
Cofounder, SAFE Infant Feeding Team