Build It In Your Community: Where To Start

After Hurricane Helene, a group of lactation professionals, clinicians, and volunteers in Western North Carolina built an infant feeding response from nothing, in the middle of a disaster, because no one else was responsible for feeding the youngest survivors. What follows is what that produced, organized so another community can use it.

Start wherever your community actually is. Most people begin in the middle, and almost nobody should begin by trying to run a full response. Every row below answers a question someone has actually asked us. Find yours and start there.

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Before anything happens

Everything is easier if it is built during blue sky. This is the work to do now, while nothing is on fire — and it is the part most groups skip, because there is no emergency making them do it.

What you need	Where to go
Where do I even begin locally?	Setting Up Local Infant and Young Child Feeding Emergency Preparedness — how to find out who in your county is already responsible for feeding families after a disaster, and where infants fall through.
Does my county plan account for infants?	Does Your Emergency Plan Account for Infants? — a short self-assessment you can run in minutes and carry into a meeting.
Who do I need to know before a disaster?	Creating a Resource List for IYCF-E Connections — emergency management, healthcare coalitions, state and local VOAD, WIC and public health, food pantries and shelters. What to record about each one, and a site-labelling convention that makes route-building possible later.
How do I speak their language?	Learning the Language of Emergency Management — the FEMA trainings worth taking before you sit down with your county.

None of this requires funding or permission. One person with a spreadsheet and a few phone calls can do all of it.

1 · Deciding whether and how to act

Something has happened. These are the documents that get you from “I think there may be a need” to “here is what we are going to do, and at what scale.”

What you need	Where to go
Do I even need to respond?	Determining Need — the questions to ask about water, power, heat, healthcare, displaced families and what sites are already handing out, then a decision tree with the four Levels of Response, from public education through a fully organized response.
How do I stand something up?	Response Overview — the master startup playbook: eight personnel roles, the categories of support to plan for, logistics and tech stack, and twelve explicit start-up decisions you will face early, including fiscal sponsor, headquarters, storage, intake, kit branding, milk banking and formula disposal.
I am one person, not an organization.	Deploying as an Individual or Small Group — what one or two people can genuinely accomplish without infrastructure, how to go out safely, and where to stop.
I run a small organization and my clients are affected.	IYCF-E Support for Small Organizations — how to keep serving the families you already have when their water, power and housing have changed underneath them.
Somebody wants to give us money and we are not a nonprofit.	Who Holds the Money: Fiscal Sponsorship — what a fiscal sponsor does, what we have done ourselves, the questions to settle in writing first, and who to learn this from properly.
Who coordinates the people going out?	Field Coordinator SOP — the boots-on-the-ground role in full: what to print, what the coordinator owns, kit management, assigning sites, building routes, and the run of the day.

Most communities land at Level 2 or 3 and stay there. That is a real response, not a lesser one.

2 · Assessing the situation

You cannot serve needs you have not found, and you will not find them by asking agencies whether needs exist.

What you need	Where to go
How do I find out what families actually need?	Rapid Needs Assessment — a facts-to-learn grid, a conversational question set that works standing in a distribution line, and a what-to-do matrix pairing education with supplies. Adapted from the CDC IYCF-E toolkit.
How do I approach a distribution site?	Contacting Sites — a phone script, an in-person scouting script with observation checklist, a gentle negotiation script for getting formula into temperature-controlled storage, a blue-sky script for ordinary times, and a wind-down script for when your response ends. Blanks instead of our details, so you can use them as they are.
How much formula should a shelter actually keep on hand?	How Much Formula to Stock — the established UNICEF planning rate, worked through for a 250-person shelter, plus why you stock for the worst case but distribute only after assessment.
How do I track sites, families and needs?	The operations spreadsheet we ran the Helene response on covers sites, agency outreach, urgent needs, families, trainings, daily dispatch and intake, with a companion inventory sheet for kits and supplies in and out. We are rebuilding both as blank templates with worked examples. Until they are posted, ask us and we will send them.

Do not rely solely on reports from agencies, shelters, or people outside the area to tell you what needs exist. After Helene, other organizations consistently reported that families had no infant feeding needs. Field volunteers then uncovered needs in those same families.

3 · Direct service

The part that happens in parking lots, church basements and shelter hallways.

What you need	Where to go
What exactly goes in a kit?	Sanitation Kit Guide — the full bill of materials with specifications, how to teach cold sanitation including the CDC bleach ratio and soak time, why the syringe in the kit is the measuring device, and the audit protocol for donated kits: what to keep, what to remove, and what has to come out because it is not safe.
How do we do this without adding to what people have already been through?	Trauma-Informed Response — how to approach families and site staff who are exhausted, grieving or displaced, and how to look after your own volunteers while you do it.
Donated human milk has arrived and nobody knows what to do with it.	When Donated Milk Shows Up — the questions coordinators found themselves working through mid-response, and what national guidance does and does not say.
The baby is nine months old and everything on the pallet is for adults.	Feeding Children 6 Months to 3 Years in an Emergency — why general rations do not feed a young child, what texture and how many meals by age, what shelf-stable food to actually stock, and the bowl-spoon-and-open-cup kit (with a note on why bottles are not in it).
A parent has been told to stop breastfeeding because of a medication.	Medications and Breastfeeding in an Emergency — how to look it up in the NIH LactMed database, why an unnecessary interruption is more dangerous in a disaster than out of one, and exactly where a volunteer’s scope ends.
What do I actually hand a family?	Why Every Family Needs a SAFE Infant Feeding Kit, Winter Storm Prep with Babies for families and the version written for the people supporting them, and Shelter Signs you can print and post today.
What else exists that is not up here yet?	The family visual booklet in editable form so another state can put its own name on it, and bilingual site posters. (The DIY sanitation kit handout, the Hierarchy of Safe Feeding and the formula storage infographics are now on the site.) All of it is real and all of it is yours — we are working through posting it, and in the meantime ask us.

4 · Training people

You do not need to invent a curriculum. Ours is recorded, free, and already yours to use.

What you need	Where to go
How do I learn this myself?	Nourishing Resilience — eleven recorded sessions with handouts and action steps. This is our answer to “how do I get trained.”
How do I train other people?	Start with Session 8 — Teaching Volunteers & Site Staff, which is built for exactly this, then Session 9 — Managing On-the-Ground Response for organising people once they are in the field. Point volunteers at the full recordings above. The trainer flip chart is UNC property and we do not distribute it — anyone who wants it goes to UNC directly.
What else do you teach?	Infant & Young Child Feeding in Emergencies Trainings — the full catalogue, including sessions we run live for coalitions and agencies.
Can we work together on an ongoing basis?	SAFE Support and Strategic Core (S3C) for organizations that want us alongside them rather than a one-time training, and Technical Assistance and Capacity Building Services for tabletop exercises and policy guidance.

5 · Policy and advocacy

Responding is the emergency. Changing who is responsible next time is the work.

What you need	Where to go
How do I get infant feeding into county policy?	IYCF-E County Policy Adoption Toolkit — the case to make, the sequence that has actually moved counties, and an editable sample county policy in Word.
What do I bring to that conversation?	What to Bring to Your Next Advocacy Conversation — what to walk in with, and what to ask for.
What do we say about donated formula?	Clarifying SAFE’s Position on Donations in Emergencies — global guidance, U.S. realities, and the harm-reduction approach we actually take when a truck of formula arrives.
A formula company wants to donate to us.	The International Code — What It Means for Your Response — what the Code covers, the four things it rules out for a responding team, why it is not a reason to withhold formula from a family who needs it, and how to write your own position down before the offer arrives.
How do I make the case that this keeps happening?	Promoting IYCF-E As Our Climate Changes — the argument for treating infant feeding as standing preparedness rather than a one-off after each storm.

6 · Sustaining and proving the work

The response ends. The need to explain it, fund it and survive it does not.

What you need	Where to go
How do I not burn out?	The trauma-informed guidance above covers looking after your responders while you are in it, and Healing After Disaster brings in Duke experts on mental health and resilience for the longer tail.
Where is the evidence?	The IYCF-E Research Repository — the literature we draw on, in one place, for when a funder or a health department asks you to show your basis.
How do I show this mattered?	Mapping the Ripples — how we think about the change this work creates beyond the households served. A measurement framework a new group can pick up is something we are still building; if a funder is asking you to report, say so and we will work it through with you.

7 · Resources you can hand to someone else

If you already know who you are serving, these pages are written for that audience and can be passed on exactly as they are.

You are	Where to go
A parent or caregiver	Resources for Families & Caregivers
Running or supplying a distribution site	Resources for Distribution Sites — what to discard, how to mark and organize an infant feeding area, and human milk handling.
Running a shelter or congregate space	Shelter & Congregate Area Resources
Part of a VOAD or a faith-based response	VOAD Resources for Infant and Young Child Feeding
A disaster case manager working with survivors one to one	DCMs & Direct Survivor Support

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Where we stop

Human milk sharing. What we do say is on When Donated Milk Shows Up — the questions coordinators actually worked through when milk arrived, and where the national guidance stands. What we will not publish is a protocol for informal milk sharing. Liability and milk-sharing law vary by state, and we are not in a position to advise another state on its own. If that is the situation you are in, talk to us before you act.

The trainer flip chart and related curriculum. Those materials belong to the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill, and requests go to UNC directly. The training that is ours to give freely is the recorded Nourishing Resilience series above. What is ours, we give under our Open Source Use Agreement — it covers the recordings, not the CGBI slides shown in them.

We’re here if you need us

Communities across the country are building this work, and many of them start with a conversation rather than a download. If you are standing something up where you are — or you are in the middle of a response right now — reach out. We would rather help you get it right the first time.

Help us keep doing this

The SAFE Infant Feeding Team is a largely volunteer effort. Everything on this site — the trainings, the templates, the tools — was built and is maintained by people doing it alongside other work, and we are actively seeking secured, sustained national funding so that this work does not depend on that.

We will say this plainly rather than politely: we are barely hanging on financially. Everything on this page is free and we intend to keep it that way, but it is maintained by people doing it around other work, and we are still looking for the secured, sustained national funding that would make it not depend on that.

If these resources are useful to you or your community, a donation is the most direct way to keep them free, current, and here for the next community that needs them. If you are replicating this work somewhere and it saved you months, that is the moment to consider it.