SAFE Team - Infant Feeding in Emergencies

Presenting at the Appalachian Breastfeeding Conference
2026-10-10 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | Oglebay Park Resort, 465 Lodge Dr, Wheeling, WV, 26003, United States
When the System Stops: Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies in Appalachia.
Brandi Harrison, Jayne Carpenter, and Love Anderson are on the Day Two panel at the 6th Appalachian Breastfeeding Conference.
SAFE is the national IYCF-E implementation of Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities. BFFC is the blue skies strategy, the slow work of building communities where feeding a baby is everyone’s business. This is the gray skies work, for the days that strategy gets tested.
Appalachia has already lived this. When the roads wash out and the power stays off for a week, the formula supply chain and the lactation support system fail at the same time, and the families furthest up the holler feel it first. Every emergency plan we have seen assumes someone else is handling the babies. This session is about what a community can put in place before the water rises.
Registration and the full program are on the Appalachian Breastfeeding Network website.

Poster at the Virginia Neonatal Perinatal Collaborative Summit
2026-10-26 00:00 - 23:59
Rachel Fann is presenting a poster at the 2026 VNPC Annual Summit, the Virginia Neonatal Perinatal Collaborative’s tenth.
SAFE is the national IYCF-E implementation of Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities. BFFC is the blue skies strategy, the slow work of building communities where feeding a baby is everyone’s business. This is the gray skies work, for the days that strategy gets tested.
The summit theme is 10 Years of Impact: Learning, Improving and Sharing, and it puts community and clinical providers in the same room — which is exactly where this work has to travel. Virginia is not our state, and that is the point. What we learned in North Carolina after Helene stops being useful the moment it stays in North Carolina.
The summit runs October 25 and 26 in Richmond. Registration is through VCU, and the venue has not been announced yet.

Presenting at the International Association of Emergency Managers Conference
2026-11-09 11:00 - 12:00 | Long Beach Convention Center, 300 E Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA, 90802, United States
The Invisible Infrastructure: Securing First Food in the Wake of Hurricane Helene.
Ashley Mickelson and Love Anderson are presenting at the IAEM 74th Annual Conference and EMEX, which is the room where the country’s emergency managers actually are.
SAFE is the national IYCF-E implementation of Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities. BFFC is the blue skies strategy, the slow work of building communities where feeding a baby is everyone’s business. This is the gray skies work, for the days that strategy gets tested.
Helene showed what happens when the infrastructure that feeds infants is invisible in a plan. It is not a shelter supply line and it is not a medical annex. It is a system of people, and when it breaks there is no form for it. This session makes the case to emergency managers that first food belongs in the plan before the storm, not in the after action report.
The conference runs November 6 through 12 in Long Beach. Registration and the full program are on the IAEM conference site.

Presenting to North Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership Home Visitors
2026-11-19 00:00 - 23:59 | Wrightsville Beach, 1 Bob Sawyer Dr, Wrightsville Beach, NC, 28480, United States
The Calm in the Chaos: Protecting Infant Nutrition from House Fires to Hurricanes.
The full SAFE Team is at Wrightsville Beach for this one. Norma Escobar is presenting for the North Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership Community of Practice.
SAFE is the national IYCF-E implementation of Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities. BFFC is the blue skies strategy, the slow work of building communities where feeding a baby is everyone’s business. This is the gray skies work, for the days that strategy gets tested.
Nurse home visitors are often the only person who lays eyes on a family in the days after a house fire or a flood. That is the point of this session. Most of the emergencies that separate a baby from their feeding plan are small and local and never make the news, and the people who catch them are already in the home.
This is a session for the North Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership community of practice. Session time to be announced.
