What Struck Me Most at the Preparedness Symposium Wasn’t on Our Slides

We went to the NC Public Health Preparedness and Response Symposium in Winston-Salem to talk about infant feeding in emergencies. But the moment that has stayed with me wasn’t anything the SAFE Team put on a slide. It was a story told by the harm reduction community about the work they did during the fall 2024 hurricane response.

I sat there listening, and I kept thinking the same thing over and over: that is our struggle, almost word for word.

They were the people the community already trusted. When the storm came, families went to them — not because anyone had assigned them that role, but because they had been showing up all along. They found ways to get resources to people that the official response simply couldn’t reach. And their challenge was exactly ours. They needed emergency managers to put their contact information on the list. They needed relationships built before the disaster, not discovered after it.

That is the IYCF-E story too. We are the people families come to. And we have built the relationship first. We need to be part of planning conversation.

Connecting with harm reduction is not a side conversation for us. It is a critical piece of building a community where people feel safe to lactate. You cannot separate the two.

From Macro to Micro

Here is where it stopped being abstract for me.

Right after the symposium, we hosted a Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community event back home in Durham. We chose the spot on purpose — a park in one of our highest infant mortality ZIP codes — because that is exactly where this work needs to be.

And the same theme showed up at a much smaller scale. One of our volunteers flagged that there were needles on the ground in the park. We had one person clearly struggling with substance use sitting on the steps at the edge of the event. The macro emergency I had just heard about and the micro emergency in our own park were, in the end, the same emergency. The same story. The same need to meet people where they actually are instead of where we wish they were.

What We Are doing Next

We left that event with two concrete commitments.

First, we are building a relationship with our local harm reduction folks, and we are working to get a sharps container installed in that park. A safe park is part of a safe place to lactate.

Second, the next time we host a BFFC event, we are going to make sure someone from harm reduction is there with us — not off to the side, but present and available — so they can talk with the community members who are struggling. The person on those steps deserved someone who could meet them. Next time, we want that someone to already be there.

This is all the same work. Whether it is a hurricane that displaces an entire region or a single person sitting on the steps of a park in Durham, the goal does not change: a community where every family feels safe enough to feed their baby. That is what a SAFE breastfeeding family friendly community looks like — and harm reduction is part of it.

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