This year, members of the SAFE Infant Feeding Team will again participate in the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster Conference as part of the Mass Care Committee’s Children and Disasters Subcommittee.
The SAFE Team first became involved in this work last year when Love Anderson and Julia Bourg, MPH (UNC Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute) presented lessons learned from the infant feeding challenges families faced after Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. Those conversations helped highlight a broader national gap: disaster response systems often lack clear guidance and expertise on feeding infants safely during emergencies.
This year, SAFE Team leaders Melinda Delisle and Ashley Mickelson will represent the team at the conference, continuing the work of integrating infant and young child feeding in emergencies (IYCF-E) into national disaster planning conversations.
SAFE Team Leadership at the Conference
Melinda Delisle
Clinical nutritionist and childbirth educator who combines expertise in maternal–infant health and team leadership to strengthen emergency infant feeding protocols and volunteer training.
Ashley Mickelson
SAFE Team coordinator and IBCLC/SLP focused on connecting families in crisis with evidence-based infant feeding support in emergency shelters and through direct service.
How SAFE Became Involved
Last year, we arrived expecting to share lessons learned from the challenges families faced after Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. Instead, we discovered something much bigger: the gaps we experienced were not unique to North Carolina — they were national.
As we spoke with different committees, we heard a familiar response. The Healthcare Committee believed infant feeding was being addressed elsewhere. The Mass Care Committee thought it might fall under pediatric work. But when we reached the pediatric group, we learned the subcommittee was focused primarily on mental health for children ages 4–12 and did not yet have expertise on infants.
When we shared the realities of feeding babies during disasters, the response was immediate:
“We don’t have expertise on infants — but you do.”
Over the course of that conference, a new conversation began. Together with partners across the disaster response community, we helped spark the development of the Children and Disasters Subcommittee under the National VOAD Mass Care Committee.
Since then, several members of the SAFE Infant Feeding Team Board have been actively participating in the subcommittee’s work, helping support early discussions on goals and strategic priorities so that infants and young children are included in disaster planning from the start.
We are proud to return to the National VOAD Conference this year to continue advancing this work. Due to overlapping conferences in North Carolina, our team will be split — but SAFE members will be present in both places, continuing to build the national conversation around infant and young child feeding in emergencies.
Through this work, the SAFE Infant Feeding Team is helping bring frontline experience into national disaster planning conversations so that the needs of infants and caregivers are no longer overlooked in emergency response.