KENT, Conn.—In a world where disasters strike with increasing frequency, a Kent couple is helping communities around the world to prepare for and recover from crisis situations.
Brian and Heather Hunt founded the non-profit Global Resilience Foundation Inc. (GRF) last May to do community training in disaster response, working with all kinds of clients, from local communities to federal agencies. They have just gone global, working with the Simex Hub in Nepal to secure funding for an $800,000 community resilience project.
“In resilience training we train communities to sustain themselves without any outside help for the first 72 hours,” Brian Hunt said. “We build connections among a community’s resources so they can work together and identify the gaps so communities can avoid them as much as possible.”
Hunt, who has about 20 years of experience in public safety in the Kent and Sharon fire departments, as Kent’s former Emergency Management director and as a security and safety director for private schools, said he was shocked to find that most communities have no strategic plans for emergency response.
He focuses on resilience training, the kind of work that can be done before a disaster strikes that informs a community’s reaction to it. “We are the bridge that fills the gaps,” he explained. “The primary goal is to ensure that when natural or manmade disasters strike, the community has a pre-defined plan for preparedness, communication, resource optimization, response, and short and long-term stabilization.
“This is a field that actually doesn’t exist,” he said, “but we have gotten some traction on it and are working with several communities in Pennsylvania. What we provide depends on what a community is looking for—it could be CPR training, planning reviews in writing, incident command training, anything along those lines. I am certified through Homeland Security and have done numerous training sessions for the public.”
The kinds of problems encountered in different communities “are pretty much uniform” despite differences in cultures, he said. “It’s actually easier in developing countries than it is in the U.S. where the ‘silos’ have been in place for so long. A lot comes down to politics. We take the politics out of everything and get people to recognize that politics is not the driving force and that they can do many things for themselves.”
To further their end, the couple has just obtained its first Mobile Resilience POD, a state-of-the-art communications center designed to deploy rapidly to disaster zones, training sites and prolonged field operations. It can provide emergency supplies, aid and essential services to frontline responders and affected communities during crises such as climate disasters, extreme heatwaves or pandemics
“It’s a self-contained communication and resilience unit mounted on a trailer that can be disseminated anywhere,” Hunt said. “It is geared toward lower-income populations that may not have vehicles to get to where they can receive information. With it, homeless populations can be linked with resources—we bring the information to them rather than them having to navigate ways to get to the information.”
“One of our bigger programs is trying to reach the homeless, locating homeless populations and completing a pre-disaster intake for this demographic. Following hurricanes Helene and Milton, I spent six weeks down in Florida working on shelter.”
He said he wants to mount it on a trailer big enough to transport the POD and GRF’s utility task vehicle “so it can go anywhere.”
The 5-by-8-foot unit has a mesh networker repeater—a unit that wirelessly connects to a central mesh router to expand Wi-Fi coverage—and a weather station. Other features can be added as desired, and he said his connection with the manufacturer allows him to work with communities to lower the price if they wish to obtain one.
The POD cost about $7,000, not counting the trailer, and was funded through a grant from the Rebecca Serkey Follow Your Dreams Fund. GRF has named it in honor of Rebecca Serkey, a New Mexico flight medic who died in 2014 in a medevac crash while responding to a call for help.
“Rebecca dedicated her life to being there for others when the unexpected struck,” said Hunt.
“One wall of the pod is dedicated to first responder line-of-duty deaths,” Hunt said. “We will put the names of first responders who died in the line of duty on the wall at no cost.”
The couple transformed their business from a for-profit business to a nonprofit to make it eligible for grants that will help it grow. “We had a for-profit business before,” Hunt said, “but we decided to go nonprofit, because we are able to get bigger grants. If a program is grant-funded, we can do it at no cost to a community.
At present the Hunts operate the business out of their Kent home. For more information on GRF visit www.grfinc.org , email info@grfinc.org , or call 203-312-7740
