Trauma-informed Disaster Recovery Toolkit
TEAM: LAB AT OPM
YEAR: 2021-2024
UX RESEARCH
CO-DESIGN & FACILITATION
PROTOTPYING
VISUAL DESIGN
More than 20 million people in the United States survive a disaster every year. The Trauma-informed Disaster Recovery Toolkit equips disaster workers with the tools they need to provide a more effective and dignified response.
The Challenge
When disaster strikes, survivors face the overwhelming task of rebuilding their lives. They must attend to basic needs and maintain businesses while grappling with stress and trauma. On top of that, survivors must navigate a maze of bureaucratic processes with conflicting guidance to access the support they need from the government.
Our Approach
We brought agency leaders from the Federal government together to understand and improve disaster recovery. Our process was survivor-centered, trauma-informed, and co-created with response staff. Our team conducted over fifty interviews in-person, virtually, in English, and in Spanish. Participants included people who respond to disasters and survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires and represented various backgrounds—including low-income renters and home owners, parents, the elderly, new immigrants, Veterans, and people with disabilities.
After interviewing dozens of disaster survivors from across the country, we drafted composite persona narratives.
The survivor narratives allowed our team to identify key pain points and opportunities for improving the recovery journey. One major learning— that the recovery experience is made meaningfully better when survivors are treated with care— became the seed for a suite of tools to support response staff to become more trauma-informed. Through co-design workshops with disaster response staff and rounds of prototypes, we developed the Trauma-informed Disaster Recovery Toolkit. The Toolkit includes an in-person workshop, three video lessons, and a guidebook delivered by trauma-informed care practitioners and disaster response experts. The Toolkit is publicly available to watch and download.​
Short video lessons break down a trauma-informed approach to disaster recovery, made clear through a range of narrators and visuals.
Its Impact
We tested the Toolkit in a pilot project with over 300 FEMA staff. All of the participants documented their interactions with the Toolkit via surveys, diary studies, and interviews with our team. They shared how it had altered their mindsets and was showing up in their interactions with survivors. The results were highly promising: a majority of participants reported that their knowledge of trauma and trauma-informed techniques increased significantly. Additionally, more than half shared that the Toolkit improved their ability to serve recovery recipients.
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​The findings from testing allowed the team to refine the Toolkit and develop an accompanying Implementation Handbook. The Handbook is a step-by-step guide for any Federal team that delivers recovery programs to carry out the Toolkit. The Toolkit is now in circulation for Federal teams across the government.
