From Relief to Resilience with Will Heegaard

The Response

Anyone who's been in a disaster and experienced the initial government or major nonprofit response may have noticed that there's a lot of waste involved. From the thousands of single-use water bottles and throw-away medical supplies to the constant churning of diesel and gas-powered generators, there’s just really no other option. But what if there was? Would it be adopted? How could these large disaster response institutions even know that things could be done differently?

That’s where Footprint Project comes in. Since 2017 they've been proving that it's possible to respond cleaner and build back greener by deploying 200+ kW of mobile solar and 600+ kWh of mobile battery storage on more than 20 disaster response and recovery missions, to provide emergency clean power access to over 28,000 people in some of the hardest hit communities following disasters.

Today on the show, we’ve brought on Footprint Project’s Operations Director, Will Heegaard, who shares the genesis stories for how he got involved in disaster response work and the impetus behind launching the organization. He also unpacks the importance of building resilient communities and the role he feels that state agencies should play in disaster relief.

And for those listeners who just completed our Emergency Battery Network Co-Lab (or are planning to check out the course recordings and Toolkit that are soon to be on our website), stick around for the full conversation to hear Will’s advice on how to build power in your community.

Resources:

• Footprint Project

Episode credits:

• Hosted and co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Presented, edited, and co-produced by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

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The Response is published by Shareable.