There's a Lesson in Here Somewhere
There’s a Lesson in Here Somewhere is a podcast hosted by Jamie Serino and Carlos Arcila that features exceptional people that have compelling stories to tell. Whether it’s a unique perspective, an act of kindness, an inspirational achievement, a hardship overcome, or bearing witness to a captivating event, these are stories that must be heard, and from which we can draw important lessons.
There's a Lesson in Here Somewhere
Key Insights for Developing Emotional Resilience in Your Organization with World Cares Center
In this episode of There's a Lesson in Here Somewhere, we speak with Lisa Orloff, Founder of World Cares Center, about helping people in high stress work environments develop emotional resilience, and how that can apply to any individual and workplace. We also discuss the work that Lisa and her team does to train citizens to be Ready Responders and help people and organizations develop disaster preparedness programs, as well as World Cares Center’s extraordinary disaster response efforts around the world over the past 23 years. Join us as we highlight adaptability, agility, and empowerment in a world where everyone needs to be prepared for the unexpected.
You're listening to. There's a Lesson in here, Somewhere, a podcast featuring compelling conversations with exceptional people. Whether it's an inspirational achievement, a hardship overcome or simply a unique perspective, these are stories we can all learn from. Here are your hosts, Jamie Serino and Carlos Arcila.
Jamie Serino:Hello and welcome to. There's a Lesson in here Somewhere. I'm Jamie Serino and we're here today with Lisa Orloff, the founder of World Care Center. I've known Lisa for about 20 years and Lisa was the person who taught me about a go bag. Lisa was the person who taught me about the phrase first responder, and she was using that phrase, I think, long before the rest of us started using it. So I've always had this sense of if my go bag wasn't up to date, or if it wasn't up to date, or if it wasn't quite the way it should be, lisa's voice would be in my head Like Jamie, your go bag, you know. So she's had a very strong impact on me and has taught me so much about disaster preparedness, disaster response and a lot of the nuances that we don't normally think about.
Jamie Serino:And between when I met Lisa and today, the world has changed right and so much has changed. And the education now is we're just becoming better educated, naturally, but I think what you're doing is pushing it. You know to where we need to know more and we need to be personally responsible. So I'll leave it at that and I'll turn it over to you for a more complete introduction and I'll say that you can go to. Worldcaresorg is the website, but we'll mention it a couple more times. Okay, lisa, please a more complete introduction.
Lisa Orloff:Thanks, jamie. I didn't realize that I was in your head. I'm sorry for that, and I should make note that you helped us a lot years ago with our marketing and the way to succinctly communicate what we do, which is always an issue, and you're going to find that out during this podcast. But thank you so much.
Lisa Orloff:So World Care Center was founded during the 9-11 relief effort, and anybody that was in New York City or in the other areas that were hit realized that there was an outpouring of people that wanted to help, not only locally, but people were converging from different parts of the world to help, and that was wonderful to see. We needed that support. We needed that outpouring of hope and help, but our traditional systems were overwhelmed. They didn't know how to handle all of these volunteers. Traditionally, it was Office of Emergency Management, the Fire Department, the Police Department and the Red Cross, and that was it. And if you weren't one of those entities, then there was really no room for you and we needed this support coming in. We were completely overwhelmed. Maybe people don't realize it, but Office of Emergency Management's headquarters were in the Twin Towers, and so they were struggling as much as anyone else. You know, we didn't realize that when we were working with them, but when we found out later on it was like, oh okay, that was why certain people were reacting in a certain way. That was unexpected, because they were grieving horribly as well. So there was no management structure. There was an outpouring of all this help.
Lisa Orloff:People were not trained. They had skills, but they weren't trained specifically on disaster response. They were going down working side by side with the fire department, not wearing the correct personal protective equipment, not wearing their N95 respirators, exposed to a lot of emotional trauma, without pre-training. Did they do good work? Absolutely. Did our firefighters do a lot of work trying to recover their fellow firefighters? Absolutely, but at what cost? Today we've lost more firefighters to the cancer that they have succumbed to because of their work in and around Ground Zero than we lost on the actual day of the event.
Lisa Orloff:So, long story short, our mission has been, and always will be, to train, support and protect ready responders, and that's just the group of people that come out to help. They can be someone who has experience say, they're experienced firefighter, volunteer firefighter out on Long Island, but they're in New York City and they're doing some work. Well, they have experiences to bring to the table. Or it could be a citizen that steps out to help and just doesn't realize they're going to plug in. But we want all of them to be trained on the same credential. So we're talking the same language. We have an understanding of what is required. We also have an understanding of what these ready responders should not do, should not take on because there's too much of a risk, and basically how to work together safely.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, yeah.
Jamie Serino:So if you can maybe dive into that a little bit more, because I think people generally feel like, oh, a disaster happens, people are going to come in and help, right, and here comes the Red Cross or here comes the fire department, and that's true, right, but you've shown that sometimes there's a gap between the event and when those people can come and help, and other times, like you're pointing out, people want to run in and try to help and they might not be trained. So if you could talk a little bit about that, I think you know, for people to understand both that gap and this sense of like you know what? I think we've seen that people are put in positions sometimes where I have to take care of myself and my family and my community it's me, you know, and then like so, then how, and so it's it's. It's like preventing chaos, right, and people running in and doing the wrong thing, letting people know and be educated, like, okay, this thing just happened. What do I do now?
Jamie Serino:As you know, the professionals are coming. Okay, this thing just happened. What do I do now, as the professionals are coming?
Lisa Orloff:So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Sure, where to start? So, first of all, when you're effective and you're efficient and you're doing a good job, everybody assumes you're with an agency and they just don't ask, right? And so there was a disbelief when we were volunteering during the 9-11 relief effort that we were just spontaneous volunteers and we would say they're like okay, what agency are you from? We're like we're just New Yorkers and they're like just New Yorkers. I've never heard of that agency before.
Lisa Orloff:So you know this phenomenon, we've learned this spontaneous volunteerism, this community action, right, not not new. It's human nature. It should be and protected, right. So disasters there is a. There are many different ways of volunteers. Volunteer groups will come from other parts of the country and they will converge upon this area and they will begin to help. But they often need guidance. They may need housing, they may need to be fed, they may need to understand the difference of our community versus the community they come from.
Lisa Orloff:But the thing that people don't really talk about is that disasters happen to communities and within those communities, there are leaders that are working in that community every day. They're not converging upon the disaster, the disaster has converged upon them and they're just doing what they would do, naturally. So if you talk about faith-based leaders caring for their community, of course they're going to either do one of two things. Their constituents are either going to call them and say I need help, what are you going to do for me? Or we need to help other people. What are we going to do together? And that local leader needs to be prepared to lead their constituents safely and effectively with the capabilities that they currently have, or maybe increasing surge capacity, but staying with what they know.
Lisa Orloff:So, for instance, during Superstorm Sandy, we went to a church on Staten Island and they felt very passionately about providing hot meals for those impacted by disaster, right by Sandy. And what ended up happening was I went there and I'm like, okay, great, you want to provide half meals? Let's take a look at your kitchen. We don't have a kitchen, okay. Let's look at your food pantry. Well, we don't have a food pantry. Okay, how many people in your constituents have, you know, food handling certificates? Well, none. We've never done this before.
Lisa Orloff:And I said, okay, let's back up a little bit. What do you have? What do you do? What are your assets? What is your constituent. What are they capable of doing? And it turned out that they had a huge warehouse. They had a pallet jack, they had the capability to actually run a supply depot out of their church, which, in fact, is what we did with them out of their church, which, in fact, is what we did with them. Right, we got them the sleeping bags and the supplies that were needed and they ended up distributing them. So it's really looking for those local leaders, looking at what their capacity is, their ability, and really building from there. Local leaders are natural coordinators, they're natural caregivers. They don't need to be taught how to do that. We just need a layer on top, the disaster management component, and then, equally as important, we need to connect them with the resources that they traditionally are never connected with.
Jamie Serino:Right.
Lisa Orloff:You know there are resources out there. There are government donations, there are individual donations of resources, so it's not only the training and the protecting, but it's also the connection to the resources that are available to them.
Jamie Serino:Yep, and so how does World Cares then play a role? Like with all that going on? How do you guys come in and address that?
Lisa Orloff:So with the training we've developed the collaborative disaster volunteer credential. And what that is is we've pulled together about 45 grassroots leaders and who don't have a standing disaster volunteer training and we've said what do you want your disaster volunteer to look like In your experience and response? What do they need to know? What's the basic training? And we've taken from all of World Care Center's training topics and pulled together three levels that we've all agreed upon is the standard that we will use. So when we say muck and gut operation, everybody knows what that is.
Lisa Orloff:When one group says I need volunteers to muck and duck my community, while the group that's going to say I'm going to help, the expectation is they've taken the training. But the expectation also is is the group that's requesting help is going to provide them with the agreed upon personal protective equipment? So that's a respirator, you know goggles a list of things are going to be provided for them, right? So it's really laying a common foundation. This is built upon the concept of what incident command is all about and what our government follows and these mutual aid agreements and these common standards. Disaster volunteers have to have that as well. Yeah.
Lisa Orloff:And it shouldn't be specific to agency to agency right. All the agencies that do muck and gut operations should have a common standard to follow and agree upon right, and we should also agree upon how we're protecting our volunteers, not only physically but emotionally. So the first thing that we're doing is training and credentialing through the Collaborative Disaster Volunteer Credential, and we invite local leaders and volunteer groups to join our advisory board and agree that this would be their foundational training, skills-based training, and help to shape this and move this forward. The second thing we do is we have become known as the organization that redistributes personal protective equipment. So we're grateful to our donors for donating N95 respirators, tyvek suits, gloves and things like that, which we then redistribute to the grassroots groups that need them to protect their volunteers. And we did a lot of that during COVID-19.
Lisa Orloff:We, the small organization that we are, we were very lucky to have a stock of N95 respirators that we were actually using for training and we were able to redistribute them to those on the front line. We distributed to the fire department, we distributed to hospitals, we distributed to grassroots groups. It's amazing, the people that did not have PPE compared to little old us that had PPE. It was kind of like the little engine that could, and so we remain that resource.
Lisa Orloff:And then the third thing that we do is really work to connect and coordinate. So when it's in our living room like Sandy was in our living room, superstorm Sandy was in our living room we opened up volunteer reception centers and we coordinated physically on the ground. When it's in somebody else's living room or backyard, we'll be invited in to support them so that we can help them. We like to say we stand either beside them or behind them, helping them, because the local leader should always be in the front. And we also have some other initiatives that are launching in the fall that are very exciting, that will help us coordinate and connect people to resources exciting that will help us coordinate and connect people to resources.
Jamie Serino:Okay, yeah, so I like that idea of the credentialing and it goes back to what you're saying about speaking a common language and everyone sort of being on the same page and so creating this credential. It then, you know, creates almost like a standard and that doesn't really exist, right, so that's a part of the issue.
Lisa Orloff:Yeah, it doesn't not across the board for these grassroots organizations, right, it's always been a push.
Lisa Orloff:Well, if you want to volunteer, you should go to this big agency, you know, and there are great initiatives, those there are great groups. There's also CERT, which is a government initiative. There's also CERT, which is a government initiative. The one difference there are many differences, but the one big difference is that our goal is training the local groups, the hyper grassroots groups, to be able to stay within their community and meet their community needs while accessing resources from others. When you join another agency's organization and become a singular volunteer, you're going where they send you right and that may not be your community. It may not be where the urgent need is, where you actually know Mrs Jones needs this or Bob down the road needs that. So ours is really and not to be cliche, but it's an empowerment initiative, it's a capacity building initiative and it's building the capabilities from within the community to stay in the community and take care of their own, while also connecting to the resources that are available to them.
Jamie Serino:Yep, or should be available to them. It's fantastic. So, going back to when you started World Cares it was actually September space, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and then that transition when you realized this needs to be something more.
Lisa Orloff:Sure. So, um, you know, some people ask like, well, what was your five-year strategic plan when you started the organization? I'm like what? There was your five-year strategic plan when you started the organization. I'm like what? There was no five-year strategic plan. It really was. You know, it was just I don't even know what to call it. You know fate, just, you know divine guidance. I think it was like just a collective effort. And so, yeah, we began doing. After the literal and figurative dust settled, we started working and integrating in with FEMA and doing some activities for FEMA. Started working and integrating in with FEMA and doing some activities for FEMA and they said you need to incorporate and you need to join this network of voluntary organizations. And so we did. We incorporated as World Care Center, with our first program being September Space, which was a four volunteer bi-volunteer community center offering a holistic menu of services to ready responders and survivors, because nobody was looking at what. Nobody at that point in time was looking at what was happening to the caregivers right, yeah, that's true.
Lisa Orloff:And also, at that time, survivors were being told you survived. What are you complaining about? Yeah, you know what do you have to complain about? And they're like are you kidding? There are people that I've spent more time with than my family that have just disappeared from this earth. Of course, I'm struggling, yes, I'm grateful to be alive, but I also have a tremendous amount of guilt. So these are the types of people, these underserved people, that we developed a center where they could drop in and access services, everything from art therapy, from play therapy for their children, to acupuncture and EMDR and talk therapy with their peers, because firefighters didn't want to come in and talk to a marriage counselor that's now doing grief counseling which was the reality back then, because we just didn't know they wanted to come in and talk to a seasoned firefighter who had been through something like that.
Lisa Orloff:And that's actually where our partnership with Oklahoma City came in. Oklahoma City came and started to help us with these peer-to-peer groups because they had been through the Murrah building bombing right.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Orloff:So people from around the world started to come in and provide support and then started to talk about how this phenomenon was nothing new. It was new to New York City, but it was nothing new and that, historically, time after time, when something of this magnitude happens, that people are going to come out of their homes and their jobs and from around the community to help. But there was no playbook. Right.
Lisa Orloff:There was no playbook the entities in charge of managing the scene. There was no playbook on how to manage spontaneous volunteers or community volunteers, and there was no playbook on how to manage spontaneous volunteers or community volunteers and there was no playbook for those volunteers. And so we quickly began to write a field guide which we published so that everybody could benefit from our lessons learned. And we created a curriculum One. We went around the country and provided training for offices of emergency management on how to set up programs to manage these types of volunteers. And then the second is the whole credentialing initiative that's evolved over time.
Jamie Serino:Yep, where can people find that guide? Is it on the website?
Lisa Orloff:So the guide is actually a published hardcover book and the information is on the website, which is worldcaresorg.
Jamie Serino:And, yes, Okay and, yes, good. So, jumping off of that, another program that you're involved with now is around emotional resiliency, and you touched upon that. You know the feelings that people had, the loss you know, and there's, you know, a sort of resiliency that firefighters have and and you know first responders, and then there's, you know, just general workplace, um, people that work in maybe high stress environments, um, and so there's this emotional resiliency that people build up, um, but also that a lot of times doesn't get talked about, right, and so your program kind of seeks to just sort of let's have the discussion and let's talk about, you know, best practices, let's talk about ways to help yourself, help people that work for you. Could you talk a little bit more about that program?
Lisa Orloff:Sure. So emotional resiliency has always been a threat, you know, from from 9-11 all the way through, because we see that people you know go and they're very excited to respond to a crisis, and then they come back from helping and what do you think the first thing they say is this is a test.
Jamie Serino:I mean the first thing that they would say, coming back from responding yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine you're coming down from this sort of like adrenaline and you know, maybe they say what's next, what's the next crisis to run to?
Lisa Orloff:So what they say is I didn't do enough, I have left and there's so much more to do. It's not, it's not all of the great things that they did, it's not all of the people that they helped. It's I didn't do enough. And I will tell you in 22 years, that is predominantly the the response that we get when we debrief volunteers after deployment. And you know, not only do they have that feeling, but they also had connected with the group and groups and people. Right, there was that connection. That connection is no longer there.
Jamie Serino:Right.
Lisa Orloff:So the there's all of these things that contribute to what one might think is a very um fulfilling experience that ends up being, um, not so fulfilling if it's, if it's something where they're separating themselves from and it's a one-time experience. So we've always addressed emotional resiliency. We most recently got a very substantial grant where we can provide emotional resiliency and suicide prevention training to at-risk workers and volunteers, so people that are in high risk, underserved positions and roles, and one of our target audiences for this is the construction industry. They have the highest rate of suicide of most of the industries for many different reasons a variety of reasons, not the least of which is it's a highly physical job and if you get injured, that's a really big deal. You can no longer perform or you're now taking pain medications and maybe those medications run out and lead to other things. And the other interesting thing about construction workers is they are often the first ones that are asked to deploy post-disaster to do cleanup work and things like that, so they might be volunteering.
Lisa Orloff:they might be doing it as a job, but still it's. They're running across the same things and we've seen that work side by side with major construction industries who have their people donate their time. So we are we have launched this emotional resiliency and suicide prevention training. We have two trainings for the workers and then two trainings for managers excited about the program where we help managers of smaller businesses develop a resiliency program or at least insert resiliency practices to keep their team emotionally okay.
Lisa Orloff:So we've been that program launched in September and it's just amazing to work with really good people that you know just need to know it's okay, like this is normal. This is not something unusual. There's nothing wrong with you. This is your human being and these are exceptional circumstances and it's perfectly normal to be responding and having these emotions. The best thing you can do is equip yourself with the information, knowing, before you even get into it, that you're going to come across these things, knowing there's a simple of steps that you can take, such as journaling the positive right down every day, the positive impact that you've made, and revisit that simple step and then to know that there are resources should it become overwhelming.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, and so it's. It's great that it is for, like, the construction industry, the first responders, people in high, high stress environments, but you know, from what I saw in the curriculum, it can also just be for really every company.
Lisa Orloff:Absolutely.
Jamie Serino:And I like what's in there for managers to try to recognize signs within your team like maybe there's something wrong with this person, that maybe there's something happening in their family or whatever's happening and it's throwing them off, and to pick up on those signs is, I think, really important. So, even just being in a regular company, I think the training is worthwhile.
Lisa Orloff:Certainly, certainly yeah.
Jamie Serino:So you have a lot of experience also responding right. So I think it would be great to dive into that responding right. So I think it would be great to dive into that. And you know, really, every major disaster over the past 20 something years that I can think of. You've gone, you've been there and you've recently been in Ukraine. So I wonder if you could, you know, tell us a little bit about that, that the feeling of going and even the feeling of coming back that you were just talking about, um, being there, being in those environments and doing what you do. I wonder if you could tell us a couple of stories from from that part of World Cares.
Lisa Orloff:Ah, stories, sure, Um. So stories, um, yeah, I think our, our first major deployments, um to really that validated the, the book that I had just written, the field guide I had just written, the training curriculum that we had launched. Um, uh, we had done some work post Katrina, withatrina, with FEMA helping, helping them develop the welcome home centers modeled after September space. But the first real deployment other than 9-11 was the, the Haitian earthquake, and everybody was urging us to respond and I kept on saying we're not a response agency, you know. And they're like no, you need to go, you need to. I have, I'm supporting this orphanage, I'm supporting this school, I'm supporting this group and you need to go and you need to help them coordinate. And so we deployed and we continued to deploy for a good three years. It went from the earthquake to the cholera outbreak, which was a whole other kind of dynamic.
Lisa Orloff:But the consistencies are this the consistencies are is there's always local leaders who have been doing good in their community for a lifetime and are continuing to do good when crisis happens, but their system is overwhelmed so that they need support. They don't need to be taught how to capacity build, because they do that every day. They don't need to be taught how to organize their community and they don't have to build trust, because they have the trust of the community. They need a layer of disaster management, they need access to resources and they need someone or a group of people that have capacity to come in to work with them until they can get on their feet and train their own constituents to take over these roles. And that's common. So when we respond to disaster, we are not going in with hundreds of volunteers, it's a group of three and, by the by, it's a group of three women. You know, over the years we have, I have had, I've deployed with, with some of my, my board members and my colleagues John Trotman, who happens to be an inspector with Fort Meade Fire Department, and and others, fort Meade Fire Department and others. But over the last few years in Haiti and Ukraine, it's been myself and these two PAs who are just, you know, butt kicking women in the medical field, who are willing to do a lot of different things. And you know and understand the concept of we're not coming in to take over, we're coming in to support your needs with what we know, and that's the winning combination.
Lisa Orloff:So during the Haitian earthquake. We went in. We found one or two local leaders, and then we found our volunteer lead, who was Haitian, who had a connection with other Haitians who wanted help, and we still have that team. We've trained them. We've gone across Haiti helping them with their needs. During the earthquake, it was setting up tents and making sure that they had provisions. During the cholera outbreak, it was medical clinics helping fortify the medical clinics. And then we were called back when there was Hurricane Matthew that struck another part of Haiti, and that was a really proud moment because I got a call from the team lead basically saying we followed protocol. Our team leads have gone to the area hit by the hurricane, they've done the assessment They've taught us to do. They've gathered the local leaders, just like you gathered us before. We know exactly what the needs are and do. We just need help finding the resources.
Lisa Orloff:So the most urgent need that they assessed was the need for water filters, and so we were able to get a grant to provide those water filters and train the team, to put them together, to train the community and to distribute them, and so that was, you know. Really, for us, that was proof of concept. It took years. Right. We went in and we delivered. Initially, we delivered what we said we were going to do, but then, years later, to see this the team still, you know, providing the service, and we're talking about all volunteers. We're not talking about a team of employees that's supported with a paycheck in an office and someone ensuring that they're coming and doing what they're doing. We're talking about a group of Haitian citizens that are volunteering their time to do this and that, years later, they were still proactive and still able to help, so that was very successful for us, very validating proof of concept Um no, go, go ahead yeah.
Lisa Orloff:We can carry that forward with. You know, responding, we were the lead um for the state of um, new Jersey. When hurricane Irene struck, we actually managed all of the incoming groups to do muck and gut operations in New Jersey. And then, when um and then we realized that protocols were missing safety protocols were missing right and began to work on that. And then, when Superstorm Sandy struck, we stood up volunteer reception centers and managed 40,000 volunteers mucking and gutting and preparing 14,000 homes for rebuild. A lot of disasters in between maria harvey, um, the japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster, which we were involved in in the emotional resiliency perspective. And then then, most recently, oh, covid, we really um really so proud of that effort because it was pretty amazing that we were able to support such large institutions and small grassroots groups at the same time, with the provision of N95 respirators and what they needed to stay safe.
Lisa Orloff:And actually during COVID, is really when we fortified our online training and our online roundtable discussions to and our online emotional support for the leaders who were so fatigued. So we really expanded our online programming and and then, of course, our deployment to Ukraine, to, to help the, the survivors and the internal refugees.
Jamie Serino:Could you talk a little bit more about that, about your work in Ukraine?
Lisa Orloff:Sure, so normally here's how it goes there's an immediate need, right, and in particular, what we had learned through working groups, attending UN meetings, talking to Ukrainian diaspora that are here telling us what they're hearing on the ground, and that need that we, you know, became more aware of was that the hospitals were overwhelmed with handling the medical needs of the soldiers and those injured closer to the front line and the people that are the internally displaced, people that are now being housed in these small container shelters, had no medical care whatsoever, right, so they're not getting their medications, the children are not being treated, no medical care. So we came in again with our team, our small team, and led by Patty Alfieri, and we started to do mobile medical clinics and at the same time, this builds trust. At the same time, we knew that there was this huge emotional need, right, but an extremely stoic population. So during September space, 22 years ago, we developed something called bandaid for healing, which was a guide for children and adults. The guide for children was like a journal that also had the opportunity for younger ones to draw in what they're feeling, and then there was a guide for the parents to interpret some of the behavior and some of the things that the children were expressing verbal and nonverbal, and we, over the years, have modified this for the disaster and we modified this for the Ukrainian population and we modified this for the Ukrainian population and we translated it into Ukraine.
Lisa Orloff:And so we again contacted a couple of local leads. One organization was our partner organization. It's actually one of the people that are very heavily involved with Dancing with the Stars. That was our lead organization over there and there was no dancing, but their program manager over there met with us and we worked with them very closely and we hired locally to be a part of the team and delivered the medical clinics first and then returned to deliver the emotional resiliency workshops. And it took that because we had to build trust right, and so by the end of our time there, you know that trust had been built, and then when we returned again, it was. We were very, very welcome and people were coming back with how they were doing medically and how they were doing with their children, and so that became a very successful program that we ended up delivering as a train the trainer.
Lisa Orloff:So it's a leave behind. We had trained the volunteer groups that we had gone to visit. We now took their volunteers and trained them to deliver this program, left the workbooks behind. We also trained them in first aid and CPR and donated defibrillators Cause. Unfortunately, one of our groups lost someone because their defibrillator um broke in the middle of a resuscitation. So these are the types of things that were um. You know, we always know that you need food, shelter, you need to be safe and secure, and and then there's always that emotional component. So you have to make sure that their physical needs are. They have to feel safe, they have to be physically okay, and then you can go and address the emotional needs. Begin to address the emotional needs.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, and when you were mentioning the stoic population, it was making me think also, you know, when we were sort of piloting the emotional resiliency program and getting feedback from former firefighters and you know it's okay, so the yeah, so the stoic population of you know people in the Ukraine, firefighters, you know construction workers, you know, because you know kind of mental health is is talked about so much.
Jamie Serino:Now I think everyone just assumes that everyone is sort of on the same page with it. But yet when we were getting this feedback, the feedback from the former firefighters, they were saying, oh, you should frame it this way or that way, because they're probably not gonna go for this or they're not gonna go for that or it's just gonna depend on what the chief of the house is like and that's gonna set the tone and this is so much to think about there. And, of course, recommending professional help if there are larger issues or deeper trauma. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that work with those populations and talking about emotional resiliency and bringing that kind of message into those environments where people are stoic or maybe the sort of tough guy, tough gal kind of attitude, you know yeah.
Lisa Orloff:So, um, as you know, I probably fall into that category.
Lisa Orloff:Um and um, yeah, I'm not only the deployment lead, but I also am a volunteer firefighter. Um, and definitely um, really came to the self-realization maybe 10 years ago that I'm not soft and fuzzy, and even though I thought I was, um, but um, yeah, people that are watching this are like you're crazy. If you ever thought you were soft, um, I yeah, and, and it's, and it's evolved Right. So when I first began teaching this, you know I was all cursing and tough and talking the lingo, and you know um and I, I think we've evolved, um, and sometimes when I curse, everybody's like Ooh, but I think, um, the most important thing is to understand the people that you're trying to serve and the way that you do that is to engage local leadership to educate you.
Lisa Orloff:I've been working with the fire, with firefighters, cops, emts all of that for 22 years, right Side by side, and um, you, you understand where they're coming from. You begin to be able to talk the language. You have shared experiences, um, and soon that trust is built because there's a common experience, right, and they know that you understand where they're coming from. The most important and the most effective times are those that are authentic. So when you catch people in a moment where they're feeling a certain way and they can speak to you about it. Or maybe you've given the workshop and it's after the workshop that individuals will come up to you and express maybe some challenges or how the workshop has helped them or validated that they were feeling a certain way that they didn't really know was a thing.
Lisa Orloff:I use air quotes a lot. I noticed that. But, yeah, so you know, I think the most important thing about the training and with that population is you may not know that how much, what an impact you're making while you're delivering it and these guys may give you a hell of a hard time and bust your chops, but in the end you may get an email later. You may get them pulling you aside and saying, hey, listen, you know, I know I was hard on you during the training, but what you've said really resonates. Or, hey, I, you know I didn't really realize that was a thing, and and and that I'm normal. You know, and I think you know that's that's so important, you know is that you're normal and you're a human being and um, but that codes cuts both ways, right, like we want. We want for our first responders to be strong, right. We want them to be stoic. We don't want them to break down on the job. We don't want them to to have that emotional vulnerability right.
Jamie Serino:Yeah.
Lisa Orloff:We want them to be okay.
Jamie Serino:Yeah.
Lisa Orloff:And so that when they do show vulnerability, you know we need to accept that and applaud that, and understand that everybody's human and that it's okay. I know for myself, people want me to be strong. They don't want me to be overwhelmed or to be sad by something or to be thrown off. They want me to be that leader, you know, and sometimes that's hard and sometimes that's hard, but to know that it's okay and to know that there are groups of people that are going to be understanding and compassionate and help you get through it, without being judgmental or take that role away from you, which is super important. God forbid. You're put on desk duty because you say you're having a hard time with something. That's important.
Lisa Orloff:So the dynamic is changing. We used to rely on the medical model where oh my gosh, lisa broke down, something's wrong about it with her. Who knew she was weak? Who knew that she couldn't handle it? And now we're away from that medical model and we're now more on that, thinking that, okay, well, this is part of life, and one thing I always say is that life is a journey, and so is being resilient. You're never resilient all the time. Right, you can build resiliency by the network that you surround yourself with, by your habits, by the way that you think, the way you control your thoughts, the way you control exposure to certain things, you can develop resiliency and you can be resilient. However, there are going to be times where maybe that support group isn't there.
Lisa Orloff:You know, maybe you're thrown in, you have to deal with more than is your comfort zone, right, and so you're not as resilient, but it's okay and the understanding and the self-compassion and building compassion you know around you is critically important.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, you know it's also helping, I think, the people in those roles that need to have a defense because they're seeing, maybe, loss of life and you know, catastrophe and they're they're rushing into those situations, um, but it's helping them also understand the patterns and how.
Jamie Serino:I remember discussing this that they may end up bringing their anger or sadness back to their spouse and family and so you start to see that get infected, or they may start to turn to alcohol or substances. There's a statistic I came across recently said 57.7% of people with PTSD also have an alcohol or a substance use issue. It's a high number. So can they recognize, can they be emotionally strong and rush into that fire or that situation but yet come back and understand, like the people around them and where they're channeling all of that stress? You know, and I think that you know your program helps to point that out, because they need to, like you said, they need to have a strong sort of armor, but then they need to also. It's difficult to do, but then they need to take the armor off at some point, you know.
Lisa Orloff:And you know, the, the network that you have around you is critically important and the more acceptance we bring to this topic and the more we try to build that within, within the community of responders. You know, this is, uh, this is certainly a topic that's near and dear um to to me. We, as you know, we we used to host something called the iron skillet cookoff, which was five firehouse chefs against two, five top chefs, and over the course of years we've lost two of our chefs, two of our firehouse chefs, beautiful people, you know both, both outward and about, both outside and inside, like you know. Again, they're volunteering their time, um, we've lost them to suicide, you know, and that's. And you look at them from the outside and they're, you know they're, they're handsome, physically fit, gregarious, they're, they're, they're first responders and they're volunteering their time for their cook off and for the cook off and to volunteer for a cause. And yet the support mechanism was not there for them.
Lisa Orloff:Yeah, in one case for sure, I'm not sure about the second one there was definitely, you know, an injury and then subsequent opioid abuse and addiction. And you know an injury and then subsequent um, opioid abuse and addiction, um, and you know, we've got to. We've got to be better. We've got to be better at that. You know, we've got to be better at this. Um, we can't expect for either first responders or ready responders to be going in and making these types of sacrifices without providing support.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, I agree. So is there anything you would leave people with? You know? Just, we'll say again, people could go to wellcaresorg and contact you, interact with a lot of the material that's there. If you are an organization, whether it is a first responder or in the construction industry or any type of company, they could engage and get that free emotional resiliency training. So any company, big or small, can contact you and get resiliency training. Um, so any, any company, big or small, can can contact you and get that training. There's four different trainings Um, the credentialing is available. All this stuff's available and they can just reach out to you also, uh, to ask questions and stuff. Um, is there anything else that you would want to leave people with you know?
Lisa Orloff:you know, in the last few minutes here, yeah, I would just say that in my experience that people are good and people are going to step out and they're going to help somebody, they're going to help a neighbor, they're going to help a stranger, they're going to do good and we want to. You know, we applaud you for that, we champion you, we think you should be acknowledged and I think you know, and we know, that the local leaders need to have a seat at the table you know, not only to be acknowledged for what they do, but to have access to the same type of resources that others have.
Lisa Orloff:You know, if you think you're going to step out and help in disaster, get trained. Please get trained. Go to our website. There's a contact us form. There's online training. There's in-person training. It is free. We will come to your location for a group of 12 or more and deliver it. We can deliver it on Zoom or you can can take it self-paced, but this is a movement. Empower yourselves, protect yourselves.
Lisa Orloff:If you think you're going to help, if your child is going on a volunteer group and deploying somewhere to do some volunteer work, get them trained. There's no downside to it. Right, the first training is eight hours out of your day. You can take it at night, you can section it off, but what you know and what can save a life is a matter of eight hours of your time. So, whether you're thinking you're going to deploy, whether you're a disaster volunteer, whether your child is going on a high school trip or your kid is going on one of those college experiences, get them trained. You know, and stay and check out our website. There's more to come. Trust me, we're always looking at ways we can help community leaders and those that want to help others.
Jamie Serino:Yeah, you guys have certainly grown and you guys pivoted and you guys really agile and it's just great. So, yeah, more to come, I'm sure. So, lisa, thank you.
Lisa Orloff:Us guys, Jamie, us guys.
Jamie Serino:I pop in and out. It's my pleasure and privilege. I've learned so much and, lisa, thank you for your time today and look forward to continuing to work with you.
Lisa Orloff:Thanks, jamie, take care.
