 In November 2025 I had the chance to help the NGO GiveDirectly design a rapid cash assistance program for people hit by Hurricane Mellisa in Jamaica (see my earlier post: High Performance Mindsets for the Storm: 9 Days of Hurricane Response in Jamaica). We used the mobile phone network to establish a unique pathway for quickly connecting with and helping storm affected people. Starlink Mini units provided fast internet connectivity, which enabled on-the-move navigation and real-time updates to targeting data within the disaster zone. This "web of connectivity" included phones, satellite internet, and financial technology like Western Union for the cash transfer. We successfully moved money from donors in the USA to recipients in Jamaica within days, highlighting fast cash as an essential tool for post-crisis recovery.
The head of GiveDirectly's humanitarian products Leith Baker, and I arrived a few days after the storm in Kingston, and soon drove west into the impact zone. Camille Raguin, and Julien Devos soon joined us to augment the response. The 220 mile per hour winds had flattened any building made of wood frame and tin roofing. The storm toppled electric poles and knocked out most cell phone connectivity in the area.
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 I recently helped the organization GiveDirectly to establish their aid program to people hit by Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. This is a smart and new-ish NGO that provides direct cash support to people in poverty settings. They are expanding this low cost and speedy response into disaster zones like the recent mega storm to hit Jamaica.
My long time friend and colleague Leith Baker, who heads GiveDirectly’s humanitarian products, invited me to work together in western Jamaica to assess the situation, design the operation, and start sending money to those who need it most. It was also a great pleasure to work with and get to know GiveDirectly’s Camille Raguin, and Julien Devos who also deployed on the response (check out Camille’s excellent post about the deployment). The cash payments we arranged will help people get emergency supplies like tarps, buy phone credit so they can communicate, and eventually repair their storm damaged homes.  The ‘gray zone’ in a sport like running or biking is a level of effort that feels slightly difficult. Think of running up a slight hill at an average pace. This type of ‘gray zone’ effort is causing fatigue while bringing few athletic benefits. Over time, endurance sport coaches figured out that the most endurance benefits come from 80% or more of training time being spent in super slow, easy feeling training. The other 20% or less should usually be super hard efforts that take us to the edge of our speed and intensity limits.
The best endurance training is never in the ‘gray zone’. It is mostly on the easy, consistent, long duration end of the spectrum, with occasional hard sprints layered into the mix a few times per week. We escape the gray zone by keeping your easy days truly easy and pushing yourself to your maximum ability on the hard days.  Mark, a homeowner in the wildfire preparedness program, and the contractor celebrating the completion of the work on this site. As an international humanitarian response professional, my work has taken me from Accra to Antananarivo, and from Bishkek to Zanzibar. As part of the international system of governments and organizations that helps people survive disasters and wars around the world, I’ve had the privilege of bringing life saving supplies, medical care and safe transportation to people across the globe.
My last month working in Los Angeles with an NGO called Global Emergency Relief Recovery and Reconstruction (GER3) was my first professional experience in this field helping my fellow Americans. In some ways it was a professional homecoming to work on wildfire recovery. Here are a few observations about my work on the aftermath of the 2025 Eaton Fire in Pasadena, California:  I’ve always envied people who can quickly remember things. Fast recollection of names, dates, addresses, schedules, and meeting outcomes is an impressive accelerator. Remembering the details is a constant struggle for me. Lacking a total recall ability, taking physical notes is the only way that my brain can keep track and process the things happening in my world.
Early in my career I remember colleagues commenting and poking fun at my compulsive note taking, writing everything down from work instructions to how to configure an early version of a local area network that we used to process refugee interviews in Abidjan, West Africa back in 2003. I have a few of these humanitarian response notebooks in the archives. They contain gear lists, travel planning, and notes from too many coordination meetings that happen between humanitarian responders in a disaster response setting.  The Trump administration has effectively ended America’s help to people across the world hit by disasters. As the leading economy and preeminent power in the world, America leads. Part of that leadership is helping people in a crisis who don’t get help from any other source.
We lead militarily with the most advanced and lethal armed forces ever assembled. We lead politically by demonstrating how democracy works. We lead economically by creating the most innovative and wealthy economy in the world. We lead morally by extending a helping hand to people around the world who have been failed by their governments and need extra help to survive. Countries and people that accumulate great wealth have an obligation to help those less fortunate both inside and outside the USA. But beyond that moral call, aid to other countries makes Americans stronger, more prosperous and safer.  OpenArt photo created with promt: "picture of humanitarians in the USA using AI to assess a disaster." Artificial Intelligence is the talk of the town in my humanitarian response world. The discussion comes across as polarized to the far ends of the spectrum. The optimist camp looks at the potential societal benefits and touts an upcoming productivity and positive revolution. The pessimists talk about the machines taking over our lives, amplifying bias and ruining the world that we know.
I’m still working my way up the learning curve on these fascinating issues, but I wanted to share a few AI use cases that I’ve developed for myself and my work that may be helpful to my fellow Social Sector workers. I use Google Gemini as my primary AI tool, and have experimented with OpenAI’s ChatGTP.  Hey folks, happy new year, how is everyone?
We had a great period of unplugging around the holidays with a road trip to a frozen lake with some snow and a lot of rain. Either way it is 2025 now and I wanted to share a simplified way that I’ve been looking at 2024 and setting up for 2025. After going through several years of more detailed and time consuming methods of summing up the last year, I’ve settled on this more pragmatic and faster method that can fit on one page of handwritten or typed text. It surfaces the big things that happened, and the things that you want to change for the coming year.  Wonderful graphics at www.instagram.com/milanicreative/ In a recent team meeting at a Social Sector organization, I saw a wide gap between colleagues who view the world via an abundance mindset, and those who operate with a scarcity outlook.
Scarcity Mindset The scarcity mindset says that resources are limited and there is a zero sum competition between resources of time, money, attention, notoriety, or network. This mindset taps into the ancient human brain construct of survival competition over scarce resources like food or water. It connects our actions to a pre-modern part of evolution that required a physical fight to the death to control, dominate or carve up limited food and territory to the strongest and meanest human. It associates specific resources with the ultimate goal of survival and reproduction. An example of a scarcity mindset is the hoarding of toilet paper and surgical masks in the United States at the onset of the Covid19 pandemic. In the Social Sector, examples of scarcity mindsets are usually present during the organization's budget allocation process, or around the selection of people for management or executive positions. If they get more, I’ll get less. If they get that position, I won’t and my life and influence will be diminished. The binary win/lose moment sets in and triggers a cascade of negative emotions and starts to weaken the group through artificial conflict.  This week we have a guest post from a friend and fellow Social Sector Titan Eric James.
Eric and I met in Liberia in 2004 when we were both working on humanitarian aid operations at the end of the civil war. Liberia at that time was a testing lab for the hardships and also joys of working on an international aid operation. The Liberia response was a weird mix of isolation from any normal environment and also intense togetherness with your work team. Over time, this loaded me up with stress that eventually resulted in burnout. Part of that burnout was related to my team at the time. So it would have benefited me to know some of these mindsets, strategies and tactics back then! The article digs into these issues. Eric began his career in the 1990s with USAID. He was also a paratrooper and did a stint as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. After managing humanitarian relief programs in the field for more than a decade, Eric again elevated his game and launched Field Ready, an organization that is pioneering the use of local manufacturing by making supplies wherever they are needed. |
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