The University of South Florida College of Public Health is partnering with the Hillsborough County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) to help Refugees Prepare for Hurricane Season with a new program sponsored by the Public Health Innovation Studio.
Public Health students facilitated a visit to the Emergency Operations Center in order to meet with the women and learn from their shared experiences. This helped students to better understand their needs for the program, such as tackling language and cultural barriers that may prevent them from accessing disaster preparedness resources.
“The goal is to learn how we can help everyone be prepared,” said Angela Salter, Hillsborough County Office of Emergency Management education outreach coordinator. “Everybody deserves the opportunity to get the information. We want to provide that knowledge they need and really help them prepare and create a plan of action.”
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“Our partners are really the eyes and ears of our community,” Salter adds. “A lot of times people don’t know we are here.” Through the partnership with USF, refugees can connect with community partners and resources that Hillsborough County offers.
USF’s Public Health Innovation Studio offers programs every year to connect students to refugees in order to break down cultural barriers and help both students and participants grow in the Tampa area. This year, the program’s focus on hurricane preparedness was selected because of an increase in hurricane intensity and new evacuation zoning for the Tampa Bay area.
Teaching hurricane basics
The first two weeks of the summer course are dedicated to learning qualitative research and evaluation methods. For the rest of the course, each student is paired with a refugee woman from the Refugee & Migrant Women’s Initiative, Inc (RAMWI) for the students to explore cultural phenomena from the refugees’ point of view and help them get ready for the summer hurricane season with classes, preparedness checklists, and more.
One of the students’ greatest tasks is to create an asset map that helps their refugee partner find essentials within the community, such as supplies and emergency shelters. While native Floridians are accustomed to hurricane preparation, refugees and migrant families can have trouble preparing for this unique circumstance and protecting their families from disaster.
Aziza, a mother of two and program refugee from Egypt, moved to the United States in 2019. While she has established a family life in Tampa, language and cultural barriers have made it difficult to understand hurricane preparedness from a Floridian perspective.
“When she does go to a store, there isn’t a section that says ‘hurricane supplies’ – you have to know what you’re looking for,” said senior Aleeza Masood, Aziza’s partner throughout the course.
This program is changing lives one at a time, and weaving Hillsborough County residents together to prepare for the stormy summer months together.