The Invisible Infrastructure: Securing First Food in the Wake of Hurricane Helene

The SAFE Infant Feeding Team is presenting at the IAEM 74th Annual Conference and EMEX, which is the room where the country’s emergency managers actually are.

SAFE is the national IYCF-E implementation of Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities. If BFFC is the blue skies strategy, the slow work of building communities where feeding a baby is everyone’s business, SAFE is the gray skies strategy, for the days that work gets tested.

Helene showed what happens when the infrastructure that feeds infants is invisible in a plan. It is not a shelter supply line and it is not a medical annex. It is a system of people, and when it breaks there is no form for it. This session makes the case to emergency managers that first food belongs in the plan before the storm, not in the after action report.

Registration and the full program are on the IAEM conference site.