What is a Disaster Doula?

A doula, of course, is an expert who supports women through childbirth. More broadly, the word is used for someone who provides support through a crisis. A disaster doula is an individual, organization, or system committed to helping a society, community, or system manage crises gracefully, honoring grief and helping communities move toward egalitarian futures. That is, instead of working to recover a community based on pre-disaster metrics, a disaster doula would treat the crises as an opportunity to support the birth of a new, better community through creative and continuous growth. Disaster doulas could be official (e.g., emergency management organizations) or unofficial (e.g., community groups), but must be willing to understand and support aspirational change even in the face of calls that it’s time to get everything back to normal.

What are the six practices of a disaster doula?

Practice One: Commit to a Politics of Care

Disaster doulas must be committed both to a nonlinear understanding of disasters—ready to engage with their historical cause and make decisions based on future flourishing—and to a politics of care that encompasses all harms found within the disaster space. That is, commit to the idea that you can’t say, “That’s not my problem” or “That’s outside the scope”.

Practice Two: Seek Productive Friction by Leaning Out

Disaster doulas must go toward tension. This means committing more resources out into the community rather than inside of health agencies. More external exercises than internal, etc. Imagine deploying epidemiologists out into neighborhood groups. As a doula, you can’t “liaise” with a person giving birth, you are there for them constantly.

Practice Three: Practice “Showing Up” to build Epistemic Virtues

Disaster doulas practice “showing up” in these times of tension. Showing up is an idea from Deva Woodly that is “fundamentally an action expressing commitment” toward healing justice. To show up means to commit yourself to understanding those angry with you, and to shift your posture to be understood by them.

Showing up in spaces of tension builds a set of skills which are hard to acquire in other ways. As we say in the book:

Practice Four: Knitworking for Kinship

Disaster doulas commit to knitworking all elements of the response together into a decentralized network of care. This is like the often “unofficial” role doulas play, acting in coordination and resistance between those in labor/crisis and those officially tasked with responding to crisis. A disaster doula’s job is to work in the cracks created by the crisis, to resist and refuse state interests, and to steadily hew to pathways of survival and flourishing that are visioned by the patient/survivor themselves.

Disaster doulas would focus on surging existing care networks, repairing relationships and empowering local mutual aid groups. This is an act of personal commitment. It’s “knitworking” because you and those you are working with are creating new ways to solve both new and existing problems. This is something often shut down by official response.

Practice Five : Process Grief as Imagination

Disaster doulas need to ensure that grief is honored, not forgotten, and that disillusionment with existing systems is listened to, not pushed aside. Disasters show fundamental issues in society. As some point, survivors and responders are overcome by grief and disillusionment. survivors see the edges and failures of the systems they live within most clearly. This can sharpen the strategies that emerge from knitworking into new, imaginative ideas to trasnform society. At this point, disaster doulas should help these ideas thrive, while always acknowledging that (as doulas) they are merely helping to birth them.

Practice Six: Fight for Rebirth to Heal the Past

These ideas for a new future will come into conflict with many folks who want to get back to normal, and recover the past. Disaster doulas have to advocate for their clients, knowing that rebirth after a disaster must address the disaster for the past, not just get us back to a steady state. This requires discernment: Which of these new ideas are worthy?

Not every aspiration will create change, and it is not the disaster doula’s job to choose this or that new future. Instead, the doula role is to ensure that communities have space to strategize, can be heard on their own merits, and have a chance to seriously propose these transformational ideas.