I'm Blue in the Face, and I'm Angry: How Many Times Do Communities Have to Tell Us What Is Broken?

FEMA has released another national study. Meanwhile, communities and frontline workers have spent years telling institutions what is wrong, what is needed, and what is coming. Why weren't we listening?

By Moni Avila, Ed.D.

I am angry. Not a little frustrated or disappointed. I am angry. I am blue in the face from saying the same things for years, watching the warning signs grow, and seeing institutions continue operating as though the people closest to the problems have nothing important to contribute until someone with an institutional title, a research grant, or a federal agency publishes a report confirming what we have already been saying.

On October 16, FEMA announced the findings of a national study on the staffing, funding, and capacity of emergency management agencies. And what did they find? Emergency management agencies are understaffed, underfunded, and stretched beyond their capacity. More investment is needed.

Are you kidding me? We needed a national study to tell us this?

Let me be clear. I am not against research. I earned a doctorate conducting community-based research. I understand why evidence matters, why we need to document trends, measure capacity, and produce findings that inform public decisions. But what infuriates me is how often community knowledge is dismissed, minimized, or treated as an afterthought until academic or institutional research comes along to validate it. The problem is not that FEMA conducted a study. The problem is that we have created systems where the people experiencing and witnessing the problems are often the last people whose knowledge is taken seriously. And then we wonder why we are always responding to crises instead of preventing them.

We Have Been Warning You

For years, I have been talking about what happens when we build programs around temporary funding, fail to invest in community infrastructure, and expect frontline workers and community organizations to compensate for systems that are stretched beyond their capacity. I have watched federal funding uncertainty ripple through programs, state and local priorities determine what services survive, and organizations build something meaningful only to face the possibility of losing it because the dollars supporting it were never intended to last. I have also watched people who understand exactly what their communities need struggle to get institutional leadership to listen.

Now we are looking at proposals to reduce federal preparedness funding while cities are facing enormous financial pressures. San Antonio entered its fiscal year 2027 budget process facing a projected General Fund shortfall of nearly $158 million through fiscal year 2028. The City ultimately adopted a balanced budget, but doing so required nearly $90 million in spending reductions over two years, along with other revenue measures. At the federal level, the International Association of Emergency Managers warned in April that the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget included a $1.3 billion reduction to

FEMA preparedness grants.

Think about that. We have documented staffing and capacity problems while considering significant reductions to funding intended to strengthen preparedness. And somehow we are supposed to believe that the solution is for local communities to take on more responsibility? With what money, what staff, and what infrastructure? Perhaps more importantly, with whose labor?

Because I can already tell you who will be expected to fill the gaps. The same community organizations, volunteers, frontline workers, and residents who have been carrying responsibilities that institutions have never adequately funded. When those people somehow manage to hold things together, we will celebrate their resilience. Again.

I'm Tired of Calling Institutional Failure Community Resilience

We need to have an uncomfortable conversation about how casually we use the word resilience. Communities are praised for pulling together after storms, floods, extreme heat, displacement, violence, and other crises. Neighbors organize food distribution, community leaders check on older adults, volunteers open spaces for people needing assistance, and families share resources. Frontline workers stay late, take calls outside their assigned hours, and find ways to help people when formal systems have reached their limits. Then come the photographs, recognition ceremonies, and speeches about how resilient the community is.

But what are we really celebrating? Are we celebrating community strength, or are we celebrating how much responsibility communities have learned to carry because the systems intended to support them are inadequate?

There is a difference, and it matters. I believe deeply in the strength of communities. I have spent years working alongside people whose knowledge, relationships, and commitment make extraordinary things possible. But I refuse to confuse that strength with an unlimited capacity to compensate for institutional shortcomings. Community resilience should never become an excuse for underfunding public responsibility, and community members should not have to repeatedly demonstrate their ability to survive hardship to be worthy of investment.

Institutions Want Community Engagement. They Don't Always Want Community Power.

Here is where my frustration becomes very personal. I am once again navigating institutional red tape while trying to build the very infrastructure needed to work in and with communities. Not around them, not above them, and not simply delivering services to them, but genuinely working with them. The contradiction is exhausting.

Institutions say they want community partnerships, volunteers, stronger networks, local preparedness, and community mobilization. But when you actually try to develop a model that builds community capacity, organizes relationships, supports community leadership, and creates meaningful opportunities for participation, you run straight into institutional processes that can make the work unnecessarily difficult. There is another approval, another procedure, another layer of oversight, and another conversation about why something cannot be done that way.

I understand the need for accountability, safety standards, legal responsibilities, and organizational coordination. But let's stop pretending that every layer of bureaucracy automatically improves accountability or public safety. Some procedures are necessary. Others create bottlenecks that prevent the very work institutions claim to prioritize. We need to be willing to question the difference because sometimes it feels as though institutions want communities engaged just enough to support institutional priorities, but not mobilized enough to have meaningful independence.

They want the relationships, trust, volunteer hours, local expertise, and ability to reach people that institutions cannot reach on their own, but they still want to determine the terms of participation. That is not the kind of community mobilization I am advocating.

Community mobilization is not simply getting people to show up when an institution needs them. It is building and sustaining the relationships, knowledge, leadership, resources, and collective ability that allow people to organize, make decisions, and respond to their own priorities. That requires sharing responsibility, investing in community leadership, and becoming comfortable with the fact that institutions do not have to control every aspect of the work.

Community mobilization is not the same as volunteer recruitment. It is not another outreach event, a listening session where people share their experiences and never hear what happened afterward, or an invitation to sit at a table after all the important decisions have already been made. It is certainly not using community participation to check a box on a grant report. Real community mobilization requires institutions to change how they work, not just ask communities to participate in the systems that already exist.

Community Knowledge Is Knowledge. Period.

This is the part that I need people in academia, government, nonprofits, and emergency management to understand. Community knowledge is not a lesser form of evidence. It is not just a personal story we include to make a report more compelling, and it is not something we collect during a listening session, summarize in a PowerPoint, and then set aside while institutional experts make the decisions.

Community knowledge is developed through lived experience, relationships, observation, cultural practices, history, and the everyday work of navigating systems. People know when a program is failing long before the performance dashboard reflects it. They know which families are not receiving information, which neighborhoods are repeatedly overlooked, why people hesitate to enter a shelter or request assistance, and which organizations have earned trust versus those that only appear when there is funding attached. That is knowledge, and it deserves to be treated as such.

Academic research has value. Institutional data has value. Technical expertise has value.

But none of these should automatically outrank the knowledge of the people who live with the consequences of our decisions. We need all three, and they should inform one another rather than compete or operate in separate silos.

Academic knowledge can help us identify patterns, test ideas, and understand broader conditions. Institutional knowledge can help us navigate systems, resources, operations, and responsibilities. Community knowledge tells us how those systems are actually experienced, where they break down, and what solutions may be workable in people's everyday lives. They are different forms of expertise, and meaningful collaboration requires recognizing the contribution of each.

What we do not need is some ridiculous hierarchy where community members speak first, institutional experts interpret what they said, and academics determine whether their experiences are credible. We need collaboration that honors community knowledge alongside academic and institutional expertise from the very beginning, from identifying the problem and designing the response to determining where resources go, deciding what success looks like, and evaluating whether the work actually made a difference.

Otherwise, we are not practicing meaningful community engagement. We are extracting knowledge from communities while keeping decision-making authority somewhere else. And that is precisely the kind of institutional practice that needs to change.

What Exactly Are We Building Capacity For?

This is the question institutions need to answer. Are we building community capacity so residents and local organizations can become stronger, more connected, and better prepared, or are we building community capacity so institutions have more people available to carry out institutional work? Because those are two very different models.

One invests in the community's long-term ability to organize, lead, and respond. The other develops a larger pool of people available to support an existing system. Both may have a role in emergency preparedness, but we need to stop pretending they are interchangeable.

When I talk about building community infrastructure, I am talking about relationships that exist before an emergency, people who know one another, organizations that can coordinate across sectors, accessible training, trusted communication networks, resident leadership, and opportunities for communities to help identify and address their own needs. I am talking about recognizing that the knowledge and capacity needed for preparedness already exist in communities, even when they are not formally recognized by emergency management institutions.

Our job should be to support, connect, resource, and strengthen that capacity rather than suffocate it beneath administrative requirements, absorb it into an institution and call it partnership, or insist that every community-led effort must operate exactly as institutions have always operated. If our organizational systems cannot accommodate meaningful community participation, perhaps the systems need to change.

And Now FEMA Has a Report

I want people to understand why this announcement bothers me so much. The original findings from this study began appearing in 2025, and FEMA's October 2026 announcement brought renewed attention to them. That means we have spent years studying how emergency management organizations operate, documenting their limitations, and discussing the importance of local capacity.

Good. But what happens next?

Another strategic plan, another committee, or another meeting where we discuss collaboration while frontline workers and community organizations continue struggling to secure the resources and authority needed to do the work?

Will the findings lead to sustained investment? Will they change how institutions recognize community expertise? Will community partners have meaningful influence over decisions? Will we reduce unnecessary barriers to building local capacity, or will we use the language of community resilience to shift even more responsibility onto communities without providing the resources to support it?

A report does not build relationships, establish trust, recruit and train a community network, or replace the experienced frontline worker whose position was eliminated. It does not magically create capacity where institutions have failed to invest. Those things require people, resources, time, and the willingness to work differently.

And that last part matters because we can have all the research in the world, but if institutions continue operating in ways that make meaningful collaboration unnecessarily difficult, we will continue reproducing the same problems. We will continue asking communities to participate without giving them meaningful influence.

We will continue emphasizing capacity while limiting the ability of people to build it. And we will continue acting surprised when the systems we have underinvested in cannot meet the demands placed upon them.

I Don't Need Another Institution to Tell Me Communities Know What They Need

What I need is for institutions to act like they believe it. I need us to stop treating community members as stakeholders whose knowledge is useful only when it supports a predetermined agenda. I need us to stop designing programs without the people who will live with the consequences, confusing the appearance of community engagement with the actual sharing of responsibility and decision-making, and celebrating collaboration while creating processes that make collaborating unnecessarily difficult.

I need us to stop telling communities to be resilient while making it harder for them to build the very capacity resilience requires.

This is not an argument against government, academic research, or institutional leadership. It is an argument for something better: genuine collaboration, accountability that supports rather than obstructs the work, financial investment that matches the responsibilities being assigned, and a model of preparedness that treats community members as knowledgeable partners rather than a reserve workforce waiting to be activated.

It is also an argument for recognizing that some of the most important expertise in emergency management does not come with an institutional title. Some of that expertise comes from years of organizing neighbors, navigating difficult systems, caring for families, responding when formal resources are unavailable, and learning what communities need through direct experience. That expertise should be informing our decisions from the beginning, not added afterward to demonstrate that someone remembered to include community input.

Yes, I Am Angry. And I Have Every Intention of Continuing to Say It.

I am angry because I have been watching this happen for years. I am angry because we keep talking about building capacity while placing barriers in front of people trying to build it. I am angry because funding decisions made far away from communities have real consequences for the people who live in them. I am angry because frontline workers and residents continue identifying problems that institutions seem unwilling to address until a formal study confirms them. And I am angry because we have somehow convinced ourselves that including community voices is the same thing as honoring community knowledge.

It is not.

You cannot claim to value community knowledge while repeatedly designing systems that push it aside. You cannot claim to support community mobilization while making it unnecessarily difficult for communities to organize. You cannot claim to support local preparedness while expecting increasingly under-resourced organizations to do more with less. And you cannot continue cutting the infrastructure that communities depend on and then congratulate them for surviving its absence.

I don't want another report that tells us what we already know and leaves the same structures intact. I want us to use that research alongside the knowledge communities have been sharing for years and actually change how we work. That means investing differently, listening differently, sharing decisions differently, and being willing to acknowledge that institutional expertise is not the only expertise that matters.

I am not angry because FEMA conducted research. I am angry because community knowledge should never have to wait for federal validation before it is treated as credible.

We have the academic research, we have the institutional data, and we have communities that have been telling us what is happening, what is needed, and what is not working. What we are missing is not another invitation to participate. It is the willingness to honor all three forms of knowledge and build something together.

And if we are serious about community resilience, that means being willing to examine our own institutional practices, remove unnecessary barriers, invest in relationships before emergencies happen, and share responsibility with the very people whose knowledge we claim to value. It means recognizing that the goal is not simply to get communities to support our systems, but to develop systems that genuinely support communities.

Stop asking communities to prove what they know. Start building with them.

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References

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2026, October 16). First-of-its-kind study provides insights into challenges facing emergency management agencies across the nation.https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20261016/first-its-kind-study-provides-insights-challenges-facing-emergency

Argonne National Laboratory. (2025). Emergency management organizational structures, staffing, and capacity study: State, local, and territory findings report. https://www.iaem.org/em-capacity-study/

City of San Antonio. (2026, September 17). City adopts balanced fiscal year 2027 budget. https://www.sa.gov/Directory/News-Releases/City-Adopts-Balanced-Fiscal-Year-2027-Budget

International Association of Emergency Managers. (2026, April 6). Statement regarding the President's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal.