Over the course of his eight-year tenure as head administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), W. Craig Fugate led FEMA’s responses to numerous major disasters: the Joplin and Moore tornadoes, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Matthew, and the 2016 Louisiana flooding. I spoke with him about how church leaders can come alongside government agencies and serve their community together amidst disasters, from mass shootings to wildfires to hurricanes.

How would you recommend churches and congregations go about improving collaboration with FEMA?

Pick up the phone and call your local emergency manager. They’re good folks, but they tend to be more focused on their government functions, and they may not know there’s an interest in participating.

I grew up in north Florida, so I learned a long time ago that some of my fastest, most capable responses—particularly in the rural areas—were our churches. Where I’m from, churches always respond when there’s a crisis in the community. I learned early on that if you give churches a seat at the table, and include them in your plans, it gives everybody a better ability to coordinate. It’s better to work as a team than to work as individual pieces and hope we each get to where we need to go.

You helped usher in the “whole community” approach to emergency management. What does that entail?

It’s a recognition that the bigger the disaster, the more likely the first assistance is really coming from your neighbors. What I have found is that the more widespread the impact of a disaster, the more that the government by itself is going to fail. You really have to take a step back and look at the community on a day-to-day basis—who’s providing the services and really meeting the needs of people before a disaster—and then after disaster strikes, recognize that the government’s not going to be able to step into those roles. In fact, it’s actually counterproductive [to think that]. It’ll be government, plus volunteer organizations in the faith-based community, plus the business community, plus the people who will naturally be helping their neighbors and looking for a way to support their community. If that’s how a community works day to day, why do we expect it to change when there’s a disaster? We need to really focus on how to build those relationships ahead of time.