As the 10-month anniversary of the July 4 flood approaches, The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country hosted another Kerr Together Grantee Gathering, which kicked off with mental health and grief recovery.
Austin Dickson, CEO of the Community Foundation, welcomed grantees and guests.
“It was important to get together again and talk together about what we’re involved in and where we are and our disaster recovery as a community at the point that we are today,” He said. “We also plan today to get together and process a little bit of what we are all going through and what our community is going through together.”
Angela Blanchard, who spoke at the last gathering in December, touched on the seven stages of recovery after natural disasters again.
To learn more about her session from December and learn the stages of disaster recovery, read the article here: https://dailytimes.com/2025flood/community-foundation-learns-about-7-stages-of-recovery/article_60a2caf0-ad68-4dba-a904-a879f5f8a864.html.
Executive Vice President for Trauma and Grief Programs and Policy at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Julie Kaplow gave an insight on how to grieve in a healthy way. She gave examples of children who have lost parents and what they go through.
A common way to grieve is to want to make a change so that no one else dies like their parents did, like being a doctor to treat illnesses or being an engineer to make safer planes.
Finding healthy ways to connect to the person, finding ways to connect with others dealing with the loss, harnessing spiritual beliefs, carrying on their legacy and making meaning of tragedy are some ways to grieve effectively.
“None of us have to grieve alone. We can grieve together, collectively, and not just in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, because we can help and support each other over the longer term,” Kaplow said.
Virtual learning libraries, risk screening tools and the Lucine Center are resources connected to the institute that anyone is welcome to use, according to Kaplow.
With the help of the Community Foundation, the institute has the ability to provide free care navigation to any bereaved families who are looking for care and free teletherapy to children and adolescents who were impacted by the flood.
Jolie Willis, founder of The Hummingly Foundation, shared a model of community recovery that includes heroic, honeymoon, chronic stress, on the up and growth stages.
“We can be really hard on ourselves and sometimes on each other,” she said. “This helps us find and cultivate that grace for ourselves and for each other. We talk about it a lot. You might have heard this expression, we talk about there being very normal reactions to an abnormal situation.”
The heroic phase falls immediately after the disaster and features the best of humanity, including the influx of support and deployment of energy for everyone to help, Willis said.
The honeymoon phase is where reality starts to set in when people stand in familiar places and fail to recognize what it used to be while there is still a naive sense of optimism around the reality of where they are and where they are going in the path of healing, she noted. The chronic stress phase is when optimism runs out, fatigue sets in and people are face to face with the real issues and frustrations that have been put on hold until now.The on-the-up phase happens when fog starts to clear and people see the light at the end of the tunnel. At this phase, life starts to feel a little more balanced, Willis said. Growth, the last phase, is often seen more individually. It doesn’t happen for everybody and it’s not to dismiss the grief, pain, stress or the suffering that happened along the way but to instead open a new road to recovery.
Willis led an activity where people could talk through the stage they believed they were in with the help of a monitor for each group.
The Community Foundation has pledged more than $10 million to ensure any person affected by the flood is taken care of. A list of resources can be found on their website at https://rebuildkerr.org/mental-health-and-wellbeing/.
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