The Trillium Center offers a series of community resilience classes. Community resilience refers to how well a community bounces back from a disaster or other intense situation. The idea is that classes in first aid, disaster preparedness, and wilderness skills complement gardening and food preservation as ways to improve community resilience. Topics we offer:
- Wilderness first aid
- Herbal first aid
- Community approaches to disaster preparedness
- Herbal approaches to disaster preparedness
- 20-hour community medic training
- Providing medical support during large gatherings or disasters
We have offered medical support to large gatherings all over the U.S. in urban, rural, and wilderness situations. Those experiences have been vital to our ability to offer comprehensive hands-on trainings. Contact us if you’d like a training in your area.
Our disaster relief experience in Haiti was another thing that influenced us to offer these classes. In 2010, Charles and Leah went with a team to Haiti to provide disaster relief in the town of St. Marc. There we assisted in the hospital with earthquake patients, emergency room patients, and other patients. We set up a free one-day clinic in a nearby village. The clinic had three stations: a first aid station, a blood pressure station, and a station where people could get a consultation from a nurse and an herbalist. Click here to see pictures. We took an integrative approach to our work there by staying with a family in St. Marc and walking to the hospital each day, greeting people with our limited knowledge of Haitian-Kreyol.
We played with children on the beach, danced to drumming and singing with our host family, and did everything we could to learn about the culture and offer our help in appropriate and useful ways.
We continue to prepare for disaster relief in oppressed areas that will have difficulty recovering, because we believe there are two kinds of disasters: chronic and acute. The earthquake in Haiti, an acute disaster, was severely compounded by the chronic disaster situation that already existed. Poverty is extreme, water and air pollution are high, and disease often spreads unchecked.
Health Research
Leah has a history of working in health research and holds a masters degree in public health. She is concerned about how the environment effects health. Currently, she is working on helping people address local food security, improve nourishment with food and herbs, while advocating for clean air, clean water, and clean soil. In 2011, she worked with a research team in West Virginia on the effects of mountain top removal mining. Read more…
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