Karen Kawala starts as Linn County’s first resiliency coordinator to strengthen disaster response

CEDAR RAPIDS — The African Student Association at the University of Iowa disappeared amid the COVID-19 pandemic when Karen Kawala was an undergraduate — offering one less space for African students at a predominantly white institution to find community.

But Kawala, a global health studies major from Des Moines, knew the group’s disappearance didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t a need for such a space. Her peers simply may not have known who to contact to reestablish the organization, so Kawala helped revive the student group.

“It was a huge deal for the African population at (University of) Iowa to have that space where you can share your culture, you can share your food and you can just be yourself,” Kawala said.

The achievement is representative of Kawala’s advocacy for marginalized communities — of helping those who experience systemic discrimination and exclusion — that she’ll take with her as she steps into her role as Linn County’s first resiliency coordinator.

Housed within the county Sustainability Department, the coordinator will work with other government and nonprofit entities to focus on the marginalized and vulnerable communities most affected by natural disasters. She also will partner with the county’s Emergency Management Agency on disaster response and maintain relationships with key partners to strengthen resiliency.

The three-member county Board of Supervisors considered multiple ways to fund the role after Supervisors Kirsten Running-Marquardt and Louie Zumbach in January voted to keep $363,389 in federal American Rescue Plan Act money with the Sustainability Department but barred it from being used to hire a new employee.

In May, the supervisors approved funding for fiscal 2024 — the budget year that began July 1 and ends June 30, 2024 — using money carried forward from fiscal 2023. Kawala’s salary is $55,806.40 per year.

A joint Cedar Rapids-Linn County Community Resilience Project report recommended a full-time employee dedicated to enhancing disaster resiliency. That report, released in August 2022, was written by Collective Clarity to capture lessons from the 2020 derecho that devastated Linn County with hurricane-force winds.

Naturally, Sustainability Director Tamara Marcus said those who are formally and informally involved in disaster response are focused on their own organization’s mission. The resiliency coordinator will understand the intersections to public and private entities that emerge in a crisis to leverage available resources countywide.

“That's why those relationships are so important because you need to know who you can call when someone else needs the thing that you don't have,” Marcus said. “ … That's what this position is helping to do is to bridge those gaps and to stitch this quilt of resiliency across Linn County.”

  Buy Photo

‘Connecting people’ to resources

Kawala, a 2022 UI graduate, has worked with Nisaa African Family Services, an organization that looks to end domestic violence and sexual assault within the African community. Additionally, she worked on a regional and national level with the NAACP as its Des Moines youth council president for a year, and for a few years as a representative on the national Youth Works Committee.

The new Linn County role seemed like a way to put her advocacy experience to use in a larger scale, Kawala said.

“A lot of the work that I was doing already with Nisaa, it was advocacy work and pulling the community together, and same thing with the NAACP, pulling an already-marginalized group in society together to create our own communities and create resiliency within our community in different ways,” Kawala said.

Marcus said one of the biggest blind spots in disaster response post-derecho was in responding to the needs of immigrant and refugee communities. With this new role, Marcus said the goal is to establish relationships to help with disaster response planning processes.

“One of the things that stands out to me in Karen's experience is being able to navigate really difficult spaces and conversations with the African community where we didn't meet those needs,” Marcus said.

To take on her role, Kawala said she has read county post-derecho reports to understand what the county has been through and where it aspires to be with disaster response.

Another thing that Marcus said stood out about Kawala as a candidate in the hiring process was when she asked what she could do to be a better candidate and took Marcus’ suggestion to take some online Federal Emergency Management Agency courses. By her next interview, Kawala came with a certificate from a six-hour course having learned some fundamentals of emergency management.

  Buy Photo

Kawala started work Aug. 21, and so far she has met with and set up meetings with many community members and community leaders. That ranges from meetings with officials in smaller cities such as Walker to leaders of Cedar Rapids-based United We March Forward, a nonprofit that supports immigrants and refugees.

She’s also begun work on a pilot program to create a disaster template to help community groups draft their own emergency plans to better support the community when disaster strikes.

“There were gaps in disaster response, so I'm happy to be here and excited to be doing that work and to be connecting people to the resources that they need,” Kawala said.

Comments: (319) 398-8494; marissa.payne@thegazette.com