Our trainee, Caroline Powell, a second-year MS student in Agricultural Safety and Health at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, recently shared her transformative summer experience at the National Centre for Farmer Health in Hamilton, Australia.
Caroline’s project explored how people, place, and power shape emergency management in agricultural communities in response to the current drought and previous experiences of bushfires and floods in the area. She provided background for future Centre work on the role of social, economic, built, and natural environments in wellbeing and emergency preparedness at the community-level, and her work was already contributing to grant applications before she left. She found that agricultural communities are better equipped to prepare for, respond to, and recover from adversity when social cohesion is high, emergency management strategies are specific, and institutions are inclusive.
Her favorite part of the trip besides all of the amazing people she met was exploring different ecosystems of the country and how they interact with agricultural ones, from big cities like Melbourne and Sydney to national parks like the Grampians and Blue Mountains to beaches like St. Kilda and Bondi.