Trumanitarian

Mental health and humanitarians is an issue which has been surrounded by stigma. The fear of being seen as weak or not suited for humanitarian work has made many humanitarians reluctant to seek help. Some argue that speaking of our own mental health will detract attention from the people we serve. The issue has been receiving increasing attention in recent years, but it has been and continues to be difficult issue to get on the agenda.Imogen Wall is a humanitarian and an advocate for mental health. She is also the founder of the facebook group “50 shades of aid.” Imogen’s basic message is that you have to be well to serve well and that we need to talk more not less about how humanitarians are impacted by extreme situations and daily stress.You can read more more about humanitarians and mental health this acticle by Young, Parkenham and Norwood: If you are struggling with mental health in one way or another, please seek help from those around you! Also, Imogen is more than happy to talk to you and help identify where you can get help. You can reach her either through her website or on linkedin 

Disasters are not natural, far from it! The impact of a crisis is shaped by a wide range of societal factors and disasters replicate and amplify the inequalities that exist in society so that it is the marginalized communities tare hit the hardest. The Covid pandemic has once again taught us that lesson. Yet, we continue to refer to sudden onset crisis as “natural disasters” and that is not just a question of semantics, it is an indication of how we tell the wrong story of crisis and very often therefore also seek the wrong solutions.This weeks guests on Trumanitarian are Ksenia Chmutina and Jason von Meding. They are academics and co-hosts of the podcast “Deconstructing Disasters.” Ksenia and bring an important perspective to us as practitioners, and because I wanted to explore what we can use each other for.You can find the Disasters Deconstructed podcast here: https://disastersdecon.podbean.com

Are Humanitarian Organizations doing an amazing job with scare resources under impossible circumstances, or has international humanitarian assistance turned into a colonial, un-accountable, technocracy – disaster capitalism at its worst? And should we be more careful when criticizing this sector not to undermine morale and give the opponents of aid ammunition? This and many other questions is what Gareth Price-Jones, the Executive Secretary of SCHR and Marie-Rose Romain Murphy, the co-founder and Board President of Haitian Community Foundation discuss with Lars Peter Nissen in this episode.

The travel industry, just like the humanitarian industry, provides everything a person on the move needs. It is also one of the largest industries in the world with a turnover many thousand times that of the humanitarian industry. Gopinath Parayil wants to dual-purpose the assets of the travel industry for humanitarian response during climate-related disasters, thereby contributing towards creating more resilient communities.

This episode was first published in February 2021. It is with Fergus Thomas from the FCDO and deals with two important and very different issues: humanitarian reform and mental health. Together with Lars Peter Nissen, Fergus explores the development of the Humanitarian to Humanitarian (H2H) network and its potential as a change agent in the humanitarian sector.In the second half of the conversation Fergus talks about what it is like to live with bipolar disorder and how that fits with a hectic life as a humanitarian.

AI is transforming the world and will have profound implications for humanitarian action. But how? Will it lend itself to authoritarian regimes controlling their populations and will humanitarian organisations be complicit in this and create additional vulnerabilities for the populations we serve? Will be help us create a better user experience for "consumers" of humanitarian aid and will it help us ensure that we get spare parts for the generator just in time?Listen in as Sarah Spencer from humanitarianai.org and Lars Peter Nissen discuss these and many more questions.The episode was originally released in March 2021 and Sarah has since then written the HPN Network Paper Humanitarian AI: the hype, the hope and the future where she writes about the issues discussed in the episode. You can download the episode here: https://odihpn.org/resources/humanitarian-artificial-intelligence-the-hype-the-hope-and-the-future/

Paula Gil Baizan, Meg Sattler and Lars Peter Nissen review 2021 and look forward towards 2022 in the humanitarian world.

Timely, flexible funding is a bottleneck is most if not all humanitarian operations. Daniel Clarke has a solution to that problem. He is the co-author of the book Dull Disasters, and the director of the Center for Disaster Protection. In this conversation with Lars Peter Nissen he discusses how risk based financing and smarter financial instruments such as parametric insurance can enable us to fundamentally change the way in which crises are managed.You can learn more about the Center for Disaster Protection their website and find Dull Disasters by Daniel Clarke and Stefan Dercon here.

Philippe Besson worked with the Swiss Development Cooperation for more than 30 years before he earlier this year retired from the position as head of the multilateral humanitarian division. In this conversation he provides a unique perspective on humanitarian action and how to be a "principled dinosaur" and a civil servant at the same time.

The Global Executive Leadership Initiative (GELI) is a new flagship initiative from the UN to promote leadership throughout the development and humanitarian sector. GELI is led by Assistant Secretary General Panos Moumtzis who in this weeks episode together with Lars Peter Nissen discusses the challenges of leadership, how being a leader at times can be a very lonely, and how GELI seeks to strengthen leadership.You can read more about GELI on their website www.geli.org and their twitter handle is @the_geli.