Page 164 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

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Collaboration in Working With
Children Affected by Disaster

Daniel Gensler

Introduction

When disaster strikes a community, children suffer along with adults. By
now, we have developed a number of concepts to understand children’s
reactions to disaster. In this chapter, I describe these ideas and then give
two examples in which the ideas are used during interventions at the com-
munity level. Both examples occurred after 9/11: working with schools
whose students were affected and working with a company whose employ-
ees included parents who were killed. This chapter is written from the
point of view of a mental health provider. I illustrate ways of collaborating
with schools and corporations from this perspective, using fundamental
principles for working with children. Our vision for intervention did not
include working with clergy and they were not involved. This limitation
was unfortunate both for their likely contribution to the work with chil-
dren and parents after disaster and for the continuity they would probably
have provided within the families’ religious communities after the mental
health interventions came to an end.
I focus on collaboration with schools and corporations because of the
impact on me of the attack on New York that occurred on September 11,
2001 (Gensler et al., 2002). I was working in Manhattan that day and spent
much of the next 3 years responding in different settings to the effects of
the disaster. Nearly all the work was collaborative, involving workshops,
training, briefing, debriefing, group work, and family work. Interventions
were offered through a variety of organizations: the police department,

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