Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Students Live Out Head, Heart, Hand
By Jay Nickel
January 15, 2025
If you have paid attention to national news in the last few months, you’re familiar with just how critical disaster relief assistance is when a natural disaster hits a community.
The trained responders that descend on those communities come from various backgrounds — medical, engineering, construction, search and rescue, logistics and social work — and some have undergraduate degrees specifically in disaster relief.
In 2020, JBU added a humanitarian and disaster relief major within the Bible department that has quickly grown to 20 students.
JBU’s HDR program concentrates mainly on the front-end, immediate response to a disaster and is primarily devoted to hands-on technical skills. It also examines domestic and international responses to disaster and aid, taught by knowledgeable instructors with extensive experience in some of the largest disasters of our time.
Greg Robinson, professor of outdoor leadership, said JBU approaches leadership development from a very experiential perspective. Starting with their first class in outdoor living skills, students lead a team on a wilderness trip and get real exposure to how leadership needs to work.
“One of our advantages over other programs is the experiential approach to leadership development built into the program,” Robinson said. “The one critique students learned from a research project they did interviewing seven senior executives of relief organizations was that too many students get hired and, though they have book knowledge, most lack authentic leadership or team experience.”
Home to the Buffalo River and the Ozark Mountains, Northwest Arkansas has active community search and rescue teams for students to volunteer with while completing their degrees.
JBU HDR students work closely with the Siloam Springs Fire Department and EMS, and JBU frequently invites organizations like Samaritan’s Purse, Canopy and Operation Mobilization to visit campus. Robinson said several JBU students have completed internships with Samaritan’s Purse and Water for Good.
Senior Acacia Hall had the opportunity to serve as a wildland firefighter in Oregon last summer, where she was dispatched with a 20-person hand crew to the Falls Fire in Eastern Oregon. The crew’s job was dry mopping, searching for and extinguishing hotspots, digging handlines and building hose lays.
“I’m thankful for the experience and the skills I learned from it, like situational awareness, mental perseverance, pushing through physical discomfort and pain at times, working in high-stress environments and quickly adjusting to changing plans,” she said. “I learned to rely and lean on the Lord for strength and joy every single day and trust him to show up even in an environment that didn’t welcome his presence.”
Experienced adjunct professors like the program’s EMS instructor, Branton Thompson, are vital to the program. He enjoys sharing how assisting in disaster situations is a rewarding experience for students pursuing careers in EMS, structural firefighting and wildland firefighting.
“Working in humanitarian and disaster relief is bringing peace and sharing truth when others are experiencing their emergency,” Thompson said. “Through the EMT program, students get to provide emergency care to the community with the Siloam Springs Fire Department.”
HDR students earn remote and emergency medicine certifications during college. They will graduate with specific FEMA certifications, an EMT license and a wilderness EMT certification.
The career path for HDR students often leads to working for a local, state or federal government or nonprofit organization focusing on disaster response. Robinson said the degree is also a great developmental experience for people who want to serve more locally in first responder roles, whether as paramedics or firefighters.
Senior Oak Martin would love to pursue a career in building or designing disaster shelters or helping rebuild houses after catastrophic destruction. His name, Oak, comes from Isaiah 61:3b: “They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.” Martin said that in college, he discovered the following verse: “They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.”
“That is what I would love to do. I am not sure how yet, but I would love to do this overseas after practicing relief work for a few years here in America,” Martin said.
With the vast array of career opportunities possible from the humanitarian and disaster relief program at JBU, it is uncertain where the graduates will be dispersed around the world. No matter where they land, however, one thing is certain — they will live out the motto “Head, Heart, Hand” wherever they go.
