A note from Jolie

When the ground shifted beneath my feet in Christchurch, New Zealand, I experienced disaster not as a distant concept, but as something intimate and all-encompassing. My family and I lived through it alongside our city—shaken not only by the earthquake, but by the long, winding path of recovery that followed. And it was in that path, in the mess and the beauty of what happened next, that I came to understand a vital truth: disaster recovery is as much about people as it is about infrastructure—even more so.

Disaster upends not only what we can see, but what we feel. It pulls the rug out from under our sense of safety, identity, and belonging. And when the adrenaline fades, what remains is often exhaustion, uncertainty, and deep emotional loss. This is the part of disaster we often don’t talk enough about. The pain. The quiet unraveling. The long tail of grief, anxiety, and exhaustion that lingers well beyond the headlines.

And yet, so often, our systems default to focusing on the physical—rebuilding roads, housing, infrastructure and distributing goods—because they are tangible and easier to measure. It’s where our stress-braced minds tend to go: the visible, the urgent, the seemingly solvable. In truth, while these things are important, real recovery is far messier—and more human.

Again and again, disaster after disaster, we make this same mistake: we rush to rebuild what’s visible. Bricks. Roads. Buildings. It’s understandable—our stress response narrows our focus to the tangible problems right in front of us, but the danger in this is profound. When recovery is reduced to construction, we risk missing what holds a community together: its people. We pour energy into restoring the physical world while overlooking the emotional, social, and psychological scaffolding that communities need to heal and thrive. And in doing so, we unintentionally leave people behind.

The Hummingly Foundation was established to change that. We invite you to join the call: Support the people side of recovery. Champion community-led initiatives. Trust local wisdom. Fund connection, healing, and care—not as extras, but as essentials. Because the way we rebuild, whether we place people at the heart, is what truly determines how we recover.