Our Mission
To provide real practical and tactical solutions for profound, compassionate support without causing secondary or vicarious trauma, offering advanced learnings based on evidence-based methods inspired by the contributions of NOVA CRT, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, and emerging experts in the field of body-brain-heart connected trauma-informed care.
Who We Are
Capacity Path Partners are highly skilled in disaster trauma crisis intervention, group trainings and emergency management, who put it all on the line to get in the trenches with survivors and caregivers to support community, family, and agencies to recover and advance towards a brighter future. We are committed to helping you thrive again, and bounce back better than before.
What We Do
We provide mental health response teams, professional debriefings and resourcing sessions, and resilience training methods for teams working with victims, survivors, medical, community governance, and responders. Mental health needs require us to be flexible and adaptable to offer customized packages to assist in repairing, reframing, and rebuilding communities, organizations, and people, from the inside out.
Our Team
Partners, Trainers, Coaches
Amie Leigh | Crisis Stabilization. Responder Resiliency and Community Redevelopment
Dale Fleming | Business Continuity and Preparedness
Deirdre von Krauskopf | First Responders and Communication
Sean Wyman | Public Safety Professionals and Trauma-Informed Care
Marlene Baggs Hoenig | International Crisis Relief and Disaster Chaplain
John Solet | Scholastic and Athletic Coach
Wanda Vollmer | Personal Preparedness
Neal Killam | Emergency Management
Karen McLouth | Community Building
Behind the Scenes
Kimberly Foehringer | Creative Content and Design
Isabella Henriksson | Content Copywriter
Interns
Stefan Chen | Emergency Management and VOAD Research
Giselle Guilles | Recovery Fitness and Occupational Therapy
Trainers and Coaches
Capacity Path works with the highest level of certified experts in the field of emergency management, disaster trauma, resiliency and capacity building. Our Trainers and Coaches take pride in working with our partner organizations in the trenches; before, during and after a disaster.
Behind the Scenes
Our creative content and community building experts are the Powerhouses behind the scenes. Working together with our partners, they help streamline workflow and consistent storytelling to build a repertoire with our audience and a strong network.
Interns
The research support we provide and receive from our Interns is a crucial component of staying on the leading edge in our fields of expertise. Our top notch collaboration with universities and students keep Capacity Path at the forefront of the global conversation of how to enhance and advance resiliency initiatives.
Contact us to explore opportunities to partner and collaborate, please inquire at amie@capacitypath.com
Our History
To date, our team has worked in 19+ catastrophic disasters, crisis environments, and mass casualty incidents. We led the first State Emergency Response Team Mental Health and Wellness team (FL SERT MHW) providing extensive direct disaster mental health relief, participating in and supporting emergency management exercises and EOCs, coordinating with FEMA IA/PA, with Public Agencies, private businesses and VOAD partners, establishing and supporting case management programs and providing relief and resilience workshops to survivors and community responders, including county hospital systems and the network of agencies responsible for county and municipal response and recovery.
Through their reactions and capacity to handle the turbulence of catastrophic incidents, survivors and governments showed us the gaps in the community response and recovery processes, where all are facing unsurmountable stressors with limited resources. Those gaps are the hidden "trenches" of the disaster. Capacity Path teams jump in those trenches, ready and responsive to the needs of the community, without letting logistical slowdowns get in the way of getting real help to real people on the ready.
First responders, secondary responders, and survivors of all kinds benefit from the real practical and tactical support of community crisis stabilization techniques we are distinct for. Before we can rebuild, we have to reconnect all the disparate pieces to have a stable foundation to move forward. Rebuilding homes and highways is one thing. Rebuilding hearts, minds, memories and community networks is another... not to be neglected.
By providing realistic perspectives and applicable methodologies to overcome these massive obstacles to recovery, we help organizations and survivors deal with their personal and professional difficulties these circumstances bring up. We help restore balance and reinvigorate a passion for public safety.
Our long-term goals are to introduce advanced concepts in psychosocial support and crisis-informed care as a fundamental and essential component of government, emergency management, private-sector business continuity, and NGO aid programs. Trauma-informed care is important, and further to it, crisis-informed care is distinct, and important, especially as more disastrous incidents are on the rise nationwide. We aim to increase capacity for first responders and related professionals to go beyond compartmentalizing the trauma-effects of their challenging roles, into being icons of health and wellness.
Resilience is more than lip service-more than a buzz word for our times- it has to be practical, tactical and accessible for all to mitigate the human risk factors of disasters and high-crisis incidents. It's as basic a human need as housing, food and water. Basic Crisis Stabilization is the frontier edge of disaster relief, the place where we can make a real, and potentially measurable difference that moves the world towards being brighter and stronger together.
Rebuilding Communities, Accelerating Recovery.
01
Discover
Civil unrest or chronic complaining that turns into fierce distress are some negative ways many disaster survivors aim to regain personal power after they have faced such an extreme and tragic sense of helplessness. Rarely is it effective or beneficial to the community as a whole.
When personal wholeness is accessed, outbursts and shows of force, are no longer perceived as the only way to deal with feeling cast out or shut down, Thriving replaces the natural instinct of “victims” to blame others who didn’t “rescue” them in their crisis time. Our nervous systems can calm down and re-engage with life, and move forward.
02
Define
Resiliency is the framework by which new and familiar tools can be integrated into individual and community recovery planning. The capacity increases as the tools fill the spaces that the disaster cleared away. By re-engaging a sense of possibility and human ingenuity, moving public and private conversation away from a dialogue of entitlement and despair after people have experienced some sort of devastating trauma, Capacity Path’s training modalities restore a sense of personal agency, and return individuals to a state of natural thriving.
03
Design
In supporting training and teaching methods for personal growth, Capacity Path engages organizations to integrate wellness into their organizational design as well as into their programmatic offerings, training teams to be better equipped to facilitate a culture of wellness within and throughout their programmatic missions. We customize our approach for cultural fit, organizational fit, and tailored to the stage of the recovery process we currently find ourselves in.
04
Develop
Capacity Path aims to develop practical and accessible means for people, organizations, and systems to integrate wholeness and wellness interventions into recovery processes. Implemented well, the goal of this is to accelerate and improve relief efforts and the lasting impact of dollars, time, and other resources invested.
05
Deploy
There are real and effective ways to experience personal power that contribute to society instead of creating a long-standing drain on resources and an increasing sense of conflict and division. When they are made available, individuals can experience a forward moving shift with less inclination to back-slide, and communities can move forward in whatever re-development or growth initiatives are needed to overcome the issue. We see the trauma on the news, and everyone wants to help but often doesn't know how.
Capacity Path creates models of engagement so wellness providers of many varieties can safely deploy and support the affected communities.
06
Deliver
In some cases, the solution is simply making the conversation present and real in organizations where it was a roadblock or non-existent. Other times, the solution is to provide an actual experiences of restoration of personal empowerment such that the negative impact can be reversed. The neurobiology can be adjusted and calmness restored. The nervous system can expand its access to safety and well-being. However it occurs, the solution to trauma can be found in a profound return to strength and wholeness such that the entire tone of the experience shifts from despair to new possibilities.
Why Partner with Us?
We Empower.
Capacity Path Partners are people training and supporting your community, your family, your agency, towards a brighter future. Many people are not sufficiently prepared for the devastating effects of natural disasters and don't realize their shortfall until after the incident. By consciously building capacity and adding to our tool kit as a way of life, humans a stronger, resilient, and thrive.
Catastrophic events leave a lasting imprint of trauma with individuals and community because they bring an immediate, and often ongoing, sense of deep helplessness. Empowering people to re-access their sense of agency can reduce depression, anger, and social cost of ongoing community-wide despair. Capacity Path empowers. We don't come to "fix" people. We strive in every way to equip and edify local communities to rise up, stronger and brighter than ever.