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Mary Fran Myers

Mary Fran Myers Award

Call for Nominations

Award Winners

The Mary Fran Myers Award was established in 2002 by the Gender and Disaster Network and is coadministered by the Natural Hazards Center. The award recognizes that vulnerability to disasters and mass emergencies is influenced by social, cultural, and economic structures that marginalize women and girls. The award was so named to recognize Mary Fran's sustained efforts to launch a worldwide network among disaster professionals for advancing women's careers and for promoting research on gender issues, disasters, emergency management, and higher education. A goal of both the Gender and Disaster Network and the Natural Hazards Center is to promote and encourage such research and practice.

The Gender and Disaster Network consists of women and men from around the world interested in gender relations in the context of disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, hazardous materials events, tornadoes, famine, cyclones, and other events. The network's goals are to document and analyze gendered experiences before, during, and after disasters and to conduct interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects.

The Natural Hazards Center advances and communicates knowledge on hazards mitigation and disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Using an all-hazards and interdisciplinary framework, the Center fosters information sharing and integration of activities among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers from around the world; supports and conducts research; and provides educational opportunities for the next generation of hazards scholars and professionals.

Call for Nominations

The Gender and Disaster Network and the Natural Hazards Center invite nominations of those who should be recognized for their efforts to advance gender-sensitive policy, practice, or research in the areas of disaster risk reduction. Established in 2002, the Mary Fran Myers Award recognizes that vulnerability to disasters and mass emergencies is influenced by social, cultural, and economic structures that marginalize women and girls, and may also expose boys and men to harm. The award was so named to recognize Myers’ sustained efforts as Co-Director of the Natural Hazards Center to launch a worldwide network promoting women’s opportunities in disaster-related professions and supporting research on gender issues, disasters, emergency management, and higher education.

The intent of this award is to recognize women and men whose advocacy, research, or management efforts have had a lasting, positive impact on reducing disaster vulnerability. All those whose work has added to the body of knowledge on gender and disasters, is significant for gender-theory or practice, or has furthered opportunities for women to succeed in the field are eligible.

The award committee is especially interested in soliciting nominations from outside the United States and strives to enable award recipients with high travel costs to attend the Natural Hazards Center workshop in Colorado.

There are three steps to nominate someone and all materials should be submitted electronically:

  • Submit your full name and contact information (mailing address, e-mail, telephone, fax) and that of the nominee
  • Attach a current resume or curriculum vitae of the nominee
  • Write a letter of nomination detailing specifically how this individual’s work fits the award criteria as described above
  • Optional: A one-page letter of support from another person or organization may also be submitted

The deadline for nominations is April 1, 2008.

Please direct any questions and submit nomination materials to mfmawards2008@gdnonline.org or be in touch by phone, +44 (0)191 227 3108 or fax, +44 (0)191 227 4715.

2007 Award Winner - Prema Gopalan

As the Executive Director of Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP) for over 15 years, Prema Gopalan has supported poor rural women in building bridges with local government to facilitate democratic processes that are inclusive of women. The impact of Prema’s work is clearly demonstrated by the experience of SSP after the Marathwada earthquake of 1993. The Maharashtran government enlisted SSP to catalyze residents in 300 villages to learn, cooperate, and apply new technology and construction techniques, and their remaining government subsidies, to rapidly repair their damaged homes. When SSP’s initial appraisal found that village officials and homeowners lacked basic information and opportunities to participate in reconstruction, Prema quickly determined that the women’s savings and credit groups, although largely defunct, could be reactivated as community organizations that could inspire and engage large numbers of women to lead their community’s repair and reconstruction. Since then, the efforts of SSP in Maharashtra to engage women’s groups in reconstruction efforts have established a platform of peer learning exchanges enabling other earthquake-impacted communities of women around the world to learn from these strategies. In earthquake and tsunami areas, Prema has supported women who mobilized to organize their communities to restore housing, livelihoods, community infrastructure, and basic services. She encourages participation in reconstruction and the creation of new, empowered spaces for women to continue their development activities after reconstruction is completed.

In 1999, Swayam Shikshan Prayog, with Prema Gopalan’s leadership, supported grassroots leaders from Maharashtra to share their experience with women in eight earthquake-devastated communities in the Marmara region of Turkey. In Gujarat, after the 2001 earthquake, Prema took a delegation of Maharashtran women leaders and SSP staff on a humanitarian/solidarity visit. Gujarat women were so moved by receiving a delegation of peer leaders who had survived similar situations that they urged the women’s groups and SSP to return and come to assist them. This process was repeated when the tsunami struck Tamil Nadu at the end of 2004. In all of these cases, Prema took care to work only in communities that invited them in, seeing the value of a women-led relief and reconstruction process. Last year, SSP partnered with more than 42,000 women organized in autonomous community groups in 889 disaster-impacted villages in three states in India.

Under Prema’s leadership, the SSP has partnered with GROOTS International, an international network of grassroots women, and served as its secretariat. In this role, she has facilitated the creation of training teams of expert grassroots community women leaders. These women-led teams are now available to support and build the capacity of women’s groups in high risk and disaster-impacted, low-income communities across the globe. These efforts have been widely recognized as a model of good practice in the field. For these initiatives and for her sustained work with and on behalf of grassroots women, Prema is recognized as an expert in community driven, gender equitable disaster response and resilience initiatives that help transform the chaos of disasters into opportunities for women to lead and restore their communities.

2006 Award Winner - Maureen Fordham

Maureen Fordham

Maureen Fordham, who is a senior lecturer in disaster management at the University of Northumbria in the United Kingdom, has a background in sociology of science and technology with a focus on ecology and environmental management. Her work has a special focus on women in disasters and disaster management, emphasizing their capacities and not just their vulnerabilities. Recently she has been focusing her work on children, females in particular, as active agents in disaster.

It was shortly after she began researching disasters in 1988 that she noticed a gap in the literature dealing with gender issues, especially in the context of the developed world. Since the early 90s, Fordham has been an advocate for gender and disaster research and was one of the founding members of the Gender and Disaster Network in 1997. Committed to the free exchange of knowledge and information, she has been involved with the design and management of a number of disaster-related Web sites, including the Gender and Disaster Network and Radix (Radical Interpretations of Disaster), and has served as the editor of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. Additionally, she is often invited to act as an advisor or participant in activities conducted by various divisions of the United Nations and other national, regional, and local governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

2005 Award Winner - Elaine Enarson

Elaine Enarson

Elaine Enarson is a professor in applied disaster and emergency studies at Brandon University in Canada. For more than a decade, Enarson has dedicated her time and efforts to better understanding and reducing the disaster vulnerability of women and girls. Her scholarship and advocacy work have fundamentally changed the way scholars conduct gendered research and the way practitioners respond to extreme events. She has served as a mentor and role model to a new generation of students and emergency responders. Her contributions to gender and disaster research include:

  • Conducting research and developing courses and publications examining women's work in disasters and their housing and evacuation experiences, the uses of feminist theory for disaster sociology, disaster prevention and sustainable development, women's cultural responses to disaster, violence against women in disaster contexts, grassroots women's efforts to mitigate natural hazards, and international trends in the gender and disaster literature.
  • Consulting on these issues with the International Labour Organization, the United Nation’s Division for the Advancement of Women, and the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
  • Serving as convener, grant writer, and planner for conferences on Gender Equality and Disaster Risk Reduction, Reaching Women and Children in Disasters, and Women in Disaster: Exploring the Issues.
  • Cofounding the Gender and Disaster Network in 1997.
  • Acting as project manager for the Gender and Disaster Sourcebook, an online compilation developed by an international writing team.

2004 Award Winner - Madhavi Ariyabandu

Madhavi Ariyabandu

Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandu is a program manager in disaster mitigation at the Intermediate Technology Development Group in Sri Lanka. The disaster mitigation program works in five South Asian countries and collaborates with governments and international nongovernmental agencies. Madhavi's significant contributions include:

  • Addressing gender issues in disasters throughout the Asia region on a continual basis, with a focus on linking gender issues with sustainable development and taking a progressive and gender-sensitive approach to risk reduction.
  • With two M.S. degrees (agronomy and agricultural economics) and extensive research experience, Madhavi is easily able to move between the worlds of practice and theory, and has a demonstrated passion for social justice and change.
  • Providing active and thoughtful participation in numerous international forums on disasters, development, and gender and disasters, including facilitating sessions, presenting papers, participating in advisory sessions, and organizing follow-up activities.
  • Acting as a global role model for women in the disaster field through her actions, publications, and personal commitment.
  • Generously giving of her time and ideas to others.
  • Consistently taking a holistic approach toward reducing the vulnerability of women and children to disasters with the demonstrated and practical understanding of the differential impact of disasters on different social groups.
  • A strong and developing body of work and practice that embodies the firm conviction that incorporating disaster risk into development planning and addressing gender considerations in all situations are critical to reaching the intertwined goals of sustainable development and effective disaster risk reduction.
  • Coauthor of Gender Dimensions in Disaster Management: A Guide for South Asia (2004), which places the issue of gender in the context of development and explores how gender and development concerns are reflected in the management paradigm of disaster response.
  • Author of Defeating Disasters: Ideas for Action (1999), a book based on a variety of experiences from South Asian countries that argues the need for an alternative approach to deal with disasters, in which mitigation and preparedness are key.
  • Active in the Duryog Nivaran network in South Asia that addresses issues of hazard vulnerability and mitigation with the understanding that hazards turn into disaster only when societies, communities, and structures become too weak and vulnerable to withstand risk, shock, and seasonality.
  • The driving force behind the video documentary, South Asian Women, Facing Disasters, Securing Life, which relates the stories of four South Asian women from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as they face disasters such as cyclones, epidemics, and civil conflict. The video is aimed at policy makers and practitioners with the goal of creating awareness about disaster mitigation and the critical need for women to assume a more active role.

2003 Award Winner - Betty Morrow

Betty Hearn Morrow

Betty Hearn Morrow works at Florida International University. While it is impossible to describe the full depth and breadth of her contributions, a few of the reasons for her nomination and selection include:

  • Intellectual contributions to research and writing that have irrevocably changed how we think about disasters and risk in the United States.
  • Work as coeditor of The Gendered Terrain of Disasters and as Coeditor of the Special Issue on Women and Disaster in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters.
  • Commitment to using academic tools to change the world.
  • Development of the Gender and Disaster Network listserv.
  • Development and continued support of Gender and Disaster Network meetings.
  • Procurement of funding for the Reaching Women and Children in Disasters conference in Miami, Florida in 2000.
  • Documentation and analysis of the unique disaster experiences of women and their families in the Caribbean.
  • Singularly important research on Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Hugo that revealed vulnerabilities and capacities of women and their families.
  • Never-ending and staunch support of those most vulnerable, in particular, single parents.
  • Development of curricular materials on households, families, gender, and disasters.
  • Sensitivity to the lived realities of men and women in disaster situations.
  • Ability to hold herself and others to higher standards.
  • Extensive background in speaking to large and important audiences with a particular focus on vulnerabilities and risk.
  • Involvement in mentoring new researchers in the field of disasters, particularly female colleagues and graduate students, and to continued guidance of new, female professors.
  • Service as former director of the International Hurricane Center’s Laboratory for Social Behavior and as professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University.

2002 Award Winner - Mary Fran Myers

Mary Fran Myers, Codirector of the Natural Hazards Center received the first award. The Mary Fran Myers Award was so named to recognize her sustained efforts to launch a worldwide network among disaster professionals for advancing women’s careers and for promoting research on gender issues in disaster research in emergency management and higher education.