Alana Tornello (she/her) joined HSC in September 2022 as the Director of Resilience. She has served crisis-affected communities through equity-driven coalition building, advocacy, and planning since 2012.

Her work began in community and faith organizations serving in disaster recovery—first internationally, and then in her hometown in NYC. Her community recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy included coordinating a coalition of grassroots providers, leading inter-borough advocacy to local government/national media, and designing a community flood mitigation program.

In 2018, she joined NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response, where she designed programs/procurements for community resilience networks. Alana served in the agency’s emergency responses, notably for COVID-19, measles, and Hurricane Maria. She co-founded and co-led response/recovery teams focused on bidirectional, meaningful engagement with partners in communities disproportionately impacted by disaster, racism, and intersecting oppression.

Alana has published on community-led recovery coalitions and crisis-driven social movements in award-winning master’s and undergraduate theses. She believes we need all our societal capacity in this age of crisis—especially via community-led, anti-racist collectives of practitioners serving the union of everyday emergencies and large-scale disasters.