📝 Record Your Disaster Story
Your story matters. Communities lose their oral history after disasters. Recording your experience preserves community memory for future generations and helps others facing the same.
Preserving your story...
🗺️ Why Community Memory Gets Lost
After a disaster, communities scatter. Survivors are too traumatised or busy to document. Within a generation, the living memory of what existed before — and what was endured — fades completely.
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8,000+
Major wildfires recorded globally each year, displacing millions
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10M+ Displaced
People displaced by natural disasters annually — most never fully return
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90% Lost
Estimated proportion of community oral histories lost after major disasters
What Disappears When Memory Is Lost
- Local place names and their histories
- Family stories passed down through generations
- Community traditions, foods, and gathering places
- Knowledge of what worked and what didn't in past disasters
- The human scale — the faces, names, and lives behind statistics
🔄 Post-Disaster Rebuild Guide
Get a personalised step-by-step guide for rebuilding after your specific disaster.
💡 How to Preserve Your Community's Memory
- Record voice stories — Use your phone to record elderly community members speaking about life before the disaster. Their voices carry irreplaceable information.
- Collect photographs — Ask everyone who had photos to share digital copies. Create a community archive on Google Photos or a shared drive.
- Document place names — Record local names for streets, landmarks, gathering spots and their histories before they are officially renamed or forgotten.
- Create a community map — Draw or photograph a map of what existed before. Mark homes, farms, community spaces, sacred sites.
- Archive stories on Wikipedia — Create or expand Wikipedia pages for your community. Free, permanent, and globally accessible.
- Contact local libraries and archives — Many national archives accept disaster documentation collections. Your records become permanent public history.