Our Story

HeakeSpeak is my call to action after a lifetime of seeing how systems fail when communities are left to navigate their greatest challenges alone.

After a lifetime working on emergency management, accessibility, and technical communication, I understand that resilience is not possible without inclusion. This is why I created HeakeSpeak: to ensure technology, community, and equity are never disconnected. We exist to create spaces for every voice to be heard and every space to be made accessible in times of crisis.

We began by consulting on accessibility and instructional design. We have since grown to pursue a vision of democratizing literacy and learning and building stronger communities by designing tools that help everyone be prepared, respond to, and recover from disasters before, during, and after.

Mitigation and adaptation are critical. But in the climate crisis, the public health emergency, and the polarized world we live in, we need to do so much more. We need to prepare, empower, and connect. That's why HeakeSpeak is engaged in the Community Inclusive Preparedness and Response Crowdmapping Project, digital literacy workshops, and accessibility audits (to help organizations meet compliance requirements while also elevating all voices).

HeakeSpeak describes community resilience as the ability of a community to adapt and support one another, and carry on as best as possible through difficult and uncertain times. Our communities will need to respond to and adapt to a wide range of contingencies, including natural disasters, rising unemployment, civil disturbances, and laws affecting the operations of agencies that deliver essential everyday services.

We will build equity, inclusivity, and transparency into disaster planning, preparedness, response, and recovery. Resilience means coming together in times of need, caring for our most vulnerable, protecting the networks and services on which our communities rely, and enabling them to flourish.

Help build an accessible community that embraces open dialogue and collective action. Communities thrive when everyone sees themselves.

Get Involved!

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