Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates an effective response, but two jump out from Beth’s scholarly work. The first is the ability of a well-formed community to pivot by using the relationships and values that it has established in new and creative ways. And the second is in the building of communities to create that ability.