Emily Embleton
Email: emily.embleton@ci.florence.or.us
Title: Emergency Management Communications Analyst
Organization: City of Florence
Community: Florence
Population: 9,475
County Served: Lane
Meet Emily Embleton (she/they):
Emily grew up outside of Denver, Colorado, enjoying all the outdoor recreation and artistic opportunities the area has to offer. Emily attended the Denver School of the Arts for middle and high school, studying theater intensively. While in school, Emily had the opportunity to travel to the Amazon Basin to work on a water infrastructure project for a remote village. This experience sparked their passion for advocacy, travel, and rural support, and they have been pursuing it ever since. After taking a year off to travel around Europe and the Great American West, Emily moved to Salem, Oregon, to attend Willamette University. There she studied Politics, Policy, Law, and Ethics (PPLE) with a minor in Sustainability, while maintaining a Theater Scholarship with an Acting Emphasis.
During the 2020 lockdown, Emily spent time tending to her passion for rural environments. She moved to Coos Bay for the majority of the year and fell in love with the sleepy, yet wild Southern/Central Oregon Coast. Upon returning to Colorado, she spent a summer in the remote mountain town that her aunt had dedicated her life to serving and conserving. This exposure to her aunt’s legacy galvanized Emily into buckling down on their studies with unwavering dedication to assisting, supporting, and uplifting rural communities, rural environments, and the Indigenous people who have stewarded them for generations.
Community and Organization:
Florence, Oregon, is touted as “Oregon’s Coastal Playground” and “The City of Rhododendrons”. This quaint tourist town is at the heart of the Oregon Coast, directly west of Eugene along the Siuslaw River on the stolen land of the Coos, Siuslaw, and Lower Umpqua Peoples. Florence is the gateway to the Oregon Dunes, an extensive national recreation area that stretches along the South-Central Oregon Coast from Florence to Coos Bay. The area is brimming with recreational opportunities provided by its many lakes, rivers, beaches, dunes, and connecting trails. Florence also has a vibrant art community, supported by local individual artists, the public arts commission, and organizations such as The Children’s Repertory Oregon Workshop (CROW) and Last Resort Players.
The City of Florence is small but mighty, and the city employees reflect this. Working from City Hall in the City Manager’s Office, Emily is surrounded by passionate go-getters who work tirelessly to support and improve the city from an administrative and community-development perspective.
Projects:
As the City of Florence’s Emergency Management Communications Analyst, Emily is focusing on improving Florence’s and West Lane [county] Emergency Operations Group’s (WLEOG) internal and external communication lines to ensure effective and collaborative disaster mitigation and response efforts. To do this, Emily is establishing relationships with WLEOG members and partners, creating a public outreach survey to assess public preparedness and community interests, diversifying the means and content of public outreach, working towards reinstating regular preparedness courses for the public, and redesigning the WLEOG website. Emily is thrilled to take on this challenge and work with others to help keep Florence and West Lane County prepared, safe, and resilient in the face of any catastrophe.