Gianna Alessi

Email: gianna_alessi@outlook.com
Title: Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan Specialist
Organization: Clackamas County Disaster Management
Community: Clackamas County
Population: 422,537
County Served: Clackamas County

Meet Gianna Alessi (she/her):

Gianna is originally from Central Coast of California. However, she moved to Idaho for her undergrad at Boise State University, where she studied Sociology and Gerontology. After graduating, Gianna served in the Peace Corps in Armenia, where she taught English in a rural high school and managed several environmental education programs for rural communities. While there, she lived with her host family for two years, learned the language, and lived in a wonderful town called Talin.

After that, she began her Master of Forestry at Oregon State University. Her studies focused on rural sociology, collaborative decision-making, and fostering opportunities for more inclusive and accessible education and engagement, particularly for those most vulnerable to natural hazards. She is excited to continue pursuing this passion in her position with RARE and Clackamas County.

Community and Organization:

Gianna is serving in Clackamas County, which is situated on the ancestral homelands of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz Indians. The county is the third most populous in Oregon, and its geography extends from the Willamette River to Mount Hood, encompassing a unique mixture of urban, rural, and wilderness areas across the county.

Her organization is Clackamas County Disaster Management (CCDM), a department of the Clackamas County Government, headquartered in Oregon City. CCDM serves the community by identifying hazards, developing emergency and mitigation plans, coordinating response activities, and engaging the community in disaster preparedness, thereby helping the community respond to and recover from natural disasters more effectively. Clackamas County is vulnerable to various natural disasters, including wildfires, earthquakes, flooding, and volcanoes.

She is also receiving support from the director of the Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience, Mike Howard, who is based at the University of Oregon.

Project:

Gianna’s primary project is to update the Clackamas County Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan (NHMP), a formal document that summarizes a community’s exposure, sensitivity, and risk to natural hazards. Accordingly, the plan outlines long and short-term mitigation strategies with the goal of minimizing losses and enhancing community resilience. Communities that have NHMPs approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are eligible for federal mitigation grant funding, both pre-hazard (during the mitigation stage) and post-hazard (during the recovery stage).

Updating the NHMP involves various actions, including utilizing current demographic, climate, and hazard data to improve the assessment of risk and vulnerability in the community. Also, a primary objective during this update is to ensure that the plan approaches the community’s hazards, risks, and vulnerabilities, and the associated strategies, from an equitable and inclusive perspective. Therefore, as part of the update process, an intentional focus is placed on public outreach and engagement with BIPOC and underrepresented communities throughout Clackamas County to ensure the plan accurately represents the vulnerabilities and interests of all community members. Lastly, once published, the updated plan will serve as a more usable and relevant planning guide for users.