I am not a professional disaster relief worker, but I think the times we are living in will require all of us to find our personal roles and contributions to supporting disaster relief. However much we may wish to avoid it, the evidence that our climate has been irreparably changed by human activity is unavoidable. Disasters are likely to be an all too common part of our future.

I am a writer and communications professional who understandably cares very much about language. I am also a human rights advocate. My “come to Jesus” moment with disaster and what role I might play was Hurricane Katrina.

It all started with a simple observation in human rights circles that the news media were frequently mislabeling survivors as “refugees.” While refugees have specific protections under human rights law, the people fleeing the storm were still in the boundaries of their own country. They should actually be classified as “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs and their human rights protections as such are even broader because they are still within their homeland.

This observation was like a key that unlocked a doorway into analyzing all the other ways Katrina survivors were being “othered” and discarded by their own country. The instinct to call them refugees was all too telling. Overwhelmingly black and poor, they were caste away by this word choice and denied the most basic recognition of their citizenship.

All of this led to an effort I played a role in to popularize recognition of Katrina survivors as IDPs. We produced materials, analysis, did our best to correct the “refugee” misnomer, and outlined the protections of IDPs under international law and the many, many ways the U.S. government was in violation. But you really don’t need to carry a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in your pocket to know that Katrina survivors were wronged in countless ways.

Hurricane Harvey has been reported to be much more “equal opportunity” in its immediate devastation but the process of recovery will invariably put the most vulnerable parts of the population in greater peril. Their road to rebuilding their lives will be much longer and more difficult.

Critiquing human rights violations is one thing. Actually finding a practical way to remedy them is another thing. Pointing out the horrors of political leaders will only take you so far. My first lesson from Hurricane Katrina is: please donate your money to local, community-based organizations with long-term commitments on the ground. Read more here).

My second lesson from Katrina: center human rights and a process for community participation in the recovery process.

Once we realized that our government was only ever going to do the bare minimum for Hurricane Katrina survivors, we started looking for models for community-led disaster recovery. We wanted to find inspiration for solutions that are rooted in human rights. This took us to Southeast Asia and an organization in Thailand called the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) that was using human rights principles to support communities impacted by the 2004 tsunami.

We read inspiring stories about poor Thai fishing villages quickly assembling to reoccupy their lands who were able to recover in an extraordinary amount of time, in some cases even negotiating land rights that they didn’t have before the storm and structural improvements to mitigate the potential damage of future disasters.

We wanted to know how they did it, so we packed our bags and organized a delegation of Katrina survivor community activists from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama to go to Asia and meet with them. Our group visited parts of Indonesia and Thailand, ending up eventually at a regional Asian conference on human rights and community-led recovery in Phuket, Thailand. Many of the people in our group had never left the United States and before Katrina, some had never been outside of the Gulf Coast.

There were obviously a whole lot of stories from this experience. Here are my key takeaways:

If we aren’t going to reference human rights protections in times of crisis and disaster, what the hell do we have them for?

A recovery process rooted in human rights principles must include the participation and direct input of the people impacted.

The most inspiring insight from my time with Katrina survivors on our visit to Asia was that a disaster process centered in the voices and interest of community members has the potential to leave them in a stronger position than before. This may sound counterintuitive but the grassroots rebuilding we observed in Asia involved cooperative lending models and innovations such as planners and architects working in direct collaboration with poor villagers to make better infrastructures that are more responsive to their needs. We saw fishing communities reoccupy their lands immediately and demand land-sharing agreements with commercial developers, so that they now have rights to the lands they’ve lived on for generations.

There were exciting possibilities and, of course, practical limitations. Katrina survivors pointed out that cooperative lending and pooled resources are unfamiliar to many Americans, given our culture of individualism, capitalism and competition. Public housing residents from New Orleans pointed out they’d been locked out of their homes and would be forcibly removed and possibly arrested if they tried to peacefully reoccupy them.

Many Katrina survivors were sent far away from their homes with one-way tickets across the country, making it difficult for them to organize and rebuild collectively. In a heartbreaking moment at a workshop at the Phuket conference, Asian participants found it hard to believe that the US government would do this. “Why wouldn’t people in neighboring communities just take you in? It’s much cheaper and you could more easily return home.”

When members of our group explained that their neighboring communities were arming themselves against poor and black survivors and didn’t want them back, I think we all felt like crying. This revealed another challenge for importing our Asian experience: US racism. It’s been heartening to see examples from Hurricane Harvey of people banding together and showing compassion across racial lines.

As I look for places for hope in these often dire and hopeless times, I think of what is possible when people transform despair into action and find ways to collaborate and care for each other. There is much to be learned from the Katrina experience and every disaster, though horrible and traumatic, can be an opportunity for us to try to learn to be better human beings.

Human rights principles give a strong foundation and framework to guide us in the right direction. I am praying for mercy in the path of destruction of Hurricane Irma. I hope that every resource is provided to the communities enduring this. As I gravely contemplate the future of climate change, I believe that our ability to help each other withstand and recover from disaster is likely to be among our most vital skills for survival as a species.