by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Craig Williams is the founder of Architects Without Borders (AWB), a volunteer humanitarian relief nonprofit that assists with disaster preparedness and provides mid- to long-range recovery assistance. AWB is committed to helping communities develop self-directed sustainable recovery and reconstruction programs. The organization supports communities in developing visionary planning, leadership, and self-determination models that communities can use to define and achieve their goals.

Education: I graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a BArch. I also studied at Sonoma State University in planning, so I have an education in both planning and architecture.

Practice outside AWB: I was working for a firm in Santa Rosa and, as of February, I am now working on my own with private clients. It gives me flexibility to participate in global issues and fairly big international programs, some of which take me to those host countries to work with national and regional agencies on master planning and getting things started. The project architect position that I had was very demanding. I just was not able to find the flexibility to continue working with AWB and as an employee in a large firm. [The new firm is called] Earthwise Design. It’s architecture, planning, and environmental design with a focus on sustainability from an ecological approach.

Hobbies: I am an avid wilderness backpacker. I just finished a 60-mile backpacking trip in Argentina. After I left my 60-hour-a-week day job, one of the first things I did was take my 16-year-old son and 22-year-old daughter, who had already been backpacking for three months in South America, on a 60-mile wilderness backpacking trip in southern Patagonia. I’m a real outdoors enthusiast and lover of nature. I find that communing with nature recharges me. I have a spiritual relationship with the planet and the magnificence of this miracle that we’ve been gifted the opportunity to be alive and enjoy.

Current read: State of the World, published by the Worldwatch Institute with a special focus on China and India. The Worldwatch Institute focuses on the key intersecting variables affecting humans and the environment such as energy, food security, ecological and environmental issues, population growth, resource depletion, pollution vectors, and wars and conflict. It weaves them in a coherent and tangible way, distilling it from both the global perspective but also giving concrete examples in regional context by looking at such things as access to employment, education, and health care. I find it fascinating to read about these things because I feel that it’s important to have a philosophy, but it’s also important to have the philosophy grounded in reality with a view of where things are going so that our efforts are not exasperating the overarching crises that face us.

On founding AWB: In 1982 or ’83, when I was at Cal Poly, our design studio was approached by a member of the Rotary Club to participate in a design competition for a pro bono outpatient pediatric clinic for physical rehabilitation and fitting prosthetics. The site was a small village outside of Acapulco called Guapinole. There was no local clinic, and it was a four- to five-hour bus ride for access to the services that this facility would provide. The Shriners and Rotary Club pulled together the funding. I participated in the design competition, and my proposal was the one that was built. It planted a seed in my heart about the incredible opportunity for our creative energy to provide a built environment solution and a very powerful social context in which the needs of a disadvantaged community can be fulfilled.

I looked into it further and quickly found that there are an awful lot of humanitarian organizations in the world, but not many of them have as their core competency planning, architecture, and engineering. Over a period of many years, groups of people started coming together and taking on small projects at first and then the idea stuck. [I decided that] we might as well establish something that is permanent, builds on itself, and gives people the opportunity to participate from time to time as their availability allows, but that [also provides] continuity so that others can continue carrying the baton when people have to go back to being responsible for their regular lives. It was a matter of building capacity, continuity, and credibility and recognition as an organization that could provide needed support.

It’s actually grown quite well. Part of what I do is inspire and help establish teams in various regions so people can come together and work in collaboration by establishing a chapter. I help facilitate a visioning process for the organization and then, depending on how quick they come up to speed, there are projects that I steer in their direction.

How the volunteers work: They join both as members and on a project basis. One of the philosophies that I promote when working with groups of people is that the process and the outcome is one that should be self-visioned by the participants. That’s precisely the kind of work we do when we work on behalf of disadvantaged communities. It’s not our own personal or team vision with foregone conclusions and a solution to be implemented. That doesn’t seem to work very well, so I promote a sense of collaborative visioning and consensus-based decision making. As people come together to form a team, they can identify whether they want formal membership and dues or if they want to have a less formal requirement for participation, but at the same time have a professional-based organization so that credibility is maintained and commitments are fulfilled. But it’s really up to the group to shape what that may look like. I encourage flexibility because being a volunteer organization, it’s hard to put rigid demands on folks.

Project and team identification: Projects are usually identified by region or context, so if we’re talking about the initial response from a disaster like Katrina or the Asian tsunami, then we work closely with international agencies like the United Nations and USAID to get a grasp on what’s happening and whether there’s an interest and a capacity to respond to a verified needs based assessment. In other words, instead of coming to a potential project location without understanding exactly what is needed, we work in collaboration with the network of humanitarian relief agencies to understand where there is a need that hasn’t been addressed.

It’s up to each particular team or chapter that wants to participate to determine whether they have the capacity to work in an emergency relief scenario or if they’re more interested and capable of working in medium or long-term recovery scenarios. They’re very different obviously. The emergency response involves temporary shelter, tent encampments, debris removal, and health and sanitation issues. Although AWB is not really geared to a broad spectrum initial response, we do find that if one or two people can go to a site to get information about the situation on the ground and an accurate needs assessment with the community, that can help steer the objectives and understanding of what the process might look like for more medium to long-term recovery.

Most difficult aspect of disaster relief: Coordination is exceedingly difficult because there are so many stakeholders who want to participate or be included in the decision-making process and implementation. The least challenging that we find is working with people within the affected community. They tend to be the easiest people to work with because the challenges that they face are fairly obvious. They’ve perhaps lost a home, family members, employment opportunities, possessions, so the need and solutions are easy to identify.

When it comes to jurisdictional and competing agencies, both in the non-governmental organizational sector as well as in villages, sometimes there is resource scarcity. For example, if there is a need for a lot of concrete in a reconstruction scenario, occasionally we see a large humanitarian relief organization come in and—without having any dialogue with other operators in the region—buy all of the concrete within 100 miles, so that then the other agencies and humanitarian organizations wanting to participate can’t move forward because all of the resources have been taken. There tends to be a high degree of competition, and it’s really unfortunate. If there’s resource scarcity, there’s competition among the survivors for what resources are available. Among humanitarian organizations, there’s competition for the same limited resources on behalf of their constituents, but sometimes there’s also competition for visibility. There’s competition for funding. There’s competition for recognition within the humanitarian sector. These things can get in the way unfortunately. We have to be sensitive to those issues and attempt not to duplicate effort where there’s already some coverage, while at the same time not miss acute needs in areas where there are gaps of response.

Perhaps, the most challenging is the overall coordination of intervention among the many agencies and NGOs. That tends to be fraught with confusion. There’s a genuine effort by most participants to have a coordinated, effective, and efficient response, yet in the context of chaos that natural disasters and human disasters have a tendency to create, it becomes exceedingly difficult to be effective in those scenarios. With a sensitivity and an awareness of the patterns that emerge in those contexts, we can avoid unintended consequences and reach out to the network of organizations and begin to shape our collaborations so that we get a much more effective and optimized outcome.