In 2014, I traveled to Tacloban City in the Philippines and lived there for approximately four months, helping Philippines Communitere develop a permanent community resource center after Super Typhoon Haiyan. Known locally as Yolanda, the storm had struck in November 2013 and devastated communities across the central Philippines. Tacloban was one of the cities hit hardest.

In a disaster, people can lose far more than buildings and belongings. They can lose the tools, workspace, equipment, and everyday systems that once allowed them to solve problems for themselves. Someone may still know how to repair a house or build a piece of furniture, but that knowledge is difficult to use without a saw, a drill, a safe place to work, or enough money to replace what was lost.

That gap was at the heart of the Communitere model.

The organization grew from a grassroots tradition of disaster response that emphasized participation, civic responsibility, creativity, and community resilience. Related work after Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti had helped shape an alternative to short-term, top-down aid. Instead of arriving with a predetermined project and leaving when it was finished, Communitere established permanent community hubs that could support the much longer work of recovery and development.

These centers brought shared resources together in one place: power, water, internet, tools, workspace, training facilities, and room to meet. Residents, entrepreneurs, community organizations, and international groups could use that infrastructure to develop projects, learn skills, and work alongside one another. The goal was not to decide everything a community needed. It was to make more resources available so local people could help shape what came next.

I went to Tacloban during the early development of the Philippines center. My work focused on helping build the community hub, its classes, and a maker space with a tool-lending library. The idea was direct and practical. People who had lost their homes or livelihoods could borrow tools, use instructions to build basic furniture, attend classes, develop new skills, and gain free access to equipment they could no longer afford individually.

Contemporary descriptions of the Tacloban center included a Logistics Resource Center with a Tool Lending Library and Innovation and Learning workspaces, along with a Communications Resource Center. The broader plans included workshop and training areas, a makerspace, an innovation lab, coworking space, sustainability projects, and facilities that could help support livelihoods.

What made the tool library powerful was not the equipment alone. It was the agency the equipment could return. A finished object can answer an immediate need. Access to a tool, instruction, and a place to work can allow someone to answer that need for themselves.

The hub developed into more than a depot for reconstruction supplies. It became a place for training, innovation, collaboration, and longer-term community opportunity. Philippines Communitere later partnered with UNICEF and the City of Tacloban on a youth resource center built with substantial participation from local young people. That later work extended beyond my four months there, but it reflected the same belief in locally shaped, durable infrastructure.

My role in Tacloban was grounded in the early work of making that infrastructure usable: helping create the hub, organize learning opportunities, and develop a system through which tools could be shared. The experience gave concrete form to an idea that runs through my civic work. Helping does not always mean arriving with the answer. Sometimes it means helping restore the conditions in which people can act, build, and choose for themselves.