When disaster strikes, communities lose more than infrastructure. They also lose agency.
Make-Break-Transform is a creative resilience framework developed over 15 years of arts-based practice across the United States and Central America, now proposed as a deployment model for the late recovery phase, when outside support has largely withdrawn.
The process is simple: participants make something meaningful, break or alter it, and transform the pieces into something new. Destruction becomes the raw material for regeneration. The framework can be adapted to any arts process and works with children, teens, and adults in trauma and non-trauma settings. Volunteers, artists, teachers, churches, and local NGOs have been trained to facilitate it. In Guatemala, local partners now independently run camps, host retreats, and expand into new communities, a multiplication model built through sustained, trust-based partnership.
Applying this framework in disaster recovery contexts raises a critical question: is the break phase appropriate for communities that have already experienced involuntary destruction? This session argues yes, when done with care. One thing disaster can take from people is agency. Make-Break-Transform returns it. The break is chosen, facilitated, and witnessed. That distinction makes the framework relevant to recovery work and demands trauma-informed facilitation. Drawing on a cross-cultural partnership approach, the deployment model enters communities alongside local arts organizations, offers local-informed programming, trains local facilitators, and shepherds a collective community project before exiting with capacity for continued, community-led work. While this application is aspirational rather than implemented, the underlying framework and multiplication model are well-tested.
This session invites practitioners and emergency management professionals to examine Make-Break-Transform as a transferable model that treats communities not as recipients of healing but as agents of their own transformation. Attendees will leave with a working understanding of the framework, its facilitation principles, and a proposed deployment model ready for adaptation in their own contexts.
