Updated 01.22.26
About June: June Isaacson Kailes is a Disability Policy Consultant who uses plain language, “Juneisms,” and selected disaster quotes to push planning beyond slogans and into measurable impact. These quotes are designed to sharpen thinking about inclusion, training, registries, public engagement, and what it takes to achieve real change. This page collects favorite quotes and original “Juneisms” with a suggested credit line for reuse.
Learn more: About June, Contact
June’s Favorite Quotes
4 Stages of Disaster Denial
It won’t happen here.
Even if it happens here, it won’t happen to me.
Even if it happens to me, it won’t be that bad.
Even if it’s that bad, there’s nothing I could have done about it anyway.
Eric Holdeman, Director of Emergency Management, Seattle’s King County
Clear, simple, and wrong
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H.L. Mencken, an American Journalist and scholar
Impact
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw
If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Is that enough? Henry Ford
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.
Goethe
Not knowing and doing nothing about it is forgivable.
Knowing and doing something about it is admirable.
Knowing and do nothing about it is unforgivable.
Source Unknown
To leave footprints in the sands of time-
You must wear work shoes.
Old African Proverb
Training and exercises
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. – Benjamin Franklin
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. – Thomas Edison
Learn more: Training, Drills, Tabletops, and Exercises
Words
The dictionary is…..only a rough draft. Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig
No dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling away. Samuel Johnson
Learn more: Language
Juneisms – Quotes from June
When used, please use this credit after each quote: June Isaacson Kailes, Disability Policy Consultant, junekailes.com
Data paradox
When you lack data, it matters because our words get dismissed, but when we do have data, it often gets ignored.
Disability
What appears vulnerable, fragile, and medically acute to an untrained eye is often simply living with disability for those who have disabilities and work for disability-led organizations.
In disasters, a portion of people with disabilities are at higher risk and often disproportionally impacted and affected first and worst!
Dogma
Dogma can rot on the shelf quickly. It should come with an expiration date!
Impact and time needed to achieve change
I want change to happen in nanoseconds, not over geologic or glacial time, but to be a real change agent, I’ve reluctantly had to get a grip and settle for being a raging incrementalist… But I don’t have to like it!
It’s not the work itself, but rather the impact of the work and how it is measured.
Don’t underestimate how long it takes to achieve change. Recognize the painfully long years and decades of the complex, slow, and arduous recovery process. For most severely affected people, it takes years to stabilize, adapt, adjust, reorient, and rebalance a life that is forever disrupted. Support capacity for long-term recovery by committing to multi-year funding.
Embedding competencies, capabilities, and capacities into multiple systems is an iterative process. This process involves identifying areas that need attention, setting priorities, evaluating progress, engaging in ongoing learning, continually improving, and sustaining the effort over many years. Those responsible for creating the sparks, the outputs, and the outcomes often do not get to sit by the fire and enjoy their impact on rebuilding and community resilience.
Participating effectively in long-term recovery and making an impact requires: know-how, tactical planning, tenacity, networking with other community advocates, organizing time, including attending many meetings, and working with investigative reporters, politicians, and legal advocacy teams to drive reform.
Inclusion
Disasters are always inclusive, response and recovery are not unless we plan for it!
We need to plan for inclusion, not retrofit for compliance. Inclusion isn’t a separate planning check box. It is a core competence that must be cemented into every system that touches planning, preparedness, response, and recovery.
Learn more: Services and Checklists
Individual Preparedness
Everyone participates after a disaster and then forgets; there’s a cycle of panic and neglect that keeps us stuck in a state of ongoing under-preparedness.
Standard emergency preparedness information, such as “get a kit, make a plan, and be informed,” does not adequately address the complexities of preparedness for certain individuals with disabilities. More detailed materials and assistance are often required to develop actionable plans.
The time and skill required to help people develop detailed emergency plans is often underestimated and undervalued.
Incorporate preparedness activities into your daily, weekly, and monthly routines so they don’t feel like ‘extra’ tasks. Instead, make them a regular part of your everyday life. Emergency preparedness is a lifestyle choice, not a short-term project.
What’s YOYO? Prepare for a significant amount of time when YOYO “you are on your own.” WAOOO “we are on our own!” is better than YOYO!
It is:
Your responsibility
Your choice
Your health
Your safely
Your call
Your life
Learn more: Individual Preparedness
Lessons to apply
The after-action report should always tell the truth that the plan refused to detail.
In emergencies, people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs are affected first and worst. We continue to lose our health, our independence, our interdependence, and sometimes our lives because, over the decades, the information we receive and the lessons we observe are not applied or integrated into capacities and capabilities.Applied lessons result in lessons learned only when they are integrated into plans, policies, processes, agreements, contracts, training, testing, analysis, revisions, and updates.
The goal is not just to observe, document, or hear about lessons, but to consistently apply them so that we can ultimately consider them lessons learned.
All those warnings and planning efforts aside, we still experience a continuous cycle of cutting funding for preparedness as new priorities overshadow previous ones. Why do we keep reinventing the wheel with each disaster instead of raising standards and expectations? Why are the lessons so difficult to implement? How many near misses are enough? Everyone gets involved and then forgets; there’s a recurring cycle of panic and neglect that leaves us perpetually underprepared. None of this is new, but we need to make it ubiquitous, seamless, and embedded.
Hard-wiring organizational emergency practices involves building capacity and capability while embedding long-term, sustainable solutions and systems rather than just short-term patches. It’s like planting trees instead of cutting flowers. Durability comes from depth, not speed.
Avoid one-and-done interventions. Require elements of resiliency through plans, drills, exercises, updates, and agreements.
Learn more: Services and Checklists
Planning
Plans are tested at 2 a.m., not in PowerPoint.
People don’t fail to comply. Systems fail to accommodate.
Vague “plan to plan” boilerplate and nonspecific statements, such as “could, should, might, may, or we will” statements, are common, and they carry a substantial risk of failure and a significant risk of inadequate response.
Symbolic planning is not planning.
Don’t accept vague statements that lack implementation details and lack the (who, what, where, when, how, & why) details of the processes, procedures, protocols, and policies.
Vigilance demands peeling the onions, clarifying the layers, and cutting through the rhetoric to activate the laser focus and do the deep dive to create, define and sustain the details.
Words are easy to write.
Steps are easy to list.
The details matter!
Doing makes it real and maintaining it is hard!
A plan that doesn’t work for people with disabilities is just a wish list.
If you don’t practice with disabled people, you’re not practicing.
Learn more: Drills, Tabletops, and Exercises
These objectives and accountability can’t rest with just one department or person; taking responsibility for improvement, increasing capacities, competencies, and maintaining partnerships is a team effort.
Public Engagement
Our commitment to creating, embedding, and maintaining effective solutions is crucial, especially given the increasing frequency, intensity, scale, uncertainty, and duration of emergencies. These inevitable hazards are becoming our new normal or abnormal future, and we will have to live with them long-term! These disasters result from climate change, public health crises, natural and human-caused events, and aging, deteriorating infrastructure, such as collapsing buildings and bridges, ruptured pipes and explosions, dam failures, and more. Disaster resilience can no longer fall solely on a few “weird” disaster-focused disability advocates. The time is now to make changes that help people protect their health and safety, while maintaining their interdependence and independence, so they can survive and cope with these inevitable events successfully.
Why include the disability community? The lived experience, details, diversity, nuances, and complexity of living with a disability cannot be fully duplicated or completely understood by those who do not have a disability.
If they aren’t at the table, don’t pretend they’re in the plan
Integrating into practice the practice of asking, listening, learning, respecting, and incorporating information from people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs is a critical emergency planning and response competency.
When we talk to each other often, including with stakeholders, it’s striking how guesses and assumptions are often exposed and corrected through actual planning, rather than symbolic, cubicle, or vacuum planning! We all should acknowledge that vacuum planning sucks!
An invitation is not involvement, and being at the table is not enough without speaking up and developing strategies, tactics, and allies.
Being at the table isn’t enough. Build partnerships, capabilities, and capacity. Make a difference and an impact. Settling for less does a disservice to you, the people you support, and those who come after you.
We are the help! Community organizations need to recognize that we are the help before and after help arrives! In large-scale disasters, the needs of survivors far outweigh the collective resources and capabilities of government at all levels. It takes a village, not a buddy.
If the only people who can use your system are the people who designed it, then it’s not a system, it’s a club.
Learn more: Effectively Including People with Disabilities in Policy and Advisory Groups
Registries
People who advocate for support of emergency registries for people with disabilities, understandably, want quick and simple solutions. Registries ignore the complexity of emergency planning and response. It is tokenistic, disingenuous, and irresponsible to urge people who may need disaster help to rely on registries. Real solutions emerge from specific, actionable, tested, and sustainable responses, rather than theoretical or fantasy-based plans.
Registries don’t save lives. Systems do.
Learn more: Emergency Registries
Rhetoric
When we use our favorite words, shortcut terms, rhetoric, and jargon, we lose people, because the true meaning of our message often gets lost when we assume the audience understands what we mean.
Plain language takes effort.
If you can’t explain it in plain language, you don’t understand it—or you don’t want to be understood.
Shortcut terms work inside a tight circle of colleagues. But outside that circle, it’s not communication, it’s exclusion.
Rhetoric, jargon, and legalese are shortcut-speak for the in-crowd. Plain language is how you include many more people.
If you need a PhD to use the content, the content is the problem.
Learn more: Language
Training, education, testing, and exercising
Unlike water gushing all at once from a fire hose, effective training is delivered at the right time for optimal absorption & reinforced over time, like drip irrigation.
Learn more: Drills, Tabletops, and Exercises, Training
Trust
Trust isn’t a feeling; it’s a design impact.
Learn more: Trust