Emergency management runs on a simple assumption: when there's a disaster, people will follow official guidance. In Santa Cruz County, that assumption had a flaw. A significant portion of the county's population — rural farmworkers, undocumented residents, Spanish and Mixtec speakers, people with limited internet access — didn't have a reliable relationship with government institutions. You can't follow guidance you never received.

The existing EOC structure lacked a formal mechanism to reach these communities before or during a disaster. Community-based organizations were doing engagement work informally, on personal relationships, in ways that evaporated when staff turned over. The county needed something structural — a framework that embedded community engagement into the EOC itself, not bolted on afterward.

TLR began with 15+ stakeholder interviews across the county's diverse population: urban, rural, linguistic minorities, undocumented communities, and the organizations that serve them. We weren't asking what the government wanted to tell these communities. We were asking what these communities needed from government, what trust actually looks like in their experience, and where the existing system had failed them in past events.

That research became the foundation for a countywide CBO disaster response and communication framework — a structured model defining how community-based organizations engage with county emergency management before, during, and after events. The framework wasn't advisory. It introduced two new structural EOC roles that formalized the CBO liaison function as a permanent part of the county's disaster response infrastructure, spanning all four jurisdictions in the Santa Cruz operational area.