Breanne Durovic

I have been blessed with the ability to not sit still, and that drive to continue to help people. I've had such a great community growing up that really influenced my desire to help more communities and build communities and build villages. I never do anything alone, I never walk into anything without support. One of the things that I love about rugby is we have this saying that we never run alone, so we never run with the ball alone, we never move alone, and the way that you can tell that you have somebody supporting you is they say 'with you.' That's something that I try to coach my team to implement outside of rugby - just that simple phrase 'with you.' Running with support, being supported, being that support person for someone else - that's definitely prompted me to be successful throughout my personal life, professional life, social life, all of the above, just having that community and having that support system with me.

The best career advice I've ever received was basically never stop learning. I think a lot of people have heard variations of that, probably some more eloquent than never stop learning, but it's very easy to get stagnant in a career, and then you just kind of go through the motions, and then you stop learning. Being able to continually learn, continue to take steps, even if it's partially relevant, not fully relevant, but just keep learning in your field, and then keep growing - you'll always have the opportunity to change up what you're doing, but you can't do that if you never learn something new.

The emergency management and disaster response area is still a pretty heavily male-dominated area, and it can be intimidating, but just remember that you know so much. There are so many people who are so much more confident with so much less knowledge. So just be confident in your knowledge, be confident in your questions, be confident in asking those questions. Be humble, but be brave, and be bold. I think women just don't have confidence as often or as readily available to them. I think men have a lot of confidence whether or not they need it, and I think women should just manifest a little bit more of that confidence as well. What's the worst that could happen? That's the mentality I take - what's the worst that could happen?

Obviously in the nonprofit space, funding is always a challenge. Getting enough staff is always a big challenge, and just making sure that we can cover what we can cover. In my field in the disaster response realm, disasters don't wait. They keep coming. They're getting worse, and bigger, and sooner, and later, and all of the superlatives you can think of - that's what's happening with the weather these days. That's definitely a challenge coming up, adapting to new weather patterns, adapting to more devastating weather events and more devastating disasters. Trying to decide what we can support and how we can support, and do we take it all on? Do we share the workload? It's definitely a growing field, unfortunately, just because of the nature of the world that we live in, and disasters don't wait. They typically hit the areas that don't have the resources to be able to support themselves and get themselves back up on their feet. That is definitely a growing trend that we're seeing, and definitely some future obstacles and future opportunities all at the same time happening concurrently.