By Jay Heisler, Freelance Canadian Journalist
Biography: Amy Sins (LinkedIn Profile) is a New Orleans chef, entrepreneur, speaker, and disaster-response leader, and the founder of Fill the Needs, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit shaped by her own experience surviving Hurricane Katrina. After losing everything when the levees failed, Amy committed her work to helping communities move faster in the urgent days after disaster, before larger systems can fully mobilize. Through Fill the Needs, Amy coordinates trusted partner networks, real-time ground information, and practical resource support during the critical first 14 days of a crisis. Her work has supported communities in Louisiana and around the world, managing missions and deploying resources across four continents, including response coordination connected to Venezuela. Amy was named a Southern Living Southerner of the Year after helping coordinate more than 100,000 meals in 20 days following Louisiana flooding, and she has been recognized by Loyola University with the Integritas Vitae Award. She is also a TEDx speaker and United Nations Global Platform presenter.
What is the role of Fill the Needs in the Venezuela earthquake response?
I am coordinating for partners who have operations on the ground. We do a lot of behind the scenes stuff to help make the teams on the ground more efficient. I am working with several groups and helping them get on the ground, we are seeing problems with visas, stuff like that. One of our partners, they are on the ground. It’s a different kind of disaster, right now it’s a very urgent disaster. Beacon Rescue have been running down our contacts, identifying partners for supply distribution, State Department, etc. to support that rapid deployment. So we are kind of a connector and a coordination partner behind the scenes. It’s complicated when you’re working in a foreign country, where everyone who travels to it from the US requires a visa. I’ve started encouraging people to look at other alternative routes as opposed to flying into the one airport that’s open. Maybe to reroute from Aruba, switch to water transfer, although the ports may be inundated.
And what is the OSINT component to this work?
I mean, honestly, I’m managing intelligence and information for multiple organizations. People will are looking for organizations that they can trust and that they can work with. And every international disaster it brings new players to the mix, I do vetting of them, kind of how the UNCN team vets everyone before they join the group. All you have in this industry is your reputation, once you ruin it, once you burn it, it’s gone. I find partners who you’re comfortable keeping your data with, so we can keep an operational circle.
Any advice for those looking to follow in your footsteps?
I think one part of any operational situation is the ability to maneuver when things are not going the way they should be, and how to help these organizations change so they do that. So we’re not stepping on toes, stepping on government agencies.
Whenever you’re looking at managing an operation, but also, that whole open source community, where are you getting your information, that’s where having trusted partners is critical. Everyone has access to Facebook, Instagram, monitoring Twitter, monitoring all these conversations that are happening online, but it’s the people you trust who have their own network and those networks are on the ground getting real time intelligence, and I can take that ground intelligence and I can take that top-down information that’s coming from government. We’re finding the trends, we’re anticipating the changes before they happened. We need those trusted partners, so the information you’re getting from the ground is not rumor mill, it’s real physical intelligence. If I wait for things to come down from government, it may be four days late.
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