Author: Meredith Hemphill
Todd Brown isn’t much of a tie-dye guy, not really. But once a week on Fridays, he dons one of the colorful shirts, and it’s not for the casual Friday vibes. There’s a message he wants to share.
Brown is the assistant director for Operations in Emergency Management and the Operations Section Chief for the State Emergency Response Team (SERT). He has been with NCDPS since 2000, right after Hurricane Floyd. Before that, he conducted search and rescue training. Brown is passionate about emergency management and his work at NCEM in particular.
“I walk into the State EOC every day during an activation and get to work with dedicated professionals from across state government, as well as our local, federal, private sector and non-governmental partners, with a single purpose: to do our best to make a positive difference in the lives of the people of North Carolina on what may be their worst day,” he said.
With his many years of experience in emergency management, much of it in leadership positions, Brown is no stranger to emergencies. However, the COVID-19 pandemic was a new experience for everyone. In late summer of 2020, Brown had something of a revelation.
“We had done the initial activation of the SERT in March,” Brown said. “We were looking at two months, three months, planning for the next worst-case scenario. They were tough times.”
Brown was in a virtual meeting with NCEM’s public health partners, a daily occurrence at the height of the pandemic. A captain with the U.S. Health Service entered the meeting from his living room wearing a tie-dye shirt. Brown is normally a business-casual person, but he loved it.
“It just immediately put a smile on my face. All of a sudden, things went from being, ‘We don’t know how we’re going to solve any of these problems’ to ‘There is still positivity, and we’re doing all this work because we want to help people make it through,’” Brown said. “It was kind of a watershed moment for me in leadership in what it meant to help your team understand why we are working.”
Before that moment, Brown did not own a single item of tie-dye, but he decided to seek out some tie-dye shirts and start wearing one every Friday. Except for a few weeks at the height of the Hurricane Helene response, when he felt it would be inappropriate to the solemnity of the situation, Brown has kept up the colorful routine ever since. He does keep a more professional change of clothes in his office in case he gets called into an unexpected press conference, though.
“Changing up that uniform of muted earth tone colors that we tend to wear across this business to something that’s a bright, cheery mix of colors symbolically says we’re going to be okay. We’re going to do our best,” Brown said