About two and a half years ago, within a week of starting his new job at Project Hope, Belmont resident Arlan Fuller headed south to address the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian.
“I was thrown into the deep end of the pool right away and was there for about three weeks in some really rough circumstances,” said Fuller. “For that time, I was driving north and south from Naples to Tampa, back and forth, trying to work with a number of free and charitable clinics and shelters that were taking care of people who were now without homes and working with community organizations to provide support to people devastated by the disaster.”
Not long after that, in February 2023, he was part of the response to a series of earthquakes in Turkey, near the southern border of Syria—a natural disaster claiming the lives of more than 55,000 people. There, Fuller worked with the Turkish Ministry of Health to provide supplies and shelter to health professionals. That same year, he went to Morocco after an earthquake in the Atlas Mountains, and in October, he responded to Hamas’ attack on Israel.
Just this month, Fuller coordinated with his team a response to the devastating wildfires wreaking havoc across Los Angeles.
“We try to respond immediately,” he said. “We try to get to the site of a disaster or conflict within about 36 hours of an emergency arising.”
According to Fuller, Project Hope is a non-governmental organization delivering healthcare worldwide in 27 countries, including the United States. Originally, the organization used a decommissioned Navy ship purchased from the U.S. government. It traveled from port to port, providing medical care.
Since then, the program has evolved to have team members based at programs in each country it serves. Today, Project Hope delivers medical supplies to families in Gaza and deploys emergency support and mental health experts to the people of Ukraine, according to the organization.
“I’ve always been interested in international work,” Fuller said.
Before joining Project Hope, Fuller—who earned a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies from Ulster University in Northern Ireland and a law degree from Boston College—worked for 13 years as the executive director at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and, later, an organization called Conflict Dynamics. There, he served for three years as the chief operating officer.
In September 2022, Fuller became director of Emergency Preparedness and Response at Project Hope, managing a small team deployed in any natural disaster and humanitarian crisis.
“In any response, whether it’s a disaster or whether it’s the early stages of any sort of violent conflict, there’s a lot of chaos,” he said. “There’s a lot of different organizations arriving on the scene, trying to assess what the needs are, trying to figure out … what systems should be up and running to be able to efficiently deliver support.”
Fuller emphasized that he and his team never approach a situation as if Project Hope is in town to “run the show.” Instead, it plays a support role by addressing the various gaps in response. In particular, Project Hope seeks to find the communities of people who may be “falling through the cracks” in accessing emergency services that could get them back on their feet.
“That sort of chaos starts to settle down as the response coordination gets more attuned … and different organizations understand what their roles are,” he said.
Prior to the fires in Los Angeles, Fuller returned home from a 16-day trip that brought him from Jordan, where he checked in on team members going in and out of Gaza. From there, he went to Israel, then to Lebanon, and finally to Washington, D.C., where Project Hope is headquartered.
“When I took the job, I knew there was a lot of travel,” he said. “My family has been extremely supportive of that. It takes a village at times in terms of support, not just in terms of my wife covering while I’m gone, but also friends and family who cover carpools and so on.”
But there is an emotional toll, he said.
“I think different people take different approaches to how they’re able to manage that level of stress, in terms of what you’re seeing and the challenges people are facing,” he said.
For Fuller, that means focusing on the main objective, which is to support the people who need it.
“We get a lot of support from our own organization for our own duty of care for our staff and personnel,” he added. “We’re always mindful in reassuring people there is support there within our own organization.”
The Belmont resident has lost team members to the violence and has known team members to lose family members to it. He expressed admiration for those who are still able to work for “the betterment of their community.”
Fuller said in Belmont, he’s lucky to be in a region of the world free of war and conflict and, in large part, natural disaster. Coming from a legal background with a focus on human rights, including social and economic rights, he is acutely aware of the circumstances around the world that people are born into or the challenges different people face.
“I think that’s the inspiration I’ve always drawn from being involved in work like this,” he said. “I do find some real fulfillment of my own to help fill [the gaps] and to really pull people up and help them really be able to get back to a world that’s normal. I think a lot of what my organization does and the work I’ve done in my career is a real personal commitment toward helping people.”