Russ Paulsen

Executive Director, Community Preparedness and Resilience Services, American Red Cross

Russ Paulsen leads nationwide community preparedness and resilience efforts for the American Red Cross.

In his 20-plus years with the Red Cross, Russ has been a leader of some of the largest disaster response and recovery efforts in the organization’s history. He designed the recovery program after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, led the $200 million recovery after Hurricane Katrina, and served on the management committee for the September 11 Recovery Program.

In his current position, he has led the creation of a new program to prepare the nation’s youth for disasters, overseen the introduction of resilience-building into Red Cross programming, and shifted thinking in the preparedness field away from creating public risk awareness and toward creating public action to mitigate risk.