Education

Julie Solomon Atwood has lived in rural Sonoma County for most of her life. She’s been a serial entrepreneur as a nationally recognized architectural detail consultant and photo stylist, owner-curator of a functional art gallery and atelier, and a leader in the Wine Country hospitality industry. As a business owner responsible for client, staff and guest safety, these endeavors frequently included planning and training for emergencies.

Long before people began to recognize the challenges that come with living at the edge of natural landscapes and wildlands, but having experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake, Julie began to think about how to care for her animals during and after a big disaster. Information and resources in her region were hard to find. Having already established a rapidly expanding local program to develop Large Animal Technical Rescue teams with rural fire departments, agencies, and encouraged by their concerns about animals, in 2013 Julie founded the HALTER Project.

Today, this grassroots, privately funded program has grown into an international community of animal owners, welfare organizations, responders and agency programs dedicated to animal emergency and disaster preparedness and response. All animals – pets, equines, backyard farm animals, production livestock and wildlife – are included in HALTER Project education material, with robust offerings in Spanish, for Seniors, and resources for teachers and the Agriculture and Hospitality industries.

She is a volunteer with Community Animal Response Teams (CARTs) and CERTs in multiple jurisdictions, a non-medical support volunteer with the UC Davis CVET, and an Animal Technical Rescue instructor and CERT instructor.

HALTER Project provides free education resources supporting animal and community preparedness for disasters throughout the world. As well as the HALTER Project Community Preparedness Education toolkit that focuses on fulfilling a great need for information to rural areas and under resourced communities.

In 2016, these programs were honored by FEMA at a White House ceremony recognizing “National Individual and Community Preparedness Award” recipients. Today, First Responders in every service, emergency managers, Tribal, community and other groups look to the HALTER Project as a resource for outreach materials, education opportunities, and scholarships or small grants for training.

HALTER Project contributes more than 8,000 volunteer hours each year to local agencies and organizations and provides several hundred training scholarships to first responders yearly. It has also equipped many animal disaster response teams, including the California Veterinary Response Team.

Julie was recognized in 2019 by California Emergency Management Agency for her volunteer disaster work and was a speaker at the 2017 British Animal Rescue and Trauma Association, (BARTA,) International Conference on Animals in Disasters.

She has produced several regional “Home & Ranch Readiness” Symposia, including a 2018 event televised nationally. Julie serves on several non-profit organization boards, including Bodega Bay (CA) CERT, and others ranging from equine therapeutic programs to programs supporting victims of domestic violence and abuse.CONTACT: