Fresh Ideas
Barrise Griffin hails from The Bahamas, With a passion for disaster risk reduction and development, Barrise sees it as her calling to craft strategies and policies that improve crisis response and disaster management in Big Ocean States like The Bahamas and those in the Caribbean. As the impact of climate change is more heavily and disproportionately felt in these countries, this is an important mission to carry out. She hopes to grow in her field and affect positive social and institutional changes in the Caribbean’s emergency and disaster responses.
She received her education at King’s College London with a Master’s in Disasters, Adaptation & Development, awarded with Distinction in 2020. At King’s, she was awarded distinction on her thesis that focused on highlighting the important links between perceptions of risk, trust in government, and people’s decision-making behaviour in disaster preparedness and response. She also holds a Bachelor’s in International Economics & Multilanguage with a minor in Political Science from St. Lawrence University, New York.
A motivated, adventurous, inquisitive person, Barrise is an avid reader, researcher, gardener, and traveller who loves learning through cultural and language exchange. She has lived in Costa Rica, Spain, China, London and New York. She enjoys reading, travelling, learning new languages (She is proficient in Spanish), scrolling on Tumblr, gardening, sleeping, baking when stressed or overwhelmed, and hanging out with her two fur-nieces Bleu & Beasley.
Barrise is currently a Research Assistant at the Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Research Centre at The University of The Bahamas, working on the “I Survived Dorian” national project to highlight the human impacts and collect the experiences of survivors of the 2019 Hurricane Dorian.
Awards
Project Bahamas
Recognised as an outstanding and emerging leader in The Bahamas in the environmental field.
King’s College London Geography Department
The author of the highest
marked masters dissertation for
the MA DAD programme at KCL
Butterfield Bank
Recipient of Butterfield Bank’s highly competitive scholarship for post-graduate studies valued at S25,000.