From Crisis to Capability: How One Advocate Turned Experience Into a Resource for Others
What we learned from sitting down with Jess Conard, and how networks can turn hidden expertise into real-world support
“I really didn’t know what I was doing,” Jess Conard told us with a laugh. “I’m just a regular person. I have a regular house, a regular car, and a regular life.”
Jess is a longtime East Palestine, Ohio resident who became a nationally recognized voice on rail safety following the 2023 train derailment that disrupted her hometown and drew national attention.
When we recently sat down for a conversation with Jess, the goal was simple: to understand how her work on rail safety grew into something other communities could actually use. What she shared went beyond advocacy, showing how hard-earned lessons, backed by support and connection, can become practical help for others.
Jess’s journey didn’t start with a plan to build services or lead national conversations. It began with a crisis.
“I really was just trying to find answers for my community and for my family. We were put in a really impossible position, and I kept asking myself why this had to happen when it was preventable. That’s been the journey for me, turning a crisis into a catalyst.”
When Crisis Becomes a Catalyst
The 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio changed everything.
Like many residents, Jess spent the immediate aftermath searching for answers. Information was inconsistent, guidance unclear, and decisions affecting her community were made quickly and often without transparency.
Her focus at first was personal and local: protecting her family, understanding risks, and making sense of uncertainty.
But as days turned into weeks, something shifted. Jess began speaking publicly, asking questions others hesitated to raise, and connecting with agencies, advocates, and journalists. She gradually became one of the most visible voices for her community.
That period became a turning point, not only in her own life but in how she understood the power of showing up and speaking out.
She later realized that the knowledge she was gaining, sometimes painfully, would become exactly what other communities needed: hard-won experience grounded in reality.
Learning in Public
Advocacy is rarely neat. It unfolds in real time, under pressure, and without a clear roadmap.
Jess learned by doing. She navigated regulatory systems, joined public discussions, and built relationships with policymakers and leaders across the country. Each step deepened her understanding and revealed how difficult it can be for local families and community members to find reliable guidance during emergencies.
Patterns soon formed. Communities facing rail-related risks repeatedly asked the same questions:
- What real authority do we have?
- Where do we begin if we want to prepare before disaster strikes?
- How do we organize effectively when information is scarce?
These were urgent realities. Increasingly, Jess fielded calls and messages from others eager to learn from East Palestine’s experience.
“I just started saying yes to every opportunity to speak, every opportunity for someone to be heard. If I couldn’t fulfill that role, I would connect people to someone else who could. It wasn’t about creating a hero. It was about making the community heard.”
That’s when the idea began to take shape. Not simply advocacy, but support that others could use.
A Turning Point: Structure Meets Experience
As her advocacy expanded, Jess became more closely connected with the work happening at Netcentric Campaigns, where our structured support, mentorship, and collaborative approach have helped leaders turn hard-earned experience into action for decades.
That partnership marked a defining shift.
Through mentorship, structured learning, and collaborative spaces, Jess refined the skills she had developed out of necessity. What once felt reactive became intentional. More importantly, she gained confidence, not just to speak, but to lead.
She described that period as one of recognition and belief. Someone saw potential in her work and helped create the conditions for it to grow.
“When powerful leaders in this movement started naming what they saw in me, it changed how I saw myself. I had people say things like, ‘You’re the next Lois Gibbs.’ I didn’t even know who Lois Gibbs was at the time, but hearing that helped me understand that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”
During this stage, our role was to help translate hard-earned knowledge into practical capability. The support didn’t replace what Jess had learned and lived. It strengthened it and opened a new perspective: what if the knowledge she carried could be structured and shared with communities facing similar risks?
When Connections Multiply
Around this time, Jess’s work became more deeply connected with the Halt the Harm Network, a national network created and managed by Netcentric Campaigns to connect advocates, workers, and communities confronting environmental and industrial risks.
Within the Halt the Harm network, the possibilities expanded.
Jess was no longer working only in her own community. She connected with organizers, union leaders, and advocates across the country who were navigating similar challenges in different contexts.
Those connections opened doors, encouraged collaboration, and allowed ideas to move faster than individual effort alone could support.
Jess described the network as a bridge to people and opportunities she would not have reached otherwise. Local advocacy became something broader, shared across communities facing similar concerns.
“Through the Halt the Harm network, I’ve been able to connect not just with community members, but with unions, railroad workers, retired workers, and nonprofits working in the rail safety space. There is no other space like what Halt the Harm has created. It has made this journey a little sweeter because now there’s a place I can go to connect with people across the country.”
From Advocacy to Action: Building RailWatch
As conversations with other communities multiplied, one need became clear. People wanted practical guidance they could act on immediately.
That demand led to Disaster Averted: RailWatch, a structured service designed to help communities understand rail risks and take proactive steps before incidents occur.
RailWatch focuses on real-world priorities:
- Mapping local rail infrastructure
- Identifying vulnerabilities before incidents occur
- Supporting community leaders in taking informed action
When RailWatch launched through a Halt the Harm webinar, more than 100 people joined the first session. Many were leaders seeking clarity in uncertain situations.
The turnout confirmed what Jess had already recognized: communities are motivated to act. What they often lack is accessible, experience-based guidance.
“That first webinar was really a show of need. People were curious about how RailWatch works and how they could apply it in their own communities. It became clear that people weren’t lacking motivation. They were lacking access to the kind of information that helps you prepare before disaster hits.”
A Model Begins to Take Shape
Jess’s work reflects a broader approach developed by Netcentric Campaigns known as the Services Lab.
The idea behind the Services Lab is simple, but powerful. Every network includes people with valuable knowledge shaped by direct experience and hard-earned lessons. Too often, that knowledge stays tucked away because there isn’t a clear path to share it, or a clear way for others to ask for help.
The Services Lab helps solve both sides of that challenge. It supports leaders in shaping what they know into something practical that others can use, while also creating a clear invitation for people to reach out. For many, simply knowing they have permission to ask for help makes all the difference.
RailWatch became one of the early successes of this approach in action because it responded to a moment when people weren’t just looking for information, but for direction on what to do next to better protect their communities.
What Happens When Expertise Becomes Shareable
As RailWatch connected with more communities, new patterns emerged.
Leaders gained confidence to act. Relationships formed across geographic boundaries. Some groups explored partnerships with labor organizations. Others began organizing locally using insights gained through the sessions.
“I’ve had conversations with people in Wyoming working on train length legislation, and now we’re planning to collaborate. I’m also working with teams in Canada on zoning issues. Those relationships would not have happened without the network.”
Jess described the experience as both energizing and humbling. Each interaction reinforced that the lessons learned in East Palestine were transferable and that sharing them could help communities prepare before crises unfold.
Preparedness changes outcomes. Access to knowledge makes preparedness possible.
Lessons From the Journey
Throughout our conversation, Jess returned repeatedly to one idea: people often underestimate the value of their own experience.
Many individuals carry knowledge shaped by crisis, advocacy, or leadership. Yet they rarely see that knowledge as something worth sharing with others.
Jess understands that hesitation. She experienced it herself.
She also understands what happens when doubt gives way to confidence.
Her advice to others considering advocacy was simple and direct:
“I believe that what you need, you already have. It’s about developing that and structuring it in a way that, quite frankly, you become unstoppable. This process has been difficult at times. I’ve failed over and over again. But it’s also made me comfortable being my true, authentic self. I feel supported and empowered enough now to say that I am unstoppable.”
That insight extends far beyond rail safety. It speaks to untapped potential inside networks everywhere.
The Hidden Expertise Inside Every Network
Jess’s story highlights a truth that strong networks are increasingly recognizing: expertise does not always come from formal credentials. It often grows from lived experience, from people who have navigated complex systems and solved real problems under pressure.
But experience alone is not enough.
It needs support, connection, and structure. Not just to deliver knowledge, but to shape it, share it, and make it visible to others who can benefit from it.
It also needs a clear invitation, one that signals it’s okay to ask for help.
Without those elements, valuable knowledge stays isolated. With them, it becomes usable, shareable, and capable of reaching far beyond its point of origin.
That is the promise behind the Services Lab: to uncover the expertise already present in networks, strengthen it, and connect it to the people and communities ready to put it into action.
What Comes Next
Toward the end of our conversation, we asked Jess what gives her confidence that this kind of work can continue growing.
“Let’s connect, let’s talk. I believe that we are all specially equipped to do the work that we want to do. What you need to power through, you already have. You just have to open yourself up to being okay with that.”
Jess’s journey reminds us that leadership often begins quietly, in moments of uncertainty, urgency, or frustration. What shapes what happens next is not only individual effort, but the presence of systems that recognize potential and help it grow.
That is where networks make the difference.
At Netcentric Campaigns, the Services Lab exists to help networks discover the hidden expertise already within them. Every network includes people whose experience holds lessons others urgently need. The challenge is not creating new knowledge. It is recognizing the value of what already exists and building pathways to share it.
Jess’s RailWatch work is one example of what becomes possible when that shift happens. Someone recognized the value of her experience. A network created the connections to share it. Structure made it accessible to others.
Inside every network are people carrying knowledge that others need.
The opportunity ahead is to find those hidden gems, support their development, and turn experience into shared strength.
That is the work of the Services Lab. And as Jess’s story reminds us, the most powerful resources are often already in the room, waiting to be seen, supported, and shared.