Building Resilience
Poor air quality, infectious diseases, and lack of access to clean water are just a few of the health implications of climate change. Whether it’s a hurricane, flood, or wildfire, the effects of weather disasters on health often require an emergency response. That’s where Americares comes in.
The health-focused relief and development organization, supporting more than 4,000 health centers in the U.S. and worldwide, helps communities prepare, respond to, and recover from disasters with emergency programs, medicine security, and health services. Leading its work on climate and disaster resilience is Elena Ateva ’03.

Elena (Karadjova) Ateva ’03 attended the White House Forum on Advancing Inclusive Climate Action in Foreign Policy and Development in October 2024.
“I advise on how to integrate climate change into every aspect of our work because what we know, unfortunately, is that disasters will become more and more frequent. They also overlap, so we are dealing with more than one at a time,” says Elena.
When Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States in September, it caused extensive damage to communities across the region. Americares responded to the emergency in western North Carolina with medicines and relief supplies, mental health support, support for local health facilities, and a mobile medical clinic that prescribed essential medications, administered tetanus vaccines, and refered patients to local health facilities as needed.
“With more frequent and intense storms like Helene, it’s more important than ever that we prepare healthcare providers to prevent or address the health impacts of climate change,” Elena says. “My team at Americares creates tools to help healthcare providers serving low-income and uninsured patients better prepare for extreme weather events that can disrupt essential health services.”
One of those resources is the Climate Resilience for Frontline Clinics Toolkit, created by Americares and the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health to help patients, providers, and clinic administrators manage extreme heat, wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding.
Elena graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science and German and earned a law degree at what is now Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Before Americares, she was deputy director of Heat, Health, and Gender at the Atlantic Council’s Climate and Resilience Center. She also held leadership roles at the White Ribbon Alliance.
“I don’t have jobs; I have passions that I follow,” says Elena, who lives outside of Washington, D.C., with her husband, fellow Bulgarian Stefan Atev ’03, and their two children.
Elena says the most rewarding part of her job is hearing how much community partners are doing with very little resources and how they’re supporting each other.
“Recently, we were working with a border community in this small town that works with homeless people, which is one of the populations at a heightened health risk from climate change,” she says. “Seeing that community’s resilience, ingenuity, and solidarity—that’s what gives me hope for the future.”