Before there was a particular disaster for which to prepare, Ashleigh Brickley and her FEMA Corps team sorted something like 10 million meals.

Brickley, 29, leads a 12-member community relations team of the first-year FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) Corps program, a unit of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. They’d just finished two and a half weeks of sorting meals in Shreveport, La., and left for another mission when the news surfaced that a superstorm was headed for the East Coast.

“My boss said, ‘I want you to drop everything,’ ” remembered Brickley, a Harvard High School graduate. The team was told to drive the meals from Baton Rouge to Shreveport.