In humanitarian settings where speed and agility are essential in saving lives, processes toward empowerment are often set aside for later, as they can be deemed time- and resource-intensive. While efforts at improving the agency of the most vulnerable are gaining ground, "beneficiaries" are still mostly only at the receiving end of response and even development initiatives. With this, power and control over the disaster-affected population's survival and recovery lie in the hands of external actors with the resources and "expertise" to provide life-saving aid. Community resilience is a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. Empowerment is crucial in enabling these communities to tap into their latent abilities to address underlying conditions that shape their vulnerability as individuals and collectively as communities. Empowerment requires enabling communities to move from being objects of designing, planning, and decision-making to become designers, planners, and decision-makers themselves. Towards this end, shelter response activities may be embedded with community organizing and empowerment activities to help restore human dignity and self-reliance of communities, improve social positions, and create an enabling environment for resilience. When done inclusively, cross-learning among these communities, government units, both local and national, as well as the professionals involved in crafting shelter solutions, ensure that response and recovery measures take the lead to greater capacity towards self-determination. By putting people at the heart of the solution-making, we collectively build better mechanisms to cope, bounce back, and recover from disasters.