When Disaster Relief Fails Communities
Part 2 of a series reflecting on crisis response, social entrepreneurship, and the barriers to innovation.
“[T]he government is not going to be there. The minute it happens. And they may not be there for a day, depending on how bad it is...the shining knight in armor is not going to come and rescue her when that fear sets in.”--former FEMA Director Michael Brown in an interview on the Floodlines podcast about Hurricane Katrina
“Nothing has changed since Hurricane Katrina,” lamented a veteran disaster relief worker. It was September, 2018, and he and others had been working around the clock to identify needs for communities hit by Hurricane Florence, which had swept through North Carolina. It had been days since the storm hit, and entire towns in the eastern part of the state had been inundated and cut off by flooding, with many roads impassable. The government and major disaster relief organizations were still struggling to get a handle on what the needs were and how to deliver them. Daily conference calls went on for hours without a clear sense of who was doing what, where they were doing it, and what was needed.
The exasperated relief worker’s allusion to Katrina, considered the pinnacle of a botched disaster response, was both ominous and sadly accurate. Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, a digital lifetime ago. It was pre-Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. If you wanted to know what was happening, you refreshed the New York Times on your web browser or watched CNN for updates. The mishandling of the crisis has been well documented. But despite the major advances in technology and communications since Katrina, every disaster since has felt like Groundhog Day, with our institutions continuing to struggle, mightily, to collaborate and communicate. And like Hurricane Katrina, BIPOC and vulnerable populations--particularly the elderly, disabled, are continuing to be disproportionately affected by natural disasters, whether we’re talking about hurricanes, wildfires, or earthquakes.
This season alone, we’ve seen Haiti suffering back to back disasters, with outrage over the slow pace of aid arriving to affected areas. In Louisiana, government agencies struggled to get an accurate assessment of the damage caused by Hurricane Ida. And a record-breaking series of wildfires, fueled by climate change and worsened by lack of government preparation, raged across the western United States.
Why, in 2021, are governments and relief organizations still struggling with disaster preparedness and response? We now live in an era of instant digital communication. We have the tools to share our exact location and needs via text, photo, and video. We have multiple platforms that facilitate group decision making, resource sharing, and logistics management. We know the demographics of communities. We can predict where storm surges are going to hit, and how big they are going to be, with incredible accuracy. And more importantly--we have dozens of disasters under our belts, so we can tell, with great precision, exactly what will be needed, when, by which communities. We also know how and where to build (and rebuild) communities that are resilient to floods and wildfires and earthquakes. And yet, year after year, communities, governments, and relief organizations remain unprepared. People continue to die. Communities continue to burn and to flood.
Not Enough to Go Around?
Through our work at NeedsList, we’ve seen these failures first hand. We know that disaster relief is a complex beast, encompassing everything from physical infrastructure (like the giant levees that were built after Katrina) to public policy to communications systems to emergency and logistics management and more. But we also know that many of the obstacles standing in the way of a disaster relief ecosystem that truly supports and meets the needs of communities are surmountable. Here are two that stand out.
First, a scarcity mentality dominates the field, making it extremely difficult to persuade agencies to collaborate in an open and transparent way about the resources they have access to and could share with others. When a community has been hit by a hurricane or wildfire, many needs tend to emerge at once. At some point, aid from relief agencies starts flowing as well. To best help these communities, and to do so in an efficient and dignified way that minimizes waste and inefficiency, it would make sense to aggregate the needs and then pool resources. That’s what our software does--it creates a transparent database of all the needs and offers in an area, and automatically makes relevant matches. But from day one, we’ve been told by large aid and relief agencies that they wouldn’t want to use our software because they don’t want other agencies to “steal their donors.” The scarcity mentality that dominates the sector means that when resources are shared, it is much less efficient, and with a lot of waste.
It doesn’t have to be this way. For the past five years, hundreds of small organizations from around the world have used our software to share their needs--and often, resources--with each other. When we were helping match needs and resources during Hurricane Florence relief, we saw how powerful transparent resource availability could be. Save the Children had a load of diapers they didn’t know what to do with, and a small organization shared their need for them. That need was matched. We believe that technology--while not a panacea--is a powerful tool to support transparency, community needs assessment and reduce duplication of efforts.
Second, access to networks and funding--and the tech literacy and social capital to reach them--is not evenly distributed to the organizations who help most in times of need. In theory, understanding what local needs are anywhere in the world right now shouldn’t be challenging. As long as you have access to a phone, email, WhatsApp, or Facebook, you should be able to communicate your needs to a global audience, right?
In practice, however, this isn’t so easy to do, especially for community based and grassroots organizations. Without the megaphone that many larger nonprofits have thanks to brand partnerships or paid communications and fundraising staff, grassroots organizations largely rely on word-of-mouth or a smaller social media presence to tell donors what they need. This means that many effective organizations fly under the radar of donors, depriving them of essential funding and resources that they could use to meet local needs.
The reality is, many donors would love to fund hyper-local organizations, if only they knew where to direct their resources. Community organizations tick all the boxes when it comes to impact. Here’s why:
- They are trusted members of local communities, and thus well-positioned to understand local needs.
- They don’t chase crisis money — they are committed to their communities for the long-haul, and therefore are unlikely to abandon them if a crisis pops up somewhere else.
- They tend to buy their supplies locally, thereby supporting local businesses.
- They are streamlined, and often run by volunteers with very little overhead, which means that donor money goes a lot further.
This is one of the biggest reasons why Tasha Freidus and I started NeedsList: we believe that local aid networks are the key to community resiliency. Given the growing number of humanitarian and natural disasters, it’s more essential than ever to support decentralized, local aid systems by directing funding and resources to grassroots and community-based organizations.
In theory, the international funding community agrees. Back in 2016, the largest donors and humanitarian organizations committed to directing 25% of funds to local organizations by 2020 as part of the Grand Bargain. But without clear mechanisms in place, donors consistently revert to giving to the same few big-name nonprofits that gobble up the lion’s share of the $29 billion of humanitarian aid given out annually. In fact, 96% of all funding in 2019 went to large international nonprofit organizations, and post-COVID numbers look even worse for small organizations, with less than 5% of all funding going to the local level in 2020 — a failure if there ever was one.
In an era of increasing disasters and COVID-19, when supply chains are disrupted and with many government responses wavering between authoritarian, laissez-faire, or incompetent, the financial and material support of local organizations is more important than ever.
In our next blog post, we’ll take a closer look at a third, equally important obstacle to transforming the crisis response sector--the lack of institutional investment in innovations.
You can follow along on Twitter @needslist4good or @amanda_levinson
