Ep. 3: Opportunity Levers for Disaster Recovery
By: Maddie Vann
Episode 3 in Network for Good’s “mini-podcast” where we’re sharing key learnings to bring durable capital to community-aligned, sustainable outcomes.
TL;DR / Highlight: NFG has identified “opportunity levers” for how/where we can have the most impact in disaster recovery: persistence, flexibility, velocity, resilience, catalyze resources, and community capacity.
On Tuesday, May 30th, I sat down with Network for Good’s CEO, Abby Ross, to discuss the frameworks we’ve been using to organize our strategic thinking as we consider the future of Network for Good and our vision to pioneer new models for providing durable capital for community driven sustainable outcomes in the social sector. Our discussion centered around the opportunity levers we’ve identified that can help us best serve the individuals and communities impacted by disasters.
Here is the transcript from our conversation:
Maddie: So Abby, tell me how you’re feeling after the strategic deep dive we’ve been doing over the past month into the “levers” that can influence to disaster recovery.
Abby: The deeper we get into disaster recovery, the more conviction I build that this is the best space for us to pioneer a new model for how a shift in capital can change outcomes. I believe that by finding the right levers, and then designing experiments that can push on them, alongside our partners, we will change how individuals and communities recover from disaster in a way that is timely, more equitable, and is infused with resilience.
Maddie: You and I have been having a really interesting conversation about who it is we’re here to serve, what their needs are, and which of those needs we are (or could be) best positioned to serve. And in that conversation, we’ve been digging deep into this idea of levers. I’m wondering if you can speak to us about where that’s been taking us.
Abby: Our opportunity levers are essentially: “what are the leverage points in the system that we can influence for a better outcome?” What we’ve essentially been doing is fast-track building a theory of change. And we have to recognize that it takes organizations months to years, and a lot of deep expertise, to do this. And we’ve just kind of been rapid fire learning and consuming all we can in terms of disaster recovery. So, we are putting together a vision for who we are serving and what the challenges are, through the eyes of those stakeholders.
So, we’re considering 1) the impacted individuals, 2) the impacted communities, and then 3) the general recovery community at large. We’re doing that by grounding ourselves in real examples –Hurricane Harvey, floods in Eastern Kentucky, California wildfires, etc. In this most recent exploration, we’ve been considering levers from the perspective of the folks working on some of the challenges: organizations including FEMA, insurance companies, and others. We’ve been considering what is the role of local government? What is the role of large nonprofits and large volunteer organizations? And our goal in analyzing that ecosystem is to find those leverage points where, if we push harder or change a process or an idea in this system, we can ultimately impact the outcome to a greater degree.
Maddie: Before we even think about network for good’s role in that, and how well positioned we are to influence these levers, what did this overall conversation take us?
Abby: Well, in this exercise we found 85 different levers/problem statements that we could impact. And with those 85 levers, several were repeating across multiple problem statements and a lot of the same players are involved in focusing on solving different parts of the value chain or the process or impacting those levers.
Maddie: Talk to me about how we narrowed that list of 85 levers down to the eight we’re now talking about.
Abby: We built a little rubric for ourselves, and the first dimension of that rubric was impact. If we did nothing but focus on this specific lever, what kind of outcome could happen, what kind of impact could there be? And we tied those back to our vision statements.
So our vision statement for individuals is that everyone recovers in a timely way and our vision statement for communities is that communities can recover equitably, with resilience, so the next disaster is less destructive for everybody. And so we created a rubric around what’s going to help with timely recovery? What’s going to impact equity? And what can improve resilience for how we build back? We scored on those three dimensions of impact and that really helped some things bubble to the top around what we’ve truly thought the highest leverage points were. And then took the lens of: what are we, Network for Good, best positioned to do? And had to take a lens there of short, medium, and long term, recognizing that when you’re talking about systems change, we’ve got to be in this for the long haul, these aren’t quick fixes.
And this requires also recognizing how we show up in these spaces is going to be different from how we are today, operating as a DAF, but recognizing we have a lot of existing assets and we’ve been in this space for a while. So it ties back to what are we best positioned to do? And when you marry that with the idea of impact, we ended up with a much more focused set of levers.
Maddie: As we discussed all these levers, some “across the board” themes also emerged, things were not unique to a specific lever or a specific area of need or opportunity. Can you talk to me about some of those general design principles that started to emerge for us in this conversation?
Abby: Yeah, it seems like in every single one of our levers we discussed the importance of trust. With impacted individuals, we have to enter those spaces trusting in people and building new systems that elevate the dignity of every human. And when we talk about equity, that’s also tied into system design. So, the role of trust and equity have to be design principles as we think about designing experiments, or designing new systems, for a different impact or outcome.
We also had to look at the idea of policies that are at the root of how communities recover. We have to ask ourselves: what role does Network for Good want to play in advocacy and policy? And while we’ve done quite the deep dive in the past four or five months on disaster recovery, that is a space where we’re still probably woefully under-informed.
And so I think there needs to be a workstream to understand about policies of what it means to make people whole, and that dollars don’t exactly flow to resilience, but there is new opportunity with some new government dollars.
What are some places in which, if we could change policy, that could be a true leverage point? But what role do we want to play? I don’t think we’ve decided on that yet.
Maddie: Right, or even some of the levers that we can’t influence until policy and advocacy work shifts. Whether or not that’s a role we’re going to play, those are still levers that are perhaps tabled until that’s addressed.
Abby: Exactly. And then, recognizing who Network for Good has been and likely will continue to be in the space is a lot when we talk about resources that comes back to money. And when we think about how money should flow into communities after a disaster, were recognizing that, for that money to flow in a new way, it has to flow through a system that is more flexible and fungible than it’s today.
So that is kind of something that we have to solve for as a little bit of a baseline condition. That will require some interesting conditions for how we design experiments. A good example of that is if we want to help communities put up a match for government dollars, for example, there has to be a shift in the flexibility for how we send money to those communities to be able to put up that match instead of just earmarking it directly for relief. Where giving them a dollar can unlock $10 from the government. For that, the flexibility has to be there.
In order to support communities to have the agency to make decisions on how they recover, the flexibility of how money flows is required across all of these levers.
Maddie: Thanks, that’s hopefully helpful context around some of the design principles that we’ve been talking about. So, tell me what came from this as it relates to the actual levers we landed on.
Abby: Well, we ended up with eight. So from 85 down to eight was painstaking, but yet really a fun task. And so there’s four levers for impacted individuals in a community recovering from a climate driven disaster. And there’s four levers at the community level.
Maddie: Can you talk to me about the levers that are emerging so far for impacted individuals?
Abby: We want everybody impacted from a disaster to recover in a timely way. And for that, one of the levers is basically persistence. Not everybody receives the right resources to recover because they can’t make it through the process to receive the funds. So what can we do to increase the persistence, increase the number of people that make it through that process to receive funds?
That could look like increasing the ease of access to those resources, whether it’s reducing barriers, or reducing complexity — there are a lot of ways to play with that. But at the end of the day, persistence is one of the levers.
Another one that I mentioned earlier is the flexibility of funds for survivors. Right now, the way that those funds come in are very, rigid. In terms of how people can recover, they’re not really given agency over how they can recover, which includes not having flexibility for incurred hardships or resilience work or even just making the decision on how to spend the money, on what’s best for them. So that’s a lever. It’s just the flexibility of how money flows to individuals.
Another one is the velocity. We’ve talked about money taking an average of two years to reach people. Money they are owed as part of recovery. So given the fact that resources for recovery take a long time to arrive, what can we do to increase the velocity of those funds to reach impacted individuals? And I think this is a lever that works across insurance, across government and across philanthropy.
So then a really interesting one, one that really has me jazzed is a little bit more of a system redesign. And it’s what we call the “push versus pull.” So, the current system is designed around individuals basically needing to navigate their own recovery. They need to know what resources are available for them, navigate through the process, and then receive those available resources. So we’re toying around with what would it mean to shift responsibility in how individuals receive those resources?
Maddie: Okay, so at the individual level you talked about the levers of persistence, flexibility, velocity and then this push vs. pull system redesign idea. So now talk to me about what the primary levers are that we’ve talked about at the impacted community level.
Abby: So the one that we’ve heard from, I think every person with lived experience here, is the fact that communities lack the capacity to recover with resilience. And so that means, expertise, experience, people, processes. So that’s one lever: what does it look like to increase community capacity? And that likely means increasing the funding for that community capacity to handle the long-term disaster recovery. Now that could be before a disaster. After a disaster. That could be resources that are persistent throughout, that could be expertise, that could also just be networking communities back together. But, overall, the lever of increasing community capacity so that they kind of take ownership over that recovery, I think, is a lever to play with.
The other one I think that kind of emerged early, that still remains a front runner, is how can we catalyze money? So increasing funding to communities to meet requirements to access sidelined, for lack of a better word, resources. Whether that’s a matching grant or resources that come in with restrictions. So how can we catalyze money to kind of serve and unlock additional dollars? This category is exciting because it exists at such a completely different scale. It’s just there are dollars we can unlock, if we can bring funding in, it can unlock millions.
And then resilience is really its own lever and I think that there’s kind of three things underneath resilience. First, increase the overall funding of resilience recovery, like resources from the first disaster don’t include ways to improve for the next time because everything is aligned around “back to normal” or those resources are depleted before resilience. So we’ve kind of said, well, how can we just increase overall funding for resilience?
How can we increase the affordable options for resilience? So that basically that costs the same as building back to normal. And then what policy could we maybe change or influence to make it so that resilience is baked in to being covered by how funds flow in.
Maddie: I think that area is really interesting, as we think about innovation and project pipelining, and as we think about increasing affordable options for resilience. That, I think, is an exciting sub-component of this lever too, just for making the economics of this make sense.
Abby: Yeah. And then the hypothesis that, from the community level, that keeps coming back, and that’s also a bit more of a system redesign, has to do with the matching of resources. So kind of the first overall kind of challenge is that communities lack a roadmap — the necessary bridge between what resources are available and what are the needs is missing. So we have a hypothesis that if you can increase the visibility into what money is available, and what resources are available (so how much, where is it from, when will it arrive) and you can increase visibility into the community’s long-term needs (so not just like how many tarps are needed in the first couple weeks or so, but what is the true requirement to build back with resilience), if we can show the visibility and show where money is and isn’t going to, that we could actually improve the match and improve the outcome.
So that’s a little bit more of a system redesign that I think could have some incremental experiments that could prove that to be correct, or not, around how capital flows. I think that’s a big lever, to match the needs and the resources. Which we are not the first organization in the social sector to say like, “Hey, just build a system that does this.”
But I believe that with the scope of disaster recovery, there’s a real opportunity to put some real use cases around what that system could look like to maximize learning.
Maddie: And this is a topic that you’ve been flagging since the beginning of our conversations. This idea of “we don’t know, what we don’t know” is very much at play here. If we can’t see, if we don’t have visibility into the needs, we don’t have visibility into the available resources, it’s very difficult to provide a match between those two things. And some of our partners and folks we’ve been talking to are, like you said, thinking about really interesting ideas here. So this feels like a sort of sector-wide problem to solve, not something necessarily that Network for Good can do on our own.
Abby: Yeah, exactly.
Maddie: So tell me more about what’s next? What are you thinking about? What are you most excited about?
Abby: This process has been the reason I believe we can make this vision a reality. I believe that we can, if we can focus in on these levers and demonstrate a change in how communities and individuals recover from a disaster, this is the perfect use case. And these are the levers for that, for thinking about the system differently. Now it just needs a design to do that. And I think that we’re the organization to do it.
Maddie: Well, thank you for talking with me today, Abby. I appreciate the overview you offered today on the eight levers we’re now coalescing around. And as always, we welcome feedback, thoughts, criticism, and hope that our advisors and supporters will weigh in on thoughts, advice, and future ideas.
