Ep. 2: Our Vision for Sustainable Disaster Recovery
By: Maddie Vann
Episode 2 in Network for Good’s “mini-podcast” where we are sharing key learnings for how to bring durable capital to aligned sustainable outcomes
TL;DR / Highlight: To anchor our problem statements when NFG thinks about the stakeholders in disaster recovery, we’ve identified two core groups: Impacted Individuals & Impacted Communities.
On Thursday, April 27th, I sat down with our Network for Good CEO, Abby Ross, to discuss our hypotheses and learnings related to the unique problems faced by a community following a disaster. Those learnings are helping to inform how NFG might bring durable capital for “community-driven, sustainable outcomes” in disaster recovery.
Here’s the transcript from our conversation:
Maddie: Hi, this is Maddie Vann. I lead strategy at Network for Good Donor Advised Fund, and I’m back again with our CEO Abby Ross, who’s generously taking this conversation from the United lounge at the airport in Seattle, on your way back from the Greater Giving Summit hosted by the Gates Foundation.
Abby: Yeah, it was amazing. Great opportunity to connect with partners, talking about opportunities and challenges for everyday giving and philanthropy. So I’m excited to bring a lot back to the home front.
Maddie: Great. Well, I’m excited to hear more later and see how that informs our work. And appreciate you taking this call while on the road. So today we are talking about our vision for sustainable disaster recovery. In our last conversation, we talked about why Network for Good has decided to focus on the disaster response and recovery space. We talked about some of the troubling stats we’ve seen around the increasing frequency of climate driven disasters in the United States, the widespread nature of disasters in the us, and the rising costs that these disasters are incurring for our country and for communities. And that community piece is what will inform our conversation today, as we think about the different people and organizations affected after a disaster, and how their unique problems, and the challenges they face, are informing our vision for sustainable disaster recovery.
So Abby, tell me what the past month has looked like. What have you been trying to help us understand?
Abby: So, so much of our work has been detangling the problem statements. We’ve been going so deep in the space that it’s kind of been challenging to pull up and realize what are the core challenges that we want to zero in on, knowing there’s so many in the space, but when you detangle those, what’s at the root of what’s not working within these communities?
And that’s been really helpful to just think about what role Network for Good can play and trying to isolate where the focus is. And one of the things that we kept coming back to is tied back to our strategic vision of community aligned outcomes. So truly defining like, what do we mean when we say that? And what does it look like in this disaster recovery space.
Maddie: And with that, we’ve talked about community and what community means. So can you offer some of the framing we’ve landed on for how we might think about and define the different stakeholders involved when we talk about community alignment in this disaster response and recovery context?
Abby: Yeah, absolutely. So we started kind of with this, “well, what should crisis recovery look like and for whom?” In doing that work, what we realize is we need to get tighter on who we’re serving as the stakeholders. So we’ve come up with basically three rings for how to define the community recovering from a disaster.
So at the center of those rings are the survivors, essentially the impacted individuals — We’re defining that as the people who live, work, and play in a geographic area where damage occurred from a disaster. Outside of that is the impacted community — So those are the formal and informal institutions that take care of the people in places. And then lastly, kind of the largest ring, is the broad recovery community — So those are the people and organizations who aid in helping that impacted community recover.
And a lot of our conversations have been with folks in that recovery community talking a little bit about how the space functions. So as we start then getting into these problem statements, and what our vision is, holding these stakeholders true has been really important. I think that in doing that we have to think about the structures and systems and do that with real people and stories. So, Maddie, you’ve been along with me reading the articles about recovery efforts. So, can help kind of put personas and put people behind this. When I say survivors of a disaster, who are you thinking about?
Maddie: We’ve read so many articles, but there was one, I think it was from NPR, that talked about a woman named Janice Perry Evans, who received $2,500 from FEMA for rent. [(1) How Federal Disaster Money Favors the Rich, NPR] But she thought she should put it toward a car so she could get to her job as a mail carrier for the post office. She had no savings for a hotel or a new apartment after Hurricane Harvey, but the car was more critical for her. And she tells this story in this interview for this article about having gotten then in trouble with FEMA for not using that money for the deposit and first month’s rent in a new place that they had sort of bookmarked it for for her. And so she’s the person who comes to mind for me, when I think of an example of a survivor who lives and works in an area where a disaster hits and who experiences several of the problem statements we’ve identified and we’ll get into discussing next.
Abby: Yeah. Great example. And so then when I say like the impacted community, and the leaders of that community, who are you thinking about?
Maddie: For that one, I mean, we read that article about Hurricane Harvey and it talked about churches, also in Houston, that primarily held religious services before the hurricane. [(2) Local Nonprofits Play Key Role in Disaster Recovery, Chronicle of Philanthropy] But after Harvey, they also became distribution centers for food, diapers, clothing, gift cards, and cleaning supplies to better serve their communities while still maintaining their primary operations, and while needing to rebuild their own facilities. So I think that’s a good example of organizations that had to make do with less money and fewer staff members and volunteers after a disaster — so they’re impacted like anyone else in the community, but they’re also taking on operations to serve their community. And balancing those two pieces further dragged out their own recovery process while they’re trying to simultaneously be of service to their community. So when we’ve talked about the impacted community, that’s sort of the persona that keeps coming up in my mind.
Abby: And then, what about the broader recovery community? Because there’s lots of folks we’ve spoken with in that group.
Maddie: Yeah, for this category I think I have less of a singular person or persona that comes to mind as representative of the “recovery community.” But the examples I’d flag are probably 1) a big government agency like FEMA; 2) a VOAD (meaning voluntary organization active in disasters) — and All Hands and Hearts comes to mind as an example we’ve talked to; and then 3) either a community foundation or other on-the-ground philanthropist, like CDP, is another sort of third persona in this category.
So then FEMA — I think there are obviously so many smaller organizations within FEMA, and we’ve talked to probably five different teams there. There are the folks who sit behind a desk and manage grant approvals and distributions, folks who are on the ground assessing and even maybe doing some disaster case management after a crisis, and then the people at FEMA who liaise with the VOADs is another part of that FEMA entity in the recovery community.
And then there are the VOADs themselves, like All Hands and Hearts, that will deploy staff and volunteers to go into a home after a flood and do the actual mucking and gutting work with people.
And then we’ve talked to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy a lot about their shoe leather philanthropy that they believe in and their practice of “ground truthing,” I think they call it, where they’ll go into the field to directly observe unmet needs following a disaster to then collaborate with funders and NGOs to inform how they allocate their grant making dollars based on the real needs they see. [(3) Shoe-Leather Philanthropy, CDP] And there’s a lot of blurring and overlap we’ve talked about within just the recovery community itself. And honestly between the recovery community and the other aspects of community we’ve talked about.
Abby: So it’s really important to recognize the blur and overlap between these groups. So, like you mentioned, the impacted community leaders are also likely survivors. And, the recovery communities are asking survivors and the community leaders to participate in their recovery. So there’s a lot of blurred lines between these, but these stakeholders and personas have helped us get a little bit crisper on the key problems.
Maddie: It seems like you’ve especially gotten much clearer on the problem statements once you were able to group them into these three stakeholder groups. And that was super helpful for me too, because we weren’t thinking about the problems in the amorphous anymore, but really for these three particular rings of the community.
Abby: Yeah, I was conflating problems of individual survivors and families with problems of the community. So separating them into stakeholders allowed me to kind of step back and look at the systems and the people and what’s not working. Also, it’s a lot easier to follow the money because money does flow differently to individuals than it does to organizations within the community.
Maddie: Can you talk a little bit about what problem statements have been floating to the top or emerging as the top priorities as we’ve formed this clearer perspective about how we define community?
Abby: So we have the three personas: survivors, impacted community, and recovery community. And we have centered the problem statements for those who are directly impacted by a disaster — so that means the survivors and impacted community. That makes the role of the recovery community essentially like supporting actors, so that’s where most of our problem statements have landed, is the survivors and impacted community.
Maddie: So let’s start with the survivors, which as you said before, you’ve defined as the people who live, work, and play in the geographic area where damage occurred from the disaster. What are the primary problems you are seeing for the survivor’s group?
Abby: So, first and foremost, not everyone can recover on their own. That might seem obvious, but ultimately that’s at the center of this: that not everyone has the liquidity or reserves to be able to recover financially on their own. Not everybody knows what resources are available. They might not be able to navigate what’s required to recover and then apply for available resources.
Maddie: And then if survivors don’t have the resources to recover on their own, that’s where the recovery community and these other systems start to step in. So what are survivor’s options when they don’t have the means to recover on their own?
Abby: So they’re owed resources, essentially, whether that’s through insurance or through government programs. So there is a path forward within the system that we have. But that leads into the second problem statement for survivors, which is that not everybody receives enough or any resources to recover. Not everyone has insurance. Not everyone has a bank account to receive funds. And not everybody can make it through the process to receive funds. It’s confusing, it’s biased, and it’s wildly complex and disjointed.
Maddie: I want to flag that last piece here, that not everyone can make it through the process as a major area that needs detangling.
Abby: Yeah, not everyone can make it through the process, and they’re forced to cobble together various sources of funding depending on what happened and who you are. It’s really confusing and unclear. Accessing these resources likely require a level of digital literacy to access, do the forms, you know, take time off from work. There’s also this crux of the process that requires a third party assessment for what the value is that you’re trying to receive that has tons of bias and mismatch in terms of then how folks recover. And there’s just systemic barriers that prevent survivors from accessing available programs, like who gets what, when, and why?
Maddie: Yeah, and the examples you just flagged tie right back to that example I gave at the beginning when you asked who we’re thinking about when we talk about an impacted survivor, and Janice Perry Evans, who was talked about in that article I mentioned, her income was too low to claim a significant tax refund, so she couldn’t access that. But she was also denied money from HUD because her income was too high to qualify even, to your point, after she used her day off to go to an info session. And then she was denied a low interest loan from the small business administration because her credit score was too low.
Abby: And those are just some of the problems. There’s the citizenship requirement for program entry, inconsistent damage assessment process. And when not everyone can get an SBA loan to cover costs on waiting for their FEMA funds, they fall further behind.
Maddie: Yeah. And that’s a big problem we identified in our last conversation, just this timeline it takes to get the money from government or from insurance or from any source to folks.
Abby: Yeah, that’s kind of the third big problem statement that we’ve identified, which is that the resources take a long time to arrive. And that’s ultimately what draws out this timeline for recovery. And there’s just tremendous compounding negative consequences if you don’t have that financial buffer.
Maddie: And so I think the perspective we’re forming around our vision for disaster recovery, as it relates to those problem statements, is that we believe, as you’ve sort of started to say, is that everyone, meaning all survivors impacted by climate driven disasters in the United States, deserve to recover in a timely way.
Abby: Yeah, that’s the vision for what the world should look like because of us. And there are two key words embedded in that vision: everyone and timely. When we think about everyone, it’s that everyone can get those resources to recover. And that it doesn’t take a long time for those resources to arrive. I have to acknowledge that when we say “everyone should recover in a timely manner,” I don’t yet have a great definition of what timely means. We have this macro stat that disaster recovery takes up to about six years, but I think we really have some work to do in terms of how do we define that for the survivors and what they need. We’re also baking in a couple assumptions around what this vision will require: that survivors can identify what they need and that we, Network for Good, believes that survivors deserve trust and agency in deciding how they recover. We don’t want to say, “here’s what recovery looks like for you.” So that success metric has to come up from the survivors.
“Our vision for survivors: Everyone impacted by a climate-driven disaster in the United States deserves to recover in a timely way.”
Maddie: So then if we shift our conversation from survivors, let’s shift now to the discussion of what we’ve been talking about around the problem statements and opportunities for the impacted community, for which our working definition here is “the formal and informal institutions that take care of the people and places.”
Abby: Because our strategic vision ties back to producing sustainable outcomes, we’re coming in hot with the bias that recovery requires resilience and preparedness for the next disaster. If we just go back to the way things were, when the next disaster inevitably hits, we’re just gonna perpetuate this cycle.
Maddie: So then, what are the primary problems that you are seeing for the impacted community group here?
Abby: So right off the bat, communities are ill-equipped to deal with the long-term recovery needs. They’re working through trauma, from that disaster and healing. They didn’t have the resources to prepare a plan. They don’t know where the funds are going to come from. And the process and capacity for recovery comes in that acute phase and doesn’t persist. And then the information about what people need within a community are just spread across disparate systems. So we’re not setting up the community for success to deal with the long-term recovery. And compounding onto that is that not all communities can access those resources available. So the same issue that you saw with survivors, kind of ditto to communities. So the example that community resources require a match, and not all communities can do that. And not all communities have the capacity, like the time and people to navigate what’s required, let alone know what’s available or can find the resources. Within the community, resources are distributed inequitably because of the above two things: they don’t have the capacity and they just don’t have visibility into what the needs are.
And then the last really important point back to that sustainable outcomes piece is that communities struggle to do the future planning and resilience work in the middle of recovery. They’re ill-equipped to do the recovery, let alone integrate resilience work into that. And with the frequency these disasters are happening, the required timeline between disasters is shortening. So this constant barrage means that they might not ever enter long-term recovery and consider resilience. And that’s ultimately the challenge, which means communities are really overwhelmed. There’s this pop-up nature of how disaster relief and recovery systems work. But it doesn’t actually help the impacted community operationalize what it looks like to serve all survivors fairly.
Maddie: And, to your point, that’s partially because the communities are not all served fairly. If a community doesn’t have the funds, like you said, to put up a match to access FEMA funding, they’re left out of these opportunities and that impacts the survivors within their community. So the vision statement then that we’ve talked about for impacted communities is that we believe “communities can recover more equitably and with resilience so that the next disaster is less destructive for everyone.” Can you say a bit more about what that means?
Abby: So, in this disaster space, I think both equity and resilience for that impacted community are required to get to those buzzwords of “alignment” and “sustainable outcomes” from that strategic vision. And if we’re helping all survivors recover in a timely way, we double down on that community-aligned part. So it’s the combination of how we show up for survivors and how we show up for the impacted community that I think will get to that aligned sustainable outcome.
“Our vision for impacted communities: Communities can recover more equitably and with resilience, so that the next disaster is less destructive for everyone.”
Maddie: We’ve been discussing how important an equity lens is for this work overall and recognizing that it’s not explicitly embedded in our current broader network for good strategic vision statement. And so digging into these problem statements for us, it’s been the words “for everyone” that have been representing some of the equity and inclusion problems you and I have been talking about.
Abby: Yeah. Many of these problems are about how the system doesn’t work for everybody, so we have to solve for that, right? And that’s another really important assumption about how we approach the levers and how we enter doing this work within an impacted community, is just recognizing that we will have to navigate community structures that are not designed for equity for all survivors.
Maddie: So what’s next? Where do we go with that?
Abby: So we’ve got the stakeholders and we’ve got the vision statements, which is that all survivors can recover in a timely way, and that communities can recover more equitably and with resilience so the next disaster is less destructive for everyone. So if we take the associated problem statements, we’re now starting to map the levers that we think are the crux of why these things aren’t true today.
Maddie: Can you outline some of those examples we’ve talked about?
Abby: So, what are the barriers to receive resources? What is the system for distributing the resources to survivors? And one really interesting example of the levers is just the velocity of how funds move to survivors. And then on the community level, playing with the pre- and post-disaster capacity within a community, what the general ecosystem calls preparedness, and then also flexibility in funding sources. So knowing that, because of the way this money comes in and it goes directly to relief, is because there isn’t flexibility in the funding. So I think that’s a lever for, if we want to push this long-term recovery or the timely recovery, we need more flexibility upstream. So that’s ultimately where we are, digging into these levers. And so then when we think about experiment design, trying to develop hypotheses on which of these levers do we want to push on? In the last month we’ve like crisped up what are the problem statements that we’re focusing on, what is the vision that we see that we think we can impact. And so now we can start to think about what are these levers for impact and what experiments do we want to run on those levers.
Maddie: So that’s what I think we’ll be talking through then over the next several weeks, thinking about these levers and I’m looking forward to coming back here with you again, Abby, to share our latest round of learnings for the next recording. I hope this was useful for our board, our advisors and supporters. And once again, we invite you all to push back on the things we’ve shared here and bring up new ideas for us to think about. So thanks for talking with me again, Abby.
