On September 14, Hurricane Florence made landfall in the Carolinas. Days after, flood waters continue to rise. Thousands of homes–over 4,300 in Bern, North Carolina alone–have sustained damage, and the full effects of the hurricane are not yet known.
But the pattern of response to Florence will be more predictable. Already, corporate donors are pledging commitments to aid affected areas, and fundraisers for organizations like Habitat for Humanity, the American Red Cross, and GlobalGiving are under way.
Over the past several years, the CDP has worked to educate corporate donors, philanthropies, and the broader public about effective disaster response strategies (its Disaster Philanthropy Playbook, released in 2016, is a good primer). Now, a coalition of nonprofits–the disaster relief and recovery organization All Hands and Hearts-Smart Response, Good360, and Global Citizen–have teamed up to get individual and corporate donors alike to pledge to follow a more thoughtful pattern of post-disaster action.
- Proactive. Philanthropists and nonprofits should begin planning before a disaster strikes to maximize efficacy.
- Needs-based. Community needs should be at the center of every action taken and donation made, and aid organizations should listen to what the on-the-ground priorities are before acting.
- Immediate and long-term. Disaster response should address immediate and long-term needs, staying in communities until the work is done, not just until the news cycle wraps up.
- Resilience-focused. Recovery work should focus on helping communities build back with stronger infrastructure and systems.
- Transparent. Donors and nonprofits need to be up front about the actions they plan to take and their commitments, and hold themselves accountable to deliver on promises.
- Educational. As aid workers and deliverers learn what works in disaster response, they should educate the public and their networks about how to donate and respond most effectively.
These six pillars are meant to guide organizations toward amending some of the shortcomings of the current disaster response system. For one thing: There needs to be an overhaul in the way that the delivery of goods and resources is managed. As CEO of Good360, a nonprofit that works with over 400 large companies to encourage them to donate excess goods, rather than destroying them, Howard Sherman has a lot of experience overseeing how and when resources are allocated. And in the disaster recovery sector, it’s often not done well. Around 60% of the material goods that arrive in disaster-struck region end up in landfill. “Often, it’s the wrong goods at the wrong time,” Sherman says.
Which leads to another issue: correcting lack of sustained engagement. The vast majority of resources are sent to an affected area within two months of a disaster. But through the Resilient Response framework, the founding nonprofits want to encourage corporations and philanthropies to more effectively spread their donations, or to continually recommit over the course of the whole recovery period.
“We’re doing a lot of work with corporate donors to get them to think about the cadence of giving, and how they can give in a way that’s really aligned with need, and doesn’t contribute to waste,” Sherman says. Part of what the Resilient Response framework also calls for is greater communication between corporate and individual donors and people working on the ground in affected areas. Sherman cites the reporting that emerged last week about the vast quantity of water that sat unused on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, where both a lack of distribution infrastructure and recipient distrust of the water quality rendered it useless. But even then, shipments of water still continued to arrive and pile up. “It’s not just enough to send goods–you have to think about how those goods are going to be distributed responsibly on the ground,” Sherman says.
As severe storms become more commonplace, so do calls for aid. But for Nemcova, what’s disturbing is the way the public cycle of processing such disasters unfolds. “You hear people talking about it for maybe four or five weeks, and then at the one-year anniversary, and that’s it,” she says. She wants to see the Resilient Response framework catalyze a new mode of public understanding of and engagement with disasters, as much as it will encourage donors to adjust their pattern of giving. In doing so, she hopes that disaster recover organizations will be able to pull in enough resources over time to assisting across the whole recovery curve, not just in the immediate weeks after a disaster strikes.