Sesso, Palacio open dialogue on serving the vulnerable after disasters

Nonprofits have become more experienced at responding to emergencies in the nearly four years since Hurricane Sandy, but funding issues, communication gaps and confusion over roles could stymie future responses, according to a report issued Aug. 3 by the Human Services Council, an umbrella group of 170 social services providers. 

“We can do better and we’re not doing that right now,” HSC Executive Director Allison Sesso said at a conference on disaster relief and recovery which was timed to the release of the report.

Forty-six percent of those responding to the survey identified funding as the biggest obstacle in providing an adequate response; Seventy-nine percent said they had no dedicated funding for those purposes. Nonprofits may be less likely to help with recovery if it could place the group in a financial hole, Sesso said.

“If a Sandy-type event happened today there may be less willingness and ability of the nonprofits to make that pivot,” she said. “And we have to pay attention to that, because that’s going to matter a lot, going back to the communities, for our ability to serve them. ”

While most agencies who responded to the poll said they had a disaster response plan, few of them worked with other groups to respond more effectively. Many were also confused about which government agencies took the lead role in response, and few of the nonprofits in the report had dedicated funds for planning and recovery. Generally, smaller organizations were less prepared to handle disasters than larger ones: Only 30 percent of nonprofits with budgets of less than $500,000 have an emergency plan, compared with at least 72 percent of those with budgets above $15 million.

The report, prepared by HSC with support from the Baruch College School of Public and International Affairs and the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, surveyed more than 200 groups through April. It updates a similar one done by Baruch and HSC in October 2013. 

One goal was to spark dialogue between organizations, government and funders, something that providers said was necessary before disasters. 

“We are very lucky to not have had a disaster since Sandy, but the more years that go, the less institutional knowledge returns,” said Louisa Chafee, the senior vice president of external relations and public policy of UJA-Federation, who has worked in state and city government.

The HSC report offered 10 recommendations that included: tapping coalitions and membership organizations to make plans and share information; implementing a “human services operations center” similar to the city’s Office of Emergency Management; creating a permanent office with city government to coordinate nonprofits’ disaster response; engaging philanthropic organizations with the government’s formal response plan; creating a disaster reserve fund and making it easy for nonprofits to prequalify.

More than one-third of the groups (37 percent) distributed food, clothing or blankets and other goods immediately after a disaster, while 30 percent served meals, performed crisis counseling or provided mental health services. While many organizations responded to Sandy or offered help after the September 11 attacks, those polled also assisted people affected by other emergencies, such as the 2014 East Harlem gas explosion that killed eight people. 

While many of those groups were likely to offer wireless internet or kitchen facilities, they were much less likely to have shelters or backup generators. Sesso said HSC was launching a committee – the Human Services Disaster, Readiness and Resiliency Workgroup – to guide its work.

Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services Herminia Palacio said that disasters seemed to highlight social divides already in the community. 

“People like to say that disasters don’t discriminate, but I think all of us in this room know that that’s just not true,” she said. “That the very structural inequities that exist and persist in day-to-day life are just amplified, deepened and worsened in a disaster.”

Palacio, who coordinated services for 27,000 evacuees who relocated to the Houston area after Hurricane Katrina, said those left behind after Katrina were the residents who didn’t have resources to leave, and those affected by Zika and other infectious diseases are often people living in poor housing conditions. “Our planning needs to reflect very explicitly an understanding of the differential impact that disasters can have on the least and most vulnerable among us,” she said. 

She also previewed a working group, due to be officially announced in the next several weeks, which will include representatives of the nonprofit sector and city government to focus generally “on the variety of ways that we can support the capacity of community-based organizations, increase stakeholder engagement and reduce administrative burden.”

Sue Fox, the executive director of the Shorefront YM-YWHA, which operates in Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach, said that after Sandy, city, state and federal agencies expected her staff to provide translators to canvass the heavily Russian-speaking neighborhood. “At the end of the day, those were not reimbursable expenses,” she said. “They would only have been reimbursable if I could have proven that they did those services during overtime hours.” (Palacio said earlier that the mayor’s office would provide training about reimbursement processes to make it easier.)

The denied payment can be seen as de-valuing the connections nonprofits have with the community. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Fox said, posted signs that were poorly translated and her staff offered to fix them. “The fact is that we couldn’t have the signage up on our building that was in terrible Russian – or Spanish or Hindi, whatever languages that it needed to be in … If you communicate poorly, the services, the connections, the trust is gone.”