Harnessing a community for sustainable disaster response and recovery: an operational model for integrating nongovernmental organizations

Including Homeless Populations in Disaster Preparedness, Planning, and Response: A Toolkit for Practitioners

Context:

People experiencing homelessness are often the first and most severely affected group during disasters. Nonetheless, communities across the United States have frequently failed to adequately address the needs of homeless populations in disaster planning, response, and recovery. Communities must build multisector collaborative relationships and ensure that homeless service providers are adequately resourced. However, constraints in funding and staffing, combined with a lack of guidance about how to achieve an integrated approach to disaster planning for people experiencing homelessness, have hindered communities' ability to accomplish these goals.

Program:

The US Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development created an interagency workgroup to identify resources to help communities address the disaster needs of homeless populations. This workgroup created a toolkit to address this gap: Disaster Preparedness to Promote Community Resilience.

This article describes the development of the toolkit. The toolkit is divided into 3 sections:

Section 1 provides guidance to homeless service providers and government entities in identifying collaborative relationships to ensure that services are available to address homeless populations' disaster needs. Section 2 offers nonprofit homeless service providers guidance in creating their disaster response plans. Section 3 aims to ensure that public health officials and health care systems have the capacity to provide health care to homeless populations during disasters.

Implementation:

Efforts are under way to develop a disaster preparedness training manual to assist nonprofit homeless service organizations.

Discussion:

Homeless service providers are vital partners in disaster response. Integrating them into emergency management and ensuring that they are adequately prepared for disasters will effectively enable them to contribute their unique skill sets to community disaster recovery.

Beyond Disaster Preparedness: Building a Resilience-Oriented Workforce for the Future

Enhancing citizens' and communities' resilience is critical to adapt successfully to ongoing challenges faced by communities, as well as acute shocks resulting from disasters. While significant progress has been made in this area, several research and practice gaps remain. A crucial next step to advance resilience is the development of a resilience-oriented workforce. This narrative review examines existing literature to determine key components of a resilience-oriented workforce, with a focus on organizational structures, training and education, and leadership models. Reviewed articles spanned a variety of study types, including needs assessments of existing workforce, program evaluations, and reviews/commentaries. A resilience-oriented workforce spans many disciplines and training programs will need to reflect that. It requires a collaborative organizational model that promotes information sharing structures. Leadership models should foster a balance between workforce autonomy and operation as a collective entity. Optimal strategies to develop a resilience-oriented workforce have yet to be realized and future research will need to collect and synthesize data to promote and evaluate the growth of this field.

Towards More Nuanced Classification of NGOs and Their Services to Improve Integrated Planning across Disaster Phases

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are being integrated into U.S. strategies to expand the services that are available during health security threats like disasters. Identifying better ways to classify NGOs and their services could optimize disaster planning. We surveyed NGOs about the types of services they provided during different disaster phases. Survey responses were used to categorize NGO services as core-critical to fulfilling their organizational mission-or adaptive-services implemented during a disaster based on community need. We also classified NGOs as being core or adaptive types of organizations by calculating the percentage of each NGO's services classified as core. Service types classified as core were mainly social services, while adaptive service types were those typically relied upon during disasters (e.g., warehousing, food services, etc.). In total, 120 NGOs were classified as core organizations, meaning they mainly provided the same services across disaster phases, while 100 NGOs were adaptive organizations, meaning their services changed. Adaptive NGOs were eight times more likely to report routinely participating in disaster planning as compared to core NGOs. One reason for this association may be that adaptive NGOs are more aware of the changing needs in their communities across disaster phases because of their involvement in disaster planning.

Youth Resilience Corps: An Innovative Model to Engage Youth in Building Disaster Resilience

Objective

Despite the growing awareness that youth are not just passive victims of disaster but can contribute to a community’s disaster resilience, there have been limited efforts to formally engage youth in strengthening community resilience. The purpose of this brief report was to describe the development of a Youth Resilience Corps, or YRC (ie, a set of tools to engage young people in youth-led community resilience activities) and the findings from a small-scale pilot test.

Methods

The YRC was developed with input from a range of government and nongovernmental stakeholders. We conducted a pilot test with youth in Washington, DC, during summer 2014. Semi-structured focus groups with staff and youth surveys were used to obtain feedback on the YRC tools and to assess what participants learned.

Results

Focus groups and youth surveys suggested that the youth understood resilience concepts, and that most youth enjoyed and learned from the components.

Conclusions

The YRC represent an important first step toward engaging youth in building disaster resilience, rather than just focusing on this group as a vulnerable population in need of special attention. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:47–50)

Getting actionable about community resilience: the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience project

Community resilience (CR)--ability to withstand and recover from a disaster--is a national policy expectation that challenges health departments to merge disaster preparedness and community health promotion and to build stronger partnerships with organizations outside government, yet guidance is limited. A baseline survey documented community resilience-building barriers and facilitators for health department and community-based organization (CBO) staff. Questions focused on CBO engagement, government-CBO partnerships, and community education. Most health department staff and CBO members devoted minimal time to community disaster preparedness though many serve populations that would benefit. Respondents observed limited CR activities to activate in a disaster. The findings highlighted opportunities for engaging communities in disaster preparedness and informed the development of a community action plan and toolkit.