Local Innovation Works

Local Leaders Active in Disaster

Challenges

  • How to support families in my community to get the resources they need.
  • Overcoming trust concerns in our community.
  • How to protect the people in my community from people who might value exploiting or punishing them more than helping them to recover.
  • How to coordinate with other organizations and leaders  in my community to align with official disaster response and recovery efforts?  = COAD.

Values

  • Registering our neighbors affected by the disaster.
  • Coordination of community response and recovery efforts.
  • Single source of trustworthy information.
  • Clarity on who has unmet needs, narrative re demographics to advocate for resources and program adjustments, coordination of care (non duplication of efforts and benefits), equity and efficiency.
  • Easily see which programs a family is registered in, open needs.
  • Tracking recovery family by family to ensure no one is neglected.

Use cases

  • Helping families in our community through recovery.
  • Tracking our efforts for reimbursement of costs to the organization.
  • Analysis of our efforts and impacts on those we serve.

Why community-wide data matters

For years, community leaders have made a lot of impact without focusing on completely, accurate data.  

Modern funding increasingly relies on data about need and impact. Community leaders who have data to back up their compelling stories heave a distinct advantage over those who don’t.

Rather than developing data within organizations, communities need to focus on shared data stores that leverage expertise, resources , and community trust to create holistic views of need and impact.  Community Information Exchanges (CIE) like UniteUs are an excellent starting point, but disasters call for specialized data and tools to handle the crisis before recovered families continue in care via the CIE.

Local community leaders must prioritize the collection and updating of disaster response and recovery data to support the efficacy, equity, and transparency of recovery.

Efficacy 

  • Identify needs and meet them more quickly.
  • Adjust programs to meet actual needs more quickly and precisely.
  • Work for full recovery, housing first, not housed and done.

Equity

  • Reaching everyone, especially the typically underserved.
  • Avoid duplication of benefits and allow those most in need to receive benefits.
  • Track family recovery throughout their process.
  • Track and fund effort and impact by our organization.

Transparency

  • The sunshine of clear data builds community trust in the recovery process and highlights areas for improvement.
  • The sunshine of data tracking organizations’ efforts and impacts reduces the possibility of data being used to glorify the few who may control it.
  • Shared data set for analysis by the community in a shared search for truth.
  • Data on suggestions and criticisms published, analyzed, responded to, and acted upon whenever possible. “Voice of the customer” is taken seriously.

Next Steps 

  • Track your efforts and impacts with the people you serve. This effort may be reimbursable if you have good data.
  • Progressive engagement with clients.  Start with just name and contact information and immediate needs.  Seek first to be relevant, meet a real need, and then proceed to learn more about how you can be more effective and relevant to them.  Ask about their upcoming needs and recovery plans in later contacts.
  • Collect data in a standardized way aligned with other organizations in your community’s data collection and reporting frameworks.  This will be valuable to your clients, organization and community when advocating for program eligibility adjustments, possible future funds to offset your costs of serving the recovery, 
  • Encourage clients to register with local disaster case management programs or recovery organizations so they can learn more about resources as they become available.
  • Seek to make local and state authorities aware of your client’s needs for security and privacy so they can develop practices that allow your clients to participate in programs that might benefit them.  Be careful, but also creative to ensure everyone is counted and receives the resources they need.
  • Meet regularly with your peers to align on data to collect, verification, deduplication, and reporting processes.  End each meeting by asking who else should be invited to join this conversation?  Work to align your organization’s daily efforts with the group’s goals and processes.  
  • Learn to practice Collective Impact or other community building and orchestration methods.
  • Work with your community’s disaster response leaders to support their implementation of solutions to collect data that supports people getting what they need in an efficient and equitable way.

But My Community Is Different

If the state solution is not serving your community’s needs, look at our pages on building your own locally-owned and controlled solution here on the Digital Leaders Active in Disaster page.