The best way to meet our community’s needs is through collaboration.
Without trust, collaboration is merely cooperation, which is simply not capable of achieving the benefits and possibilities available to true collaborators.
Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust
Unfortunately, everyday life gives us many reasons to doubt others. Distrust creates silos and silos create blind spots that are costly to our clients and our community.
- Clients may not know about available resources.
- Organizations may not know of potential partnerships or collaborations.
- Needs may not be surfaced to the people who can help meet them.
Disaster Can Reinforce Distrust
The 2020 Labor Day fires were a natural disaster followed by a data disaster partially caused by and definitely reinforcing some sources of distrust.
Overcoming The Community Trust Deficit
Trust is the key to successful community action but it’s at a low in our society. That hurts us most when we can afford it least, after a disaster.
Overcoming Underserved People’s Distrust Of Government
If we want to have a complete list of people affected by a disaster, we need to work with trust earned methodically in the community. We must partner with the organizations who serve underserved populations in ways that build trust on a daily basis.
- Partner with Trusted Local Organizations
- Transparent About Data Uses And Risks
- Progressive Engagement Tied to Resources
After the 2020 Labor Day fires there was a pattern of collecting data and not delivering resources.
In the future, we need to tightly align data about needs with the resources to meet those needs.
We must be able to say, “Register and you get these resources. Next, if you prove need, you get a larger set of resources.”
We want to create a very low barrier to entry so we can track everybody who was affected by the disaster, but progressively clarify needs to bring efficiency and equity to everyone’s recovery efforts.
Overcoming Organizations’ Distrust Of Each Other
Direct Funding – Organizations in a competitive funding model lose trust in each other. Scrappy action-oriented organizations often mistrust larger, more visible, more bureaucratic organizations and the state agencies who funded them despite their locally visible shortcomings.
Tracking Efforts and Impacts – Any disaster registry system should allow local organizations to support subjects with data entry and updates as well as resource navigation. This would allow organizations to track their efforts and impacts to support accountability and impact reporting to funding agencies. Transparency improves accountability and feedback loops on what is working and not in recovery programs.
Building Community Trust
- Transparent – Be transparent about security systems and protocols, even under what conditions law enforcement can gain access to certain data.
- Rewarding – Tie progressive data gathering to extended levels of resources. Be very clear about the eligibility criteria and denial rates before collecting large amounts of data.
- Relevant – Focus on earning trust every day by making unique, relevant contributions visible to those who might benefit from your work.
- Collaborative – Invest in collaborating with organizations to serve your shared populations with a focus on relevance, speedy impact, and cross organization reciprocity. Collective Impact is an effective way to build collaboration and trust.
- Accountable – Hold yourself accountable by transparently publishing your efforts and impacts.
So, we must work together to intentionally build community trust between our clients and our organizations as well as between our partners and ourselves. We can build trust by:
Reach out with any questions or comments
Local Leaders on Trust
On February 29, 2024, local leaders gathered in the Fire Survivor Serving Agencies meeting to have a conversation about challenges with community trust in data registry.
Here is the link to the video of that conversation.
We hope that these voices will be included in conversations around data sharing agreements and software requirements for disaster registry work going forward. It is important that we take the voices of the street and bring them into the halls of power where decisions are made that will affect our recovery from the next disaster.
To make things easier, here are the timestamps for the conversation as it relates to the Post Disaster Digital Registry.
Hours:Minutes – Topics
00:59 Start of the Digital Registry conversation.
1:00 The key questions of this conversation.
1:09 Survivors’ experience and trust issues.
1:11. Siloed data. We need a central, shared data source. We’re re-traumatizing survivors.
1:12 Diana at Unete, ask at the Gateway about what the trust issues are.
1:14 Sylvia, American Red Cross never handed over the data and when they finally did, it’s messy and it’s siloed.
1:16. Communication. Silos with local organizations.
1:18 Elib, bilingual and bicultural are not enough. We can’t just rely on culturally specific organizations. All organizations need to be ready to do outreach and intake. It’s not just about language and culture. It’s about a trusting relationship built over time.
1:20 How to track effort and impact by organizations for reimbursement and future grants. Reporting in an anonymized way to show effort and impact in the community,
1:23 Organizations of care versus organizations of control and how to distinguish between the two. DHS and FEMA muddy the waters and they are like a machine that has teeth. The machine was focused on closing cases, more than on serving people, it felt like.
1:26 Communication was the missing key. If the funds run out, then we pause but people were told that their case was closed, not just paused. So, we need to have a data source that continues past the DCM program and can be picked up by future programs like HARP or HOP.
1:28. Trust is difficult to build when data is incomplete, this meeting, the Fire Survivor Serving Agencies meeting, is an attempt to build that trust and collaboration between organizations
1:30. There are too many points of contact per case and so there’s no coordination and there was no transparency, and consistency of case view. So if you want to build trust with the survivors, then you need to have transparency iand consistency of data across the community and all the organizations that are serving.
1:32 Jocsana says, I didn’t hear who my DCM was. I never heard from them. There was no outreach from them. Te siloed data leaves, not cracks that people fall through, but huge gaps. She registered with American Red Cross and FEMA but they never shared their data until much later. So she (and uncounted others) fell through a huge gap.
1:37 Joe with Access, Federal dollars carry restrictions and so a care organization can look like a control organization or can have to live with all the restrictions of a federal funding source.
1:38 Complete data allows programs to to be designed to meet actual needs. Without complete data, we don’t know what the real needs are and what the criteria are that would allow people to benefit.
1:39 people won’t apply unless they can see that they are qualified. We have to make the process simpler, faster, and clearer up front. Otherwise people don’t trust the process because the amount of effort required and the chances of ever having any reward or resource at the end are so low. People opt out. So it’s on us to figure out how to use data and program design to maybe reverse the process.
1:43 Complete, clean data would allow us to offer resources and not have survivors come begging for resources. We heard that again and again, begging retraumatizes.
1:44 Outreach via traditional media, that’s not just digital.
1:52 Day one data collection matters because many people will leave and go to stay with relatives or whoever. Local organizations can make that happen starting on day one but there has to be coordination up front
1:53 The COAD is the organization designed to pre-organize the data collection and the service organizations. So that’s really where this work should live going forward.