This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will further the understanding of how communities can effectively leverage philanthropic resources to meet housing-recovery needs after disasters. As disaster costs and disaster displacement increase, governmental assistance to individuals and private insurance often are inadequate to ensure full recovery for all affected people. Philanthropic resources can address unmet needs of disaster survivors if used effectively and efficiently. Locally led nonprofit ?long-term recovery groups? are often charged with distributing these resources, but little is known about these organizations? efforts or what makes their operations more or less effective in promoting community recovery and resilience. This project will assess how philanthropic housing-recovery practices affect individual unmet needs, post-disaster equity, and the overarching philanthropic ecosystem of affected communities. This project will use the research results to inform and test a training program for locally based nonprofits, government officials, and foundations that will improve their effectiveness in managing philanthropic resources for disaster recovery. Educational outcomes also include undergraduate research experiences to foster under-represented student engagement in STEM and graduate student internships coordinated with disaster recovery nonprofits to further their data management skills.
This project builds on past research into nonprofit operations and housing recovery, introducing a new approach that integrates both. Recent research indicates that governmental aid processes correlate with increased economic and racial inequality after disasters. At the same time, social ?infrastructure?, like local nonprofits and especially long-term recovery groups, provide recovery support to socially vulnerable populations who often have difficulty accessing governmental disaster aid. Yet, philanthropic response to disaster is understudied. This is the first attempt to quantify long-term recovery groups? effectiveness and to identify the factors that increase their effectiveness in supporting housing recovery across the United States. The project work will include the development and analysis of a new dataset of nonprofit disaster recovery operations using secondary and primary data from recent disasters. While focused on long-term recovery groups, the findings from this work will have implications for non-disaster situations. The project will increase understanding of how practices undertaken in disaster situations can be institutionalized into organizations, thus addressing how sudden change in mission and capacity affects organizational operations. The research findings will also point to how disaster resilience can be integrated into daily operations of all types of nonprofits and how resilience affects their overarching operation and mission. Further, this work will evaluate the effects of philanthropic response to disasters on a community?s broader philanthropic safety net.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
