Taking Disaster Response Seriously

Foundations are expected to provide rationality and solutions to the major challenges of our time, but they have failed when it comes to dealing with natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies.

It is not that they have failed to invest, though perhaps they have not invested enough. The real problem is that grant makers have failed to do their homework on what it takes to strengthen the disaster-response system and to focus their investments wisely.

When the intensity or duration of national headlines and television coverage persuade foundations to support disaster relief, grant makers are often driven by compassion, embarrassment, or pressure from their boards rather than by an understanding of the problem and a hypothesis about the solution. As a result, they usually make grants to reputable organizations that provide immediate relief and make a large difference in curbing human suffering. But the money seldom goes to efforts that deal with the underlying problems that led to the crisis or that help to build the field of emergency response.

In fact, foundations seldom recognize that disaster response is a field, and a major one as measured by the economic and social impact of disasters as well as the size of contributions, especially those provided by governmental sources.

To be sure, we just closed a year that was unusual in the frequency and severity of the disasters. But in 2006 and every year to come, thousands of people around the globe will lose their homes, their possessions, their means of subsistence — and often their lives — due to scores of natural disasters as well as humanitarian crises caused by war, political strife, and other challenges.

International organizations spend billions annually dealing with those tragedies. The causes of those emergencies are often complex, as are the responses. But well-timed, well-focused philanthropic contributions can make an enormous difference.

The first step in developing a more thoughtful and effective response to disasters is to recognize that a disaster should not be defined by an unexpected event but by the failure of a community to respond to that event.

Many emergencies — local, national, and international — never become disasters that require outside assistance because organizations in the region are equipped to deal with the situation. Foundation support for a disaster should focus on the causes of the breakdown of a community’s ability to respond to a crisis.

Some disasters, such as the Pakistan earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, destroy a region’s physical infrastructure, making it impossible for any local organizations to provide emergency relief without significant external help. In other cases, such as the death of almost an entire generation of parents in parts of Africa or the flight of community leaders in New Orleans, the social system breaks down to the degree that little of the traditional community leadership is left to cope with significant problems. And in other cases, such as ethnic-cleansing campaigns against civilians, the psychological or moral identity of a community is so damaged that its traditional resilience and values system fail.

Developing a strong understanding of the types of damage that a region has sustained often does more than just provide a road map to an effective short-term response; it can also reveal opportunities to support longer-term programs that can help assure that a region has the capacity to respond to many types of disasters.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, told me recently that his only surprise in the Katrina response, compared with the many emergencies and disasters that affect Bangladesh every year, is the weakness of the response by civil society.

During a major emergency in Bangladesh, he said, branches of the Grameen Bank, which makes small loans to help people start businesses, cease their banking business and become information centers that help relief organizations plan how they will help those harmed by a disaster.

If foundations could help private organizations of all kinds demonstrate that kind of agility in their response to disasters, grant makers could multiply many times the impact of their financial support.

Foundations can also shape a disaster response by the timing of their grants. Nonprofit groups that respond immediately often set the priorities for the relief and rehabilitation phases of dealing with a disaster. Early foundation-assisted action by expert organizations can direct vast resources in a more thoughtful direction instead of waiting for donors, charities, and governmental bureaucracies to trudge slowly to the recognition of what is needed.

Another way in which foundations can make a difference is to help first responders identify and publicize significant disasters well before they hit the headlines. That is especially true of crises that set in slowly, like ethnic cleansing and droughts.

Major droughts and resulting food shortages in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe barely saw the light of day in the American news media compared with the tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina.

It is not unusual for relief organizations to see disasters coming many months in advance, and then to wait in frustration while the news media, donors, and governments let them evolve into full-blown crises before responding. But in a few instances, quick action by foundations and other donors has helped avert trouble.

A major commitment from philanthropy to one of the “quiet disasters” — the type that does not get five days of coverage in The New York Times or CNN — can carry much greater influence than adding to the coffers of a well-financed response to a well-known tragedy. But learning about those quiet disasters requires vigilance and timely work by the staff members of foundations.

Beyond the help the foundation can make directly, responding to the less well-known disasters has a multiplier effect because other foundations, as well as companies, journalists, and philanthropists, pay attention to what big grant makers are doing.

Disaster money comes and goes. When disasters are out of the news, money dries up precipitously. Often the regions that have suffered through a crisis are left on their own when short-term assistance disappears.

Foundations can help balance this predictable cycle by focusing their grants on longer-term rehabilitation needs. They can also make grants to programs that deal with the causes of a disaster by investing in a region’s resilience — physical, social, and civic — to prevent the next emergency from becoming a disaster.

What’s more, foundations can support the capacity of disaster-response organizations during periods when large disaster grants are not being given, thereby preventing the cyclical “boom and bust” reality of organizations that essentially need to rebuild much of their response effort each time an emergency occurs.

The disasters of the past year demonstrated the enormous opportunities for philanthropy to take a leading role in shaping the field of national and international emergency response. As a field, it has been virtually untouched by what philanthropy can offer. Let’s resolve in 2006 to make sure that this is no longer the case.

Terrence R. Meersman is executive director of the Talaris Research Institute, a Seattle nonprofit group that seeks to improve the relationships between parents and young children. He was previously a vice president of Save the Children and has worked at several foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.