Bracing for Catastrophe

Many nonprofit groups have stepped up their disaster planning, but experts say more need to do so

When the power went out in New York last month, Joan Mintz, executive director of United Neighbors of

East Midtown, felt the same crushing concern about the welfare of her organization’s elderly clients as she did on September 11, 2001. But one thing was different — this time she had a plan to make sure they fared well during the emergency.

United Neighbors is one of six nonprofit organizations serving the elderly on the east side of Manhattan that have been meeting monthly since the terrorist attacks — at the urging of the Isaac H. Tuttle Fund, a New York foundation — to figure out how they can work together to ensure that their clients have the food, water, and care they need in the event of another disaster. The organizations have also developed a shared database of their most vulnerable clients so that they can help each other contact those who are most likely to suffer during a crisis.

“When disaster struck on September 11, we all did what we felt we had to do,” says Ms. Mintz. “It wasn’t according to a plan. It was according to gut and emotion and brain power.”

Since the terrorist attacks, United Neighbors and other nonprofit groups have been trying to better think through the steps they would need to take to get their operations back to work quickly after a disaster. Many of the groups are making sure more than one employee knows how to do all of the most urgent tasks, as well as keeping backup copies of important paper and computer records somewhere other than their charities’ offices.

But experts worry that too few organizations — especially small and medium-size groups — are thinking about how to recover from a disaster. They say that many nonprofit groups are too wrapped up in their day-to-day work to think about long-term planning, while others find the prospect of developing a disaster plan so daunting that they don’t even start.

“People want to stick their heads in the sand,” says Andrew S. Lang, national director of nonprofit services at BDO Seidman, an accounting and consulting company in Chicago, and co-author of Disaster Preparedness and Recovery: A Guide for Nonprofit Board Members and Executives. “Once the initial scare goes by — a la 9/11 — people put it out of their minds.”

Common Crises

Large-scale disasters, says Mr. Lang, are not the only reason that charities need to think about disaster planning. He points out that for every September 11 or Oklahoma City bombing, there are hundreds of smaller emergencies, such as floods, fires, or embezzlements, that nonprofit groups are much more likely to face. And the impact of what may seem like a small event can be devastating, depending on the nature of an organization’s work and the circumstances of the crisis.

“If you are a local blood bank, and the power goes out, and your blood warms to the level that it all has to be thrown out, you’re in a heck of a lot worse shape than if you’re a local day care center where the power goes out and you can’t take the kids for a day or two,” he says.

Several nonprofit organizations, though, are trying to raise awareness of the importance of disaster planning.

Among the efforts:

• The Museum, Library & Cultural Properties Facility Group of Greater New York City is working with the city’s Office of Emergency Management to develop guidelines to help arts organizations formulate emergency plans. The guidelines — which are scheduled to be available this winter — will encourage cultural groups to determine which artwork, books, or artifacts should be salvaged first during a disaster, and to establish a relationship with local police and fire departments so that emergency responders understand the organizations’ work and are familiar with their facilities before a crisis hits.
• NPower, a network of organizations that provide technology assistance to other charities, has received a $50,000 grant from the SBC Foundation to update and distribute an emergency-preparedness guide created by its New York affiliate to share lessons learned by the city’s nonprofit groups after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
• With a $139,700 grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif., the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, in Washington, is working closely with 40 groups in San Francisco and Washington to help them develop disaster-recovery plans. Participants in the Business Continuity Planning Project attended in-depth training sessions and received follow-up consulting. The management center is using the organizations’ experiences to create an online tutorial to help other charities through the planning process.

John C. Patterson, the management center’s senior program director, says the organization encourages charities to plan for the damage that a disaster causes, rather than for the particular disaster itself. “It doesn’t make any difference if your office burns down, if the earthquake flattens it, or if the hurricane blows it away,” he says. “You don’t have access to the office.”

This approach, says Mr. Patterson, allows charities to focus on recovery rather than on creating a laundry list of possible emergencies. He says the first step in disaster planning is to examine the charity’s mission and identify the critical functions that have to be restored immediately after a catastrophe.

Unexpected Benefits

Charity leaders participating in the program say that the shift from thinking about particular disasters to their organizations’ most important functions made recovery planning less daunting — and some have found side benefits to their preparations.

“There are more possible disasters than the human mind can contemplate,” says Peggy McGuire, executive director of Ronald McDonald House of San Francisco, an organization that provides housing for the families of seriously ill children who come to the city for medical treatment. “When you start from that perspective, the immediate human response is to just shut down.”

Much of the work the Ronald McDonald House has done so far has been to document the steps involved in getting its key operations — such as caring for guests, processing donations, and paying bills — running, and to cross train employees so they know how to handle each task. Having all that information written down and in one place will make the organization’s response to an emergency less dependent on the knowledge of individual staff members, says Ms. McGuire. She says that in a small organization with only five employees, staff members need to be able to cover one another’s responsibilities in the event that not everyone can make it to the office.

Documenting important procedures has had the added benefit of helping the Ronald McDonald House find ways to improve its operations. For example, when the group’s business manager began to write down the banks that would need to be contacted in an emergency, it quickly became clear that the charity’s banking structure was more complicated than it needed to be. The group is currently talking with several banks and getting bids and proposals so that it can consolidate all of its banking at one financial institution, which will simplify the business manager’s job and free him up to tackle more complicated projects.

Filling Out Forms

At Arc Hennepin-Carver, a charity in Minneapolis that provides services to people with developmental disabilities, Karen Sebesta, director of administration, created what she calls an emergency replacement plan, a series of forms that each top manager completes in order to give his or her co-workers the information they need to step in and fill their roles in the event of a crisis.

One form asks managers to list the name, phone number, e-mail and mailing address, and area of expertise of all of their important contacts. Ms. Sebesta’s list, for example, includes the lawyers that she consults for human-resources advice and the agents who handle the charity’s insurance policies. Managers use other forms to list their most important job responsibilities, report deadlines they have to meet each year, committees on which they serve, and the location of computer passwords, office keys, and critical files.

While Ms. Sebesta developed the forms as part of the organization’s disaster-planning efforts, they have already come in handy when staff members have been unreachable while traveling.

Members of the management team have been planning what their departments need to do in the first three weeks of a large-scale emergency. In October, they will gather at the site the group has designated as its first backup location — one of the charity’s three thrift stores — for a dry run. Faced with the scenario that the group’s main office has been destroyed, the managers will talk through the steps they would take to carry out key services.

A Trial Run

Ms. Sebesta hopes that the exercise will point out any areas that the group might have missed as it drafted its plan. “If something does happen, you’re going to be caught up in some level of emotion and anxiety, just natural reactions because of the crisis,” says Ms. Sebesta. “So to test it at a time when you’re calm and you can think is critical.”

The blackout that brought New York and other parts of the country to a standstill last month gave the East Side Community Emergency Preparedness Project — the coalition of organizations in Manhattan that serve the elderly — an unexpected opportunity to test its emergency plans.

After the power went out, the organizations worried whether their clients had enough water to endure the extreme heat and if they had food, batteries, and other emergency supplies. Communication was difficult, since some cell phones did not work, and neither did telephones that were part of sophisticated systems.

Using printouts of the information in the joint database of their most vulnerable clients, charity employees and volunteers divided up the names and contacted all of the people in the database, either by telephone or in person. Employees of some groups in the coalition were only able to place calls once they had put a conventional phone into their fax line.

Thanks to the database, the charity representatives had extensive data about each client, including home addresses, phone numbers, doctors, emergency contacts, the services they usually receive, information about the buildings in which they live, and more. Clients — who were included only if they gave permission — had already been assigned a code of red, yellow, or green, depending on their level of need, so that charity workers knew which people to contact first.

The charities also checked in on frail clients who had not given permission for their information to be shared but were listed on the groups’ internal emergency lists.

The real-life test provided by the power failure showed the organizations areas that could be improved. For example, they learned that the people making the calls needed more guidance on what questions to ask.

When elderly people were asked “Do you need bottled water?” or “Do you need food?,” the answer was almost always “Yes,” because people were worried they would run out of supplies, says Stephanie A. Raneri, executive director of the Tuttle Fund, a foundation that is part of the coalition.

As a result, charity workers ended up delivering supplies — in some cases up many flights of stairs — that weren’t necessary. To better identify who needs assistance, the coalition now plans to write a script for callers to use during future crises, with more-precise questions such as “Do you have bottled water in the apartment?”

The communication problems posed by the blackout have also led the coalition to consider buying two-way radios.

But all in all, the organizations were pleased with the way their emergency plan held up under fire.

“We are better together,” says Ms. Raneri. “The whole is stronger than the sum of the parts.”