New toolkit gathers together strategies, tactics, and best practices to help community-based, state, and national organizations ensure a complete and equitable disaster housing recovery
Washington, D.C. – NLIHC released today Advancing Equity: Strategies, Tactics, and Best Practices for Disaster-Impacted Communities, a comprehensive toolkit for advocates and organizers in communities that have experienced or are likely to experience climate change-induced disasters. Alongside their other destructive consequences, disasters cause housing instability, homelessness, and permanent displacement and often exacerbate existing racial and social inequities. The new toolkit is designed to help advocates and organizers educate policymakers and the public about the systemic barriers to equitable and complete disaster housing recovery and the steps necessary for reforming our nation’s disaster housing recovery framework.
“Instead of reducing barriers, America’s disaster housing recovery framework reinforces racial, income, and accessibility inequities at each stage of response and recovery,” said NLIHC Disaster Housing Recovery Manager Noah Patton. “Moreover, despite the clear need, federal disaster recovery and rebuilding efforts frequently leave the lowest-income and most marginalized disaster survivors without the assistance necessary to recover and their communities less resilient to future disasters. This new toolkit gives advocates and organizers the resources they need to educate policymakers at all levels of government.”
The toolkit draws upon discussions held earlier this year at a national convening of the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC). Part of NLIHC’s ongoing Disaster Housing Recovery, Research, and Resilience (DHR) initiative, the DHRC comprises more than 900 national, state, and local organizations, including many working directly with disaster-impacted communities and with first-hand experience recovering after disasters. The coalition works to ensure that federal disaster recovery efforts reach the lowest-income and most marginalized survivors by providing recommendations about disaster recovery reforms and creating materials and programming to assist organizations working in disaster-stricken areas.
Hosted in Washington, D.C. in June 2024, the national convening brought together stakeholders from more than 60 member organizations to discuss strategies, tactics, and best practices for educating policymakers about how best to ensure equitable disaster housing recovery. In addition to seeking to help organizations in disaster-impacted communities respond to disasters more effectively, attendees worked to build a foundation for a more cohesive and cooperative approach to fixing America’s broken disaster recovery system.
The new toolkit, which was created with the support of the Walmart Foundation, compiles these strategies, tactics, and best practices into a single resource meant to help community-based, state, and national organizations leverage media engagement, existing law, organizing efforts, and research to support the reform of disaster housing recovery. Among the topics addressed by the toolkit are pre-disaster media strategies, Freedom of Information Act requests, community-based surveys, community tours, pass-through grants, and resilience hubs.
The 2024 convening built on the success of the last national DHRC convening, held in Houston, Texas, in 2019. The 2019 convening was attended by stakeholders from across the nation and focused reimagining a federal disaster housing response and recovery framework centered on the needs of the lowest-income and most marginalized disaster survivors and their communities. The convening inspired the publication of a two-part report, Fixing America’s Broken Disaster Housing Recovery System, which examined the barriers to a complete and equitable recovery for America’s lowest-income and most marginalized disaster survivors and identified specific policy reforms that were needed.
“In the years since the first national convening in 2019, advocates, organizations, and disaster survivors have deepened their collective knowledge of disaster inequities and impacts and strengthened the critical partnerships necessary to reform our nation’s disaster housing recovery system,” said NLIHC Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Field Organizing. “This new resource provides directly impacted communities with the most comprehensive set of tools available for creating policy change, based on emerging best practices and lessons learned from years of working together.”
Download the new toolkit here.
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