NLIHC Hosts Disaster Research Consortium and Launches New Disaster State and Territory Network

NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery, Research, and Resilience (DHR) team and Research team hosted a joint event on May 12-15 in Washington, DC that brought together over 50 researchers, organizers, and advocates working in disaster-impacted communities to collaborate, learn, and craft solutions. This event continues to build on the ongoing work of the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition, a group of over 900 local, state, and national organizations working to ensure that all disaster survivors receive the assistance they need to fully recover.  

The event began with a Disaster Housing Research Consortium meeting, a long-running group of disaster researchers and community-based organizations looking at the impacts of disasters on housing and the outcomes of disaster assistance programs. Last year, NLIHC sponsored a series of seed grants for participants of the group seeking to conduct non-extractive, community-driven, research in disaster-impacted communities across the country. The meeting of the Consortium featured presentations by seed grantees from Louisiana, Texas, California, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Alabama discussing early findings from their efforts as well as the challenges and solutions they’ve found in working in a community-driven model.  

The Consortium meeting also featured a collaborative activity for drafting policy briefs for research papers, and presentations from the Bill Anderson Fund, the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, Angela Frederick (author of the recently published book “Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster”) the Federation of American Scientists, and the Policy Development and Research Office of HUD.  

After the Consortium meeting, the event continued with a reformulated set of partners and friends from states and territories across the country. This event marked the launch of a new network of state and territory-wide disaster response and recovery coalitions to be convened by NLIHC. Members of the new state and territory network will work to bring together community-based organizations, government stakeholders, and other non-profit partners to educate state- and territory-level policymakers on disaster response and recovery topics in their respective areas. As FEMA continues to undergo dramatic transformations, state and territory-level assistance will become even more important to disaster survivors, requiring more concerted work at that level.  

The event featured collaborative discussions around needs, capacity, network and coalition formation, and Just Recovery principles, as presented by network members like the North Carolina Inclusive Disaster Recovery Network, Texas Housers, FURIA, Inc. from Puerto Rico, the Louisiana Just Recovery Network, and NLIHC staff. Members left with a commitment from NLIHC for additional capacity and expertise in further forming their state and territory-wide coalitions, and an agreement to meet later this year to further build network programming, roles, and connections.  

NLIHC’s DHR team continues to advocate for reforms to our country’s broken disaster recovery system, providing technical assistance to community-based organizations in disaster-impacted areas, and facilitating collaboration and information sharing between disaster-impacted and at-risk communities across the country.