NLIHC released 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. Advocates are encouraged to use the new toolkit to 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. Read the report.
The new 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.
Download the toolkit here.
Learn more about NLIHC’s Disaster Recovery, Research, and Resilience work here.