As hurricanes and other natural disasters become increasingly common, they often coincide with public health crises and economic downturns. That overlap exacerbates the effects that these disasters have on millions of Americans. The challenge may be most acute in the American rural South, which is susceptible to weather-related disasters and where many people live in locations not supported by urban resources. For those communities, it can be difficult to overcome a single tropical storm, let alone additional systemic or crisis-driven challenges.

Recognizing the scope of those challenges, JFF has prepared this Disaster Resilience Toolkit to offer local leaders a plan of action for not only putting people back to work and restoring economic activity in the wake of a disaster, but also building long-term resilience to disasters. Despite our targeted focus on the Southern United States, we believe that many of the recommendations in the toolkit are applicable to communities across the country.

If we’ve learned anything during the many months during which our lives have been deeply altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that any type of disaster leads to a jobs crisis. Frontline workers are the first to lose work when a disaster strikes, but they are also essential to regional recovery. Many community leaders have plans in place for accessing state and federal resources when responding to disasters, but we found that far fewer are prepared to provide social services in such situations. To support the workforce in an equitable way during a disaster recovery effort, local leaders must tap into wraparound supports from a broader ecosystem to help people stabilize their lives and return to work.

This toolkit provides community leaders with a step-by-step guide to activating local and far-reaching networks to fulfill their residents’ immediate post-disaster needs and build longer-term strategies to address societal gaps that push economic opportunities out of reach of many people—and leave them vulnerable to disaster.

3 Phases of Disaster Recovery and Resilience

We recommend a three-phase approach to preparing for disasters and building long-term disaster resilience. Here is an overview of the work local leaders can do during each phase—prepare, stabilize, and recover—to engage their local and extended ecosystems and ensure that necessary workforce supports are in place.

This work was generously funded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies.