By Pat Kondas, American Red Cross of Colorado and Wyoming, Public Affairs
The increasing number of large disasters over the last several years has meant more people are being displaced for longer than the immediate aftermath of the disaster. To address this, the American Red Cross of Colorado and Wyoming Disaster Cycle Services hosted a summit May 23 – 25 in Loveland to consider how best to assist people in their long-term recovery.
The summit brought in subject matter experts from around the country as well as local responders and community partners to discuss how they can work together to help communities be better prepared for disasters and how communities can increase resiliency and build recovery capacity locally. A focus of the summit was in helping community partners consider the questions that should be asked before there’s a disaster in the community.
Gehrig Haberstock, Direct Services Manager and one of the organizers of the Summit, explained that much of what the Red Cross does is geared to immediate recovery – sheltering, feeding, and distributing emergency supplies. But for many people, recovery can take months or even years rather than days or weeks. Because of this, the Red Cross is adapting its mission to be able to assist people in their long term recovery.
As other groups have stepped up to provide more immediate assistance, the Red Cross has moved to take on a different role. Haberstock’s Volunteer Partner, Ron Hedrick, said, “One of our main roles is as facilitator, the convener of groups to make sure those community groups that are out there come together and start to talk about how they might structure their long-term recovery group and to be sure there is funding available for that.”
Funding is an issue that has changed over the years. According to Haberstock, “We budget for the response [to a disaster], and when we raise more funds than the response costs and those funds are earmarked for the response, we are allowed to channel the additional funds back into the impacted community.”
One way this is done is through the Bridge Assistance program that puts additional financial assistance into people’s hands three to six months after the initial incident for families that still have need. Red Cross can also give grants to community groups or organizations like food banks or community health and mental health services. In fact, the Summit was made possible through additional funds raised during the devastating 2020-21 wildfire seasons that included the Marshall, Cameron Peak, Mullen fires and others. This is one reason the Summit was held in Loveland, where shelters were active for three months during the Cameron Peak Fire response.
As Haberstock put it: “We are getting more into Long Term Recovery because we’re in a cycle. Disasters are not linear, where we go from preparedness to response to recovery. Everything we do in recovery helps us to prepare, which helps us to better respond.”
Red Cross priorities remain the same: prepare, respond and recover. But the Red Cross is moving in a new direction with Mission Adaptation. As growing disaster risk and repetitive impacts to populations move from acute to chronic, the Red Cross is looking into being able to do more to build resiliency in communities, which has a direct relationship to the long term recovery of a community and its return to normalcy. Or as Hedric put it, “We’re helping them to find some order in chaos and to take control of their life moving forward…to re-imagine their future” for both individuals and the community as a whole.