Across the United States and around the world, communities are preparing for disasters that have not yet occurred. Emergency response teams are reviewing and refining their playbooks. Public works crews are maintaining levees before flood season. City councils are enforcing new building codes before hurricane season. Community organizations are mapping at-risk households, training volunteers, and planning how to keep people housed, fed, and connected well before the cameras arrive, demonstrating the importance of funding the urgent yet invisible work of disaster preparedness.

But for many of us, these efforts are invisible. Preparedness rarely comes with dramatic images or urgent appeals. When it works, at best nothing is seen to happen, or at the very least, community rebuilding and recovery happens quicker.

This invisibility comes at a staggering cost, including tens of billions in annual losses in the U.S. alone, as well as unquantifiable and profound suffering. But it is one that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to help mitigate.

Funding the Urgent Work of Disaster Preparedness: The Disaster Before the Disaster

Over the past decades of working in humanitarian crises conditions, I’ve come to deeply believe that a disaster is not the storm or the wildfire itself. In 2022, I wrote in the Sarasota Herald Tribune: “A disaster is not the event or hazard itself; a disaster is when that event or hazard meets vulnerabilities.” Notably, it was published just a couple of weeks before Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida.

Hurricane Ian didn’t just damage homes. It exacerbated what was already broken. One year after the devastating storm, Sarasota Herald Tribune reported that families with flood insurance and homeowner’s insurance found themselves trapped in bureaucratic limbo for months, living in campers in their backyards while mold crept up their walls. They interviewed Lindsay Weishaar, a nurse in South Venice, who described her ordeal: “We have been living in crisis mode all the time.” Six months after the storm, her family was still not home — and more than $130,000 in debt.

Lindsay’s story represents the hundreds of other families across Sarasota County that fell through the cracks between FEMA and private insurance, between immediate relief and long-term recovery.

Read the full article about funding disaster preparedness by Patricia McIlreavy at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.