Resilience in a Perfect Storm…COVID-19 and Peak Hurricane Season

Community resiliency means many things. To LISC Jacksonville, a commitment to community resiliency requires a comprehensive approach that is relatively simple in focus yet highly broad and detailed in execution: help Northeast Florida residents and businesses stand strong against and quickly recover from adverse events. Collectively, it is an immensely overwhelming endeavor—itemize the myriad of potential adverse events our community might face, evaluate the level of risk and preparedness, and begin to implement resiliency priorities and action plans. Yet for John Sapora, LISC Jacksonville’s disaster recovery and resiliency manager, this is exactly what our community must continue to prioritize, especially for our most vulnerable and underserved neighborhoods.

“What’s unique about LISC Jacksonville’s role in community resiliency is not only helping our neighbors prepare for and recover from catastrophic events, but also working to transform the trauma of disaster into opportunities for greater neighborhood investment and more livable communities,” said Sapora. “We are able to learn and improve from past events from a natural disaster perspective, as well as a societal and human perspective. While we help communities recover and prepare the physical environment around us, we are also approaching each at-risk neighborhood comprehensively to provide social and economic opportunities to help people emerge from the trauma and achieve longer-term success.”

While the scope of resiliency is widespread, Jacksonville is currently facing two very timely, tangible examples. Globally, our society has experienced how public health and pandemic preparedness and response are essential components of community resiliency. The River City also faces another severe threat in the late summer and early fall months: peak hurricane season.

Hurricane Irma wrought severe havoc and damage on Jacksonville in 2017, after which LISC Jacksonville has played an important role in the recovery that continues to this day. LISC facilitated the creation and funding for the Northeast Florida Long Term Recovery Organization (NFLTRO) in late 2017, a network of 30 nonprofit, private sector, government and community-based organizations focused first on basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and financial assistance after Irma. Three years later, a remaining priority is repairing 100 homes of Jacksonville’s most vulnerable citizens who have been living in hazardous and unhealthy situations since Irma left town. Another strategic priority is to establish a permanent, year-round infrastructure of disaster preparation, recovery and mitigation practices to improve community-wide response, and then create a longer-term vision and action plan for more resilient and livable communities.

“The Hurricane Irma Home Repair Program is directly helping people who are most at-risk for the next big storm event, which is inevitable in Florida,” stated Sapora. “It also enabled us to develop a system that provided local contractors based in these low-income communities the opportunity to do the work, thus re-investing the revenue back into these impacted neighborhoods. Overall the system is working very well and achieving multiple resiliency goals while also being scalable or transferrable to other similar situations.”

Hurricane Irma home repairs in progress.

To date, the NFLTRO has raised $920,000 for the home repair program and helped 71 families in Duval and Nassau counties. Volunteer Florida recently awarded a $450,000 grant to continue home repairs, which will generate an additional $225,000 in local matching funds.

“While this work continues, we are looking ahead and have created the Duval Community Organizations Active in Disasters (COAD) coalition to address how we respond to future disasters,” added Sapora. “Our focus with Duval COAD has been to keep the community partners involved in disaster recovery engaged over the long term and work toward mutually identified goals to improve community resiliency. The creation of this group was well-timed because we had this framework in place as the COVID-19 pandemic reached our community.”

Since March 2020, the Duval COAD has been actively engaged in the community’s COVID-19 pandemic response. Sapora serves as the coalition’s chair, intricately involving LISC Jacksonville in community-wide efforts to mitigate the impact. Some of Sapora’s work includes convening more than 50 coalition agencies to address operating challenges, share unmet needs and identify available resources, in addition to aligning community health outreach teams with resources from nonprofits and other neighborhood and faith-based organizations. LISC is also actively involved in researching and pursuing disaster-related funding opportunities alongside government and other organizations. This summer, the COAD’s focus has shifted to integrating hurricane preparedness into the ongoing COVID-19 recovery activities.

“It really could be the perfect storm: dealing with the impacts of a major hurricane or flooding event while continuing to battle a public health crisis,” affirmed Sapora, who also serves on the education and community outreach subcommittee of the City of Jacksonville’s Special Committee on Resiliency. “We have learned from the ‘100-year storm’ experiences of Irma and we have the right people at the table from a public infrastructure, health and disaster response perspective to ensure that our community’s next response is swift and all-encompassing and leaves no neighborhood behind.”

Stay tuned next month for more about LISC Jacksonville’s commitment to community resiliency. In the interim, click here for more about LISC Jacksonville’s disaster relief work.