Written by: TFVstaff • July 28, 2020• Hurricane Season

78 Hurricane Florence impacted families home thanks to innovative model

SBP, a national disaster resilience and recovery nonprofit, marks a milestone in Hurricane Florence recovery with the completion of an innovative resource sharing program with eight local recovery organizations. Collectively, the organizations rebuilt 78 homes in eight months through a $1.8 million grant from the American Red Cross. The Red Cross grant enabled SBP to provide funding to local partners for rebuilding, training and capacity-building allowing them to serve more clients collectively than any one organization could have independently.

“When more rebuilding organizations operate at peak capacity and efficiency, more homes can be rebuilt sooner and over a larger geographic area, sparing disaster-impacted people the suffering of a prolonged recovery,” said Zack Rosenburg, Co-founder and CEO of SBP. “Now more than ever, we need to make sure our most vulnerable populations have a safe and secure home to shelter in. It’s not about how many homes SBP can rebuild; it’s how we can facilitate the greatest number of families to return home.”

“The partnership with SBP has enabled Fayetteville Area Habitat for Humanity to assist twice as many clients’ families, and increase our outreach and impact significantly,” said Tracy Coffin, Project Manager for Fayetteville Habitat for Humanity. “By working together with SBP to achieve a common goal of helping people return to a safe, secure home, we were able to help more families, in a shorter period of time.”

This is not the first time SBP has worked through local organizations to shrink the time between disaster and recovery. Following Hurricane Harvey, SBP partnered with the Greater Houston Community Foundation to develop Harvey Home Connect, a centralized application and coordination system that connects eligible homeowners with vetted nonprofit organizations for rebuilding services. The common management system eliminates the need to file multiple assistance applications and increases efficiency in the recovery process for both nonprofits and clients. SBP has used similar tools following other disasters, and has the capabilities to create and customize a central application tool to expedite recovery in disaster-impacted communities in the future.

In addition to streamlining caseloads in Houston, SBP placed 60 AmeriCorps members with eleven local organizations and injected rebuild funding directly into the community through a grant from the Justin J. Watt Foundation. Through two rounds of grants, starting in May 2018, SBP has rebuilt more than 230 homes in the Houston area and anticipates completing 10 more homes by the end of the year working through seven local organizations. Through a combination of AmeriCorps members, training and funding, SBP will exceed its rebuild goal by more than 30 homes.

“We invest more than grant money into our partners,” said Rosenburg. “We share, through hands-on technical support and guidance, our efficient rebuilding model developed through years of collaboration and partnership with Toyota. These efforts increase capacity across the non-profit rebuilding industry, thereby expeditiously serving a greater number of impacted homeowners.”

In the aftermath of a disaster, SBP collaborates with rebuilding organizations and nonprofits, including community foundations and local/regional nonprofit and non-government organization training partners, to utilize SBP’s innovative, proven-effective rebuilding model. This raises the collective capacity to serve disaster-impacted communities quickly, efficiently, and at high standards so that a greater number of residents have a shorter recovery time. To learn more about SBP, support or volunteer, visit www.sbpusa.org.

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