To get started, I'm Twyla Carter, Chair of the Resilience Committee for the City of Houston, and I'd like to call this meeting to order.

We've got a couple of great presentations today.

First off, I'd like to acknowledge a lot of staff here this morning, bright, shiny faces.

First, from uh Vice Chair Councilmember uh Cayman's office.

We have staff.

We have staff from Councilmember uh Tiffany Thomas's office, Mario Castillo's office, uh, and Alejandro Salinas' office and Sally Alcorn.

Thank you all for being here.

Um today we've got two presentations.

First up will be uh Brooke Campbell, who is the director of community outreach and disaster recovery for the United Way for Greater Houston, and we have a couple of speakers uh signed up to offer comments or questions, and we'll get to those after both presentations.

So, Brooke, come on up and tell us what you've got.

I'm excited to hear your presentation, and it's a nice sunny day, so we don't have any disasters to worry about, but let's get prepared.

Thank you for being here, Brooke.

Hugh, do I need to?

Oh, y'all can hear me, okay.

Well, good morning, and thank you for um allowing us the opportunity to talk a little bit more about what we do.

I'll just start again with a quick introduction.

My name is Brooke Campbell.

I'm the director of community outreach and disaster recovery at United Way of Greater Houston, primarily responsible for the Greater Houston Disaster Alliance.

Um, and that's what we'll be talking about today.

So, in the interest and spirit of um reducing awareness gaps, my presentation today is really more about who we are, what we do, and some of the achievements we've made over the last few years, and then I'll close with just a few light calls to action, nothing serious, more collaborative in nature.

Um, so next slide, please.

At its core, the disaster alliance is a philanthropic partnership between the United Way of Greater Houston and the Greater Houston Community Foundation.

And it exists to accelerate disaster recovery and strengthen long-term disaster resilience throughout or through coordinated philanthropy and coordinated partnership.

Um the work would not that we do would not be possible without investments from our lead sponsors, NBridge and Philip66.

Um, together they committed one and a half million over three years, which we lovingly refer to as phase one, 2023 to 2026, which helped lay the foundation for the work that we do for a more permanent disaster philanthropy model uh that serves this region.

And so that investment supports uh post-disaster philanthropic work immediately after a disaster strikes, but also year-round infrastructure, uh building relationships year-round, and preparing processes and tablets and tools that increase our readiness, which is required for us to act um quickly after a disaster strikes quickly and effectively.

Next slide, please.

So I want to begin by uh first taking a brief look at the local landscape.

Um this reflects a reality that all of us know all too well.

We have experienced 28 federally declared disasters since 1980, that's in the last 45 years, and more than half of our residents live in a census tract with medium to high social vulnerability.

And that's significant because disasters compound their existing challenges related to income and housing stability, access to health-related resources like food and mental health services.

And then lastly, Harris County has the largest number of cedars for short, uh community disaster resilience zones that were designated by FEMA.

Those were announced in fall of 2023.

So it's um that combination of frequent disasters, concentrated vulnerability, um, which really reinforces why a coordinated and data-informed recovery and preparedness effort are just not optional for our community.

They they really are essential.

Next slide, please.

So there's a lot going on here.

It is unavoidably busy.

Uh the early years on this timeline represent very well-intentioned but sometimes fragmented efforts, um, specific to disaster philanthropy.

Orange dots are uh funds that were started by the United Way.

Blue dots were started by the Greater Houston Community Foundation.

The yellow dots represent joint funds.

We learned after a couple of decades.

Let's do this together.

And then the green dots represent the funds that were officially launched under the Greater Houston Disaster Alliance name and partnership.

So what this is really showing is a duplication of efforts.

For one disaster, you'll see that there were multiple funds launched.

That meant that donors who are donate had to decide between which fund to donate to.

Nonprofits often had to submit two or more grant applications to receive funds to do the same work.

And that duplication is one of the primary reasons why the disaster alliance was created in the first place to solve that inefficiency, not by replacing partners, but by truly aligning all of us together.

Next slide, please.

So this is our our journey toward partnership.

Formally launched in 2023, but the roots go way back to 2017 after Hurricane Harvey, which is 10-year anniversary next year.

Leaders from both of our organizations really began exploring a deeper collaborational effort to share data to talk about what it might look like to raise and distribute dollars together.

Those initial exploratory conversations really set the stage for a more combined response in 2020 when we all experienced the COVID-19 pandemic.

So at that time we partnered to assess community needs together to review that data as well as conduct a survey to assess our nonprofit sector's capacity to respond.

Our nonprofit staff and organizations are also affected by these disasters, and they may not be in a position to provide services that the community typically relies on them to provide.

So funds were actually granted back to the community within 24 days after that disaster.

We also then signed an MOU to committing to work together for future disasters, and just one more later, we all experienced winter storm year in 2021.

So we launched another joint fund, that time with support from the city of Houston and Harris County leadership, and we were able to distribute funds within 16 days to the community, which is a truly dramatic change in the time it typically takes, traditional granting institutions to get the dollars into the community where they're needed most.