Will Hurricane Ida make the rich richer?

This time, emergency gas, food, and diaper money just isn’t going to cut it.

That said, the preponderance of mobile money services may be the only meaningful improvement in disaster support for vulnerable communities since Katrina landed in the same spot some 16 years ago. Curtis Brown, the emergency management coordinator for Virginia, told Congress last summer that an overwhelmingly white emergency community has contributed to decades of inequitable disaster responses.  “An overwhelming number of individuals designated as emergency managers are white males,” he told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “Diversity in emergency management will help to reverse the existing failure to enact equitable practices before, during and after disasters.” 

This 2019 NPR investigation supports his claim. “[W]hite Americans and those with more wealth often receive more federal dollars after a disaster than do minorities and those with less wealth,” they found. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. “Federal aid isn’t necessarily allocated to those who need it most; it’s allocated according to cost-benefit calculations meant to minimize taxpayer risk.”

Experts believe that good information can help. This 2017 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is a compilation of research and case studies on how disasters have impacted low-income communities in the U.S. In Greater Impact: How Disasters Affect People of Low Socioeconomic Status, the table of contents alone tell a terrible story: People in vulnerable communities often don’t hear or are unable to respond to evacuation messages. They may live in inadequate housing in low-lying areas, and are more likely to be more seriously hurt or sickened during a disaster. Afterward, they struggle to get the aid or support they are entitled to. It adds up to cycle of trauma that deepens their alienation and despair.

This type of research informs a relatively new tool used by social scientists called social vulnerability modeling, which takes relevant variables associated with the most vulnerable groups — people living in poverty, the elderly, families with young children, renters, people with disabilities, specific racial and ethnic groups, recent immigrants — and combines them to form maps and predictive indexes. Not only can those maps be used to prepare disaster responses, the information is helpful to environmental justice initiatives, and to study how these populations benefit — or don’t — from recovery programs like those offered by FEMA or HUD.

You can dig into how it works and why it matters here, and I hope you do, particularly if you’re in a position to influence disaster support initiatives at your organization. Right now, there’s little reason to believe that vulnerable communities displaced by Ida are going to fare any better than they did last time around. And we can’t CashApp our way out of this level of systemic inequity.

“Political leaders, policymakers and emergency managers can no longer turn a blind eye to the recurring disproportionate impact of disasters in vulnerable populations,” Brown told Congress. “The entire emergency management enterprise—federal, state, local, nonprofit and private—must drastically improve.”

Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
[email protected]

In brief, breaking news

A Greater Place to Work? UKG Inc., a $3 billion human resources software company, has acquired Great Place to Work Institute, Inc., for an undisclosed amount. GPTW is best known by this audience for its employee surveys and contribution to the iconic Coins2Day lists: 100 Best Companies to Work For, World’s Best Multinational Workplaces, and  Best Workplaces for Diversity. Little will change at first; there will be no associated layoffs, and the lists will live on. GPTW will continue as a standalone company within the UKG organization, led by their equally iconic CEO, Michael C. Bush. In a call with raceAhead, Bush hinted at a bright future. “We have the resources to dig deeper into the demographic experience of equity in the workplace,” he says, citing more data and analytics, and richer conversations with members of underrepresented groups. “We’re going to crack the code on what DEI really is.”

Bush paused to reflect on his early days as a young executive at Kaiser Permanente. “My mentor, Alva Wheatley, founded the Kaiser African American professional association in 1989, the first employee resource group at Kaiser, possibly in health care,” he said. He also befriended another up-and-coming executive, Bernard Tyson, who went on to become one of the most influential and equity-minded CEOs in health care. It was then that he first fully understood the potential — and obligation — of an organization to contribute to the growth of employees and impact the broader world. (Tyson, who died in 2019, was a key contributor to the story that launched the race beat at Coins2Day, Leading While Black, and had become a personal inspiration to me.) Bush went to business school and never looked back.

Bush says now is the time to ask the bigger questions about workplace diversity. Weak-tea bias mitigation training and underfunded diversity departments aren’t going to meet this moment. “There are some big myths about what DEI work is and how it functions,” he says. “We’re going to test all of it.” Equity of opportunity, equity of representation, equity of compensation and equity of wellbeing, are the broad benchmarks. “They’re easy to see, easy to measure, whether you’re there or not.”

On Point

On background

Moodboard

Shannon Stapleton—SS/VP/Reuters