How Hurricane Sandy Helped Nonprofits Prepare for Covid

On the night of October 29, 2012, Staten Island was hit by a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy that peaked at 14 feet, sending water as far as a mile inland.

David Sorkin, then the CEO of the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island, couldn’t get into his offices for two days. Power was out. Homes flooded or were ripped from their foundations. Cars and boats littered streets where first responders searched for victims.

As soon as they could, Sorkin’s staff began calling its members. The reports were grim. “People had basements full of water, no food, no lights. They were cold and desperate. Their mattresses were soaked, their clothes all gone,” he says. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to do something.’”

He put interns to work cooking food. Inside an apartment building, Sorkin knocked on a door to deliver meals to a needy family by flashlight. The door opened. Then another and another. It wasn’t just his group’s members who were hungry. No one had food. Sorkin had to decide whom to feed.

He called the executive director of the UJA Federation of New York, who quickly wired $36,000 to the group so it could pay staff, and the city loosened restrictions on a grant so the group could get food to every hungry person it encountered. That was the first emergency donation in what would eventually total $4 million for Sorkin’s hurricane relief efforts.

“This idea of the speed of trust really comes into play,” says Betsy Dubovsky, executive director of the Staten Island Foundation, which was able to quickly move money to Sorkin’s group and other grantees. “You don’t have to spend a lot of time on due diligence when you’ve already made grants to organizations and understand their work.”

That quick infusion of money allowed the group to retrain some existing staff and hire new people as case managers — 40 in all — to assess the needs of people impacted by the hurricane and connect them with services. Some members struggled with mental-health challenges in the wake of the storm, so the group provided art and dance therapy for children. Sorkin still marvels at how quickly his group transformed itself under deeply trying circumstances.

“We were able to take those little microcosms of social service that we did and expand very quickly because of our talented, enthusiastic staff who were motivated to help others,” he says.

The hurricane happened eight years ago. But for the past eight months, nonprofits and foundations in New York have been drawing on the lessons of Sandy as they fight Covid-19 and seek to help people reeling from the economic downturn.

One of the most important things they learned: Small, community-based organizations like the Jewish Community Center were remarkably effective in responding to Sandy. They were often the first to enter flooded buildings and aid survivors. In many cases, nonprofits communicated needs to government officials and augmented their work. It was often these small, scrappy groups — not big, national organizations like the American Red Cross — that supplied much-needed food and supplies and helped people clean up damaged homes. The Red Cross received more than half of all Sandy donations but faced criticism from local nonprofit leaders and politicians for its late response and lack of local knowledge.

JCC of Staten Island

Community nonprofits were so central to the recovery effort that one study found that areas with strong nonprofits fared better in the rebuilding than communities that lacked a charity infrastructure.

“We learned during Sandy that the local response was the most effective. From the city administration to the boroughs to the community organizations to the mutual aid, as each one got closer to the ground, their response was better and more relevant,” says Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president for programs at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and a regular columnist for the Chronicle. During Sandy, she served on the board — and answered the phones — for a community group that responded to Sandy. “We see that now, too, in terms of taking care of individual citizens. What mutual-aid networks are doing is more useful than what the mayor is doing.”

Sandy also pushed grant makers to disburse money quickly to grantees and, in the best cases, streamline grant processes. Many nonprofits and grant makers saw up-close how the storm devastated poor communities of color and exacerbated existing racial inequities, forcing a shift toward racial justice. With that lesson in mind, during the Covid crisis, nonprofits have pushed the city to provide rent relief for undocumented immigrants, because they aren’t eligible for federal aid.

Sandy changed the Jewish Community Center, Sorkin says. The group became better prepared for disaster, which made it nimbler and more effective when the coronavirus pandemic overwhelmed New York this spring.

The group had disaster plans that helped it start staff working from home quickly and about a month later helped it determine which of its 1,000 staff members were essential and whom it should furlough or lay off. It had already detailed how the board would function remotely. The Jewish Community Center even had plans for how to close its buildings so they would not be damaged while vacant.

Just as it did when Sandy struck, the group’s staff reached out to members to learn what they needed in the early days of the Covid crisis. Initially, it provided food to members in need and posted basic public-health information and referrals for other services on its website. Over time, needs changed. Now, the center provides child care for about 500 children of essential workers. And because mental health was such a concern after Sandy, the group is starting to think about how it can help its members with that, too.

“We were able to maintain the mission, the structure of the organization and the continuity of both our volunteers and our staff,” Sorkin says. “We benefited tremendously from the lessons learned during Sandy.”

Lessons of 9/11

As the storm surge from Sandy flooded lower Manhattan that October night, 8.1 million people lost power across the New York metro area. The grant maker Robin Hood, with offices in downtown Manhattan, was also in the dark. The group got access to a conference room in another office with power and quickly began working.

John-Francis Bourke

It was part of a massive philanthropic relief effort. Sandy affected the entire East Coast, killing 117 people in the United States and causing $75 billion in damage. Charitable groups raised more than $658 million to help people and communities in New York recover. Foundations and corporations gave about $380 million for recovery in the region.

Robin Hood staff began by reaching out to its grantees to learn about needs in the neighborhoods they serve. It was a lesson — one of many — gleaned from the group’s experience after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and one that it’s relying on today in its response to the Covid crisis.

In 2001, the group’s staff quickly queried grantees about their needs. Then it distributed emergency funds to those groups — many of which were providing food or cash to people. The group set up a relief fund, and six of its board members met for at least two hours a week to review proposals. It made grants every week for nine months.

“We were in an emergency, and business as usual wouldn’t work,” says Emary Aronson, chief knowledge officer and senior adviser to the CEO at Robin Hood. “We need to really be specialized and deeply engaged in this.”

After Sandy hit, Robin Hood reactivated its 9/11 relief fund so it could accept donations earmarked for storm relief. By that Friday, it had already provided money to some of its grantees to buy food. The group raised about $50 million — of the $80 million it would eventually distribute — from a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden just six weeks after the storm.

Sandy affected many people who didn’t necessarily think to turn to nonprofits for help, Aronson says. So in addition to the nonprofits it usually funded, the group worked with local religious institutions to distribute cash to people hurt by the storm. It was a way to let people decide what their greatest needs were, whether it was a mattress, sheetrock, or washers and dryers.

Today, the Covid crisis has produced even more varied needs so the group is taking a page from its Sandy playbook and is again distributing cash to some individuals. It has been focusing on households with a wage earner who is hospitalized. This time people are spending their money on food, rent, and medicine.

“This is about agency. This is about respecting people,” Aronson says. “We are saying you are making what are the best decisions for you.”

More Nimble Than Government

While the federal government was quick to pass stimulus packages at the beginning of the pandemic, Sandy survivors had to wait for federal assistance. Republicans in Congress held up the Sandy relief package for more than two months over concerns it was too expensive and a desire to offset the relief funds with spending cuts in other areas.

So many groups were waiting for government aid that the New York Community Trust created a fund together with the city to provide loans to groups to rebuild their offices while waiting for federal relief.

As the trust’s staff met with grantees, they found that weeks after the hurricane, people were still suffering. “We were seeing children in November, in December wearing snowsuits indoors,” says Pat Swann, a senior program officer at the trust. “We had the ability to be a little bit more nimble and therefore a little faster. We weren’t doing what government was doing. We were filling the gap until government came.”

Many grant makers pushed out small sums of money very quickly to groups and even individuals, something that can avert more complex and costly problems later on, says Mark Rossier, who was director of grants at the New York Foundation for the Arts when Sandy hit and is now a consultant to the foundation. After Sandy, he says, it was much easier to stop people from becoming homeless than to help them once they’d lost everything, he says.

To do that, the New York Foundation for the Arts set up a fund that awarded grants of up to $5,000 to individual artists. The application was streamlined and documentation requirements were relaxed because many people had lost computers and paperwork in the storm. Nearly 90 percent of applicants received grants.

Robin Hood

“The goal was to help people with their immediate needs,” he says. “It was the notion that for $5,000, they can get in a hotel, they can get food, they can travel somewhere to get to a place where they’re safe.” The foundation is using a similar approach during the pandemic. At the end of April, it announced that it was working with several other foundations to provide grants of $2,000 apiece to working artists affected by Covid-19 from a $1.25 million fund.

Philanthropy New York, a regional association of 300 grant makers, urged its members to act with speed and flexibility.

The group learned the value of putting money in the hands of community organizations in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and wanted its members to do the same after Sandy, says Ronna Brown, president of Philanthropy New York.

“When funders are working with grantees they know, they could dispense with some of the protocols that were their norm and just get the money into the hands of people who needed it.”

The group set up regular calls for foundations, government officials, and nonprofits — as many as 120 people at a time. The goal was to help people learn from one another, understand where resources were going, and figure out where the gaps were and what communities needed immediate assistance.

Grant makers used the calls to coordinate their response and decide what money needed to go out quickly. Philanthropy New York is hosting similar meetings now to discuss Covid relief. And because of what they learned during Sandy, these foundations have been quick to share information, coordinate their responses, and provide general operating support.

The Brooklyn Community Foundation was even quicker to disburse funds during this crisis than it was after Sandy. Over 16 weeks, the foundation issued 420 grants totaling $3.3 million. It asked only two questions: Is your organization responding to the Covid crisis? And how does your group’s work address racial equity? Now the organization is pausing its grant making to listen to its grantees to learn more about their needs, but it is ready to award more grants if necessary.

That is among the biggest concerns for many grant makers — uncertainty about the unique nature of the Covid crisis. It doesn’t follow a known trajectory like a natural disaster. No one knows how long it will last, what the recovery will look like, or how community needs may grow and change — or how long foundations can continue their emergency funding.

Quick Infusions

The fast, no-strings-attached funding from foundations and individuals helped groups provide needed services to their communities at a time when organizations were overwhelmed.

The Red Hook Initiative, a nonprofit focused on education and employment for young people in that Brooklyn neighborhood, became a hub for the recovery effort from the start. About 10,000 people live in public housing in the waterfront neighborhood, which is surrounded by well-off areas. The low-lying neighborhood was flooded by 10 feet of water, causing power outages and vast damage to buildings. But, miraculously, the group’s office remained dry and had power. Word got out, and people started to gather there — as many as 1,000 a day — to charge their phones, to connect with others, to help by cooking and distributing meals. Food, supplies, and staff to manage volunteers and donations all cost money.

“Our funders who knew us were instantly like, ‘We’re sending you more money.’ They didn’t even ask what we needed,” says Jill Eisenhard, the group’s executive director. The Red Hook Initiative had built relationships with several foundations over its first decade, and after Sandy, those grant makers told others about the organization. Soon the group was getting unsolicited funds from foundations and individuals it had never worked with. Contributions to the group jumped from $736,000 in 2011 to $2.5 million in 2012 and $2.7 million in 2013.

That funding helped it pay for staff members to assess needs in the nearby public-housing buildings and to buy and prepare food and deliver meals, clothes, and other essentials to those affected by the storm. New York University ran a medical clinic out of the organization’s offices, and the city placed several of its social workers with the group to help connect people to needed services. A small Wi-Fi network that one of the young people in a Red Hook Initiative program built was expanded with help from the federal government and used by thousands after the storm.

Across the East River, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, elderly New Yorkers were trapped in high-rise buildings without running water or elevators due to power outages that lasted as long as two weeks. Some foundations quickly gave checks for $5,000 and $10,000 to Good Old Lower East Side, an organization that has fought for tenants’ rights in the neighborhood for 40 years. The grant makers asking only that it report back when it had time. This kind of funding was vitally important when staff and volunteers were working around the clock, says Damaris Reyes, the group’s executive director. The organization received about $160,000 more the year Sandy struck than it had the year before.

Volunteers and staff collected and distributed batteries, candles, baby food, diapers, wipes, and other essentials. At night, volunteers would go out on bicycles to see which buildings had no lights on. High-rises without power had no elevators and, more important, no water.

But as helpful as the grants were, the cumbersome application and reporting processes for some grants got in the way of providing services. Reyes remembers sitting in a corner of her office, which was filled with volunteers, trying to write updates and proposals for foundations that kept their time-consuming grant-making practices in place.

“I’m super appreciative that anybody reached out at all and wanted to help,” she says. “But in that moment, I felt like I needed to be working with these volunteers. I needed to be out there. And here I was doing this.”

Connective Tissue

Community groups like the Good Old Lower East Side, the Red Hook Initiative, and others were so central to helping people recover from Sandy that the more of these groups a community had and the better they worked together, the better that community fared, says Cecilia Clarke, CEO of the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

That is not surprising, says Mindy Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School. Nonprofits and community groups of all sorts are the connective tissue of a community. They are connected to people, to each other, and to local government.

“In a very fractured society, that becomes an irreplaceable asset because to really do recovery, you’ve got to mobilize all the little pieces of the society,” she says. “The only way to do that is by organizational connection.”

In Brooklyn, the Red Hook Initiative continued to work on storm-related issues for years. Rather than push for the cash-strapped New York City public housing agency to remediate Sandy-related mold, the group called in researchers who helped prove that the mold was from Hurricane Sandy. That meant that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with its huge budget and resources designed to address this type of issue, would pay to fix the problem. The group is still working on getting some remaining mold cases remediated eight years after the storm.

Without organized advocacy, other neighborhoods missed out. In Coney Island, for example, some playgrounds were not repaired a year and a half after Sandy even though many others had been repaired in different neighborhoods, Clarke says. Groups in other areas pressed the city government to make sure their neighborhoods’ needs were met.

Race also played a role. “One of the lessons learned out of Superstorm Sandy was how important it is to look at racial equity in the face of disaster and also recovery, especially the long-term recovery,” Clarke says.

One study examined disparities between the Rockaways in Queens and the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

While the neighborhoods have similar poverty rates and levels of racial diversity — and both have tens of thousands of units of public housing — there are some important differences. The Rockaways is a coastal community on a long strip of land on the very eastern edge of New York City. It is divided racially and economically between the wealthier, more white west side and the poorer, more Black and Latino east side. And in part because of this division, it lacks a collaborative network of nonprofits. The Lower East Side in Manhattan is rapidly gentrifying, is close to jobs and amenities, and has a decades-long history of nonprofits, including Reyes’s group, that worked well with each other.

In part because unemployment and poverty were high in the Rockaways before Sandy and were slow to improve after the storm, public housing residents and the nonprofits that serve them focused on short-term economic issues to the exclusion of long-term rebuilding and resiliency, says the report’s lead author, Leigh Graham, senior advisor at the Cities Challenge at Ariadne Labs. They were not able to collaborate with other like-minded groups to advocate for their future. “They were isolated, marginalized, and excluded from the public recovery process,” she says.

Groups on the Lower East Side were able to address immediate storm recovery needs and at the same time work together to push for changes in policy and infrastructure in the years after the storm. They created their own long-term recovery group, LESReady, which brought together 40 organizations to plan for future disasters. They became advocates for the neighborhood pushing for a say in how vast government funds were spent.

As a result of those differences, the study found that the Lower East Side benefited more from policies and government actions designed to promote resilience to future storms than the Rockaways.

But grant makers can help groups in communities like the Rockaways work better together and reap the benefits that can follow. Sometimes it takes only a little money to have big effects, says Fullilove. “Strengthening and catalyzing interorganizational cooperation is not very expensive,” she says. “But it’s very powerful because it lifts that collective effort.”

Deep Inequities Remain

During Sandy, communities with large numbers of people of color and poor people were some of the hardest hit. Many of the low-lying waterfront neighborhoods where they lived flooded and then suffered from long delays in getting heat and power restored and struggled with mold for years.

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“What Sandy revealed was that communities of color are hardest hit in any kind of crisis because of structural racism,” says Clarke, of the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

It is no accident. Robert Moses, the legendary city planner who remade New York in the mid-20^th century, pushed poorer communities of color to the city’s edges. Many large public-housing complexes were located along waterfront neighborhoods in the Lower East Side, Red Hook in Brooklyn, and the city’s far fringes in Coney Island and Rockaway. “We then deprived them of anything that promotes a good quality of life,” Cowan says. “All of these things are related to each other.”

Those inequities have again been cruelly apparent in the Covid crisis. According to a New York Times analysis, race and income were the largest factors determining who lived and who died from the pandemic.

Black and Latino people are about three times as likely to be infected with Covid-19 as white people and twice as likely to die from it. The city’s poor neighborhoods with more people of color had the highest death rates. And many of them were also among the hardest hit by Sandy. Of the 15 neighborhoods with the highest rates of death from the coronavirus, five were also devastated by Sandy.

People who are the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burden, whether it’s a hurricane or a global pandemic, says Diane Arneth, executive director of Community Health Action of Staten Island.

“We never go to the root of the problem,” she says. “We just keep putting Band-Aids on everything, and then when a disaster happens, we have to put a big Band-Aid on it. Then the disaster goes away. And we’re back to income inequality and incredible poverty in the richest nation in the world.”

The Brooklyn Community Foundation is doing its part to try to change that.

The clear inequities revealed by Sandy led the foundation in 2014 to re-examine its work through a process in which 1,000 residents and local leaders shared their concerns and insights about their communities. It released a report called Brooklyn Insights. Racial justice was one of the five areas of focus that emerged from that process, and it led the foundation to concentrate much of its work on that.

Community Health Action of Staten Island

Because of what it learned during Sandy and that ensuing process, the foundation’s Covid grant making has been different. Three-quarters of its grants have gone to groups led by people of color. It is focusing its pandemic relief on the 10 neighborhoods that have been hardest hit, which are all largely communities of color. And it disbursed unsolicited grants using criteria that resulted in groups led by people of color receiving more funds than larger groups led by whites.

“Because of what Sandy revealed about crisis exacerbating the impact on Black and brown communities, it allowed us to get that insight and rethink a vision and strategy for the foundation, which in turn then allowed us to say, ‘OK, we’re going to approach Covid with this intention, to be pre-emptive because we need to look at the root causes,’” Clarke says. “It’s not just that Sandy exacerbated it, but it revealed it. We always have to look at that: Why are Black and brown communities worse off?”

Advocacy Is Critical

The Covid pandemic is different from Sandy. The economy has suffered staggering losses all across the country. It’s uncertain whether there will be more government aid and what it would entail. And no one knows when the pandemic will end, how needs will change, or when they will stop escalating.

For instance, Community Health Action of Staten Island runs a food pantry that usually gives out meals to 100 families in a four-hour session but has been consistently serving 350 families per session during the pandemic. From March to June it served more than 18,000 households. “It’s frightening, and it’s not stopping,” Arneth says.

The confluence of racial inequity and overwhelming demand is another reason advocacy needs to be part of the response to Covid, Clarke says.

“Philanthropy can shine a light on the issues and the populations the government is clearly not thinking about,” she says. “To get the government’s attention, you’ve got to put as much stuff in front of them as possible. That’s activism and advocacy. And that’s how philanthropy can be useful.”

It’s a key lesson from Sandy that both nonprofits and foundations are applying now. Grant makers understand they need to support groups as they try to get government money for their communities and identify critical gaps. Nonprofits are pushing for what they need to help their communities move forward during the crisis.

“From Sandy, I learned that I had to be more aggressive in going out there and asking for what it is that my community needs,” says Reyes of the Good Old Lower East Side. “There’s no shame in asking for what you need for your community. I pick up the phone, and I start calling folks.”