Lessons in disaster recovery

Rebuilding a community after a devastating natural disaster takes time, energy and commitment. This is nothing new to Chris Henderson, an education officer for Social Innovation, an organization that offers creative and collaborative youth-focused solutions to social and environmental challenges. He is also currently lead facilitator for Looking Beyond Disaster: UNESCO Youth Forum.

On January 14, Henderson was at Concordia to deliver a workshop on how communities can redevelop their social and physical environments after a major disaster.Following the workshop, organized by the Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies, Concordia NOW spoke with Henderson about his work.

This week we feature part one of the conversation. Next week, Henderson describes what he sees as the crucial role young people can play in disaster relief projects.

Sustainability is important to you and your organization. What role does it play when responding to a disaster?

We see sustainability as an issue of social equality, community resilience and ecological conservation. We see disaster as an opportunity to create real and meaningful change. This might mean that indigenous and minority communities are better represented in the physical landscape of the new city.

It might mean that people have multiple alternatives for emission free transport. It might mean that small businesses can be built around developing small-scale, energy-generation alternatives for houses and communities. Or, it might mean that the structure and functionality of economic enterprises are more resilient to future disaster through the formation of co-operatives.

How can people best contribute to responding to a natural disaster?  Why aren’t donations of food, clothing and basic goods welcome?

This is often due to the unmanageable and random accumulation of goods that might become more of a burden on the organization rather than a benefit. Money, sadly, is often the best way to contribute as the organization then has the power to target those funds directly towards priority areas of need.

I would be very reluctant to support organizations going into a country for the first time, especially organizations that are formed as a specific response to a certain disaster. These organizations are rarely effective and generally have a negative impact on the effectiveness of more established and experienced organizations.

Haiti was a perfect example of this. Port-au-Prince became known as NGO-Ville, as throngs of inexperienced but well-meaning aid workers came in thinking they could offer meaningful assistance. In reality, they became a burden on an already stretched infrastructure. And what's more, they often applied their "best-practices" in culturally and professionally inappropriate ways.

Do you feel that governments do enough to mitigate the resulting damages from natural disasters? For example, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, the failure to reinforce the levee system resulted in flood damage after the hurricane while Japan was well prepared for earthquakes, it was not prepared for the unexpected tsunami.

Japan and New Zealand were incredibly well prepared, yet beyond the success of the government, the success really came from the resilience and preparedness of their populations. In these contexts, the social inequalities pre-existing the disasters were not as pronounced as what existed in New Orleans. Therefore I think there was a lot more cohesion between different sectors of society in the relief effort.

I do think, however, that governments overlook the importance of supporting the development of more socially and economically equitable communities as a means of disaster impact mitigation. New Zealand's response has been very participatory and community-inclusive. Japan has also relied on collaboration between government authorities and the existing social strengths in respective communities.

New Orleans, however, was a very top-down, government-controlled response that failed to accommodate the diverse needs of an economically and culturally stratified city.

Related link:
•  Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies