 Good evening and welcome to the Center for Strategic International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz and I am CSIS's Senior Vice President for External Relations. Tonight is my pleasure and indeed an honor to introduce a true public servant and innovator, Ms. Lori Bergman, who is President and CEO of the Irene W. and CB Pennington Foundation of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. CSIS's partnership with LSU and its Stevenson Disaster Management Institute is one of our most important collaborations and I've seen many of you at our events this year and I'm so grateful that you could continue to support us and come back and learn from us at these sessions. Our partnership with LSU is the vision of Lori Bergman and that really established the series and forged this crucial partnership. The series is the first of its kind in Washington. It's an ongoing examination of the issues surrounding disaster management and emergency response. Over the past year we've held sessions with FEMA's talented and thoughtful administrator, Mr. Craig Fugate, with Admiral Thad Allen, the National Incident Commander who gave his first remarks following the Gulf oil spill here at CSIS at this series at the inaugural event of this series. But tonight we have something truly unique and remarkable. Again, it's through Lori's vision that we're able to take a substantive and thoughtful look at the role of philanthropy in disaster preparedness relief and recovery. As I mentioned before, this isn't Lori's day job. Her day job is running Louisiana's largest private family foundation where she helps provide support to the disadvantaged of the great state of Louisiana. Somehow though, she finds time to be a tireless advocate for the disaster-stricken communities and a cutting-edge innovator in the world of disaster policy and philanthropy. I'd like to quote Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans who couldn't be here tonight, but he wanted you all to hear something about Lori Bergman who has, as you all know and I've said, has helped us establish this series. Mayor Landrieu told me there's no one I know of who's more passionate, selfless, committed to helping disaster-stricken communities recover from the immense challenges they face than Lori Burton. As an innovator and a leader in the field of emergency response in disaster philanthropy, I have sought and benefited from Lori's thoughtful counsel. She's one of the few professionals who is thinking about how we as a nation can be more proactive and get ahead of disaster situations before they get the best of us. Lori's a determined woman. She actually even convinced a two-lane graduate, me, to partner with LSU. Boy, am I glad she did because now I have a football team to root for, but also because what we're doing here in Washington is a real game changer. We're changing how policy makers and thought leaders and those in the private sector view their respective roles in helping forge smart disaster policy. We don't have all the solutions yet, but we're well on our way to a greater understanding of this complex set of issues because of the vision and tireless commitment of Lori. Lori, with CSIS's deepest gratitude for your service and commitment and for helping us establish the series, it's my pleasure to give the floor to you. Thank you so much. I think that might have been the nicest introduction I have ever received. And when the funder of the series asked to be the moderator, you get to kind of be the moderator. So they usually say yes. But thank you so much, Andrew. And I want to thank CSIS for hosting an event on philanthropy. This is really the first of its kind up here on the stage. You let the private sector people in and I'm very excited about that to give our viewpoint about how we can all work together. And I'm very thrilled that this is part of the LSU series of emergency preparedness and disaster response. And I love that there's this amazing audience out here. We read over the audience list and you are a very diverse audience. I'm not sure that any of us have ever spoken to such a diverse audience on this topic. And I think that's a great start in terms of building collaboration and coordinating our efforts. I do have to thank Andrew and his team, Allison, Nicole, and Ryan for putting this together as well as Rick Ozzie Nelson, the director of the Homeland Security Encounter Terrorism Program and his associate Rob Wise for their outstanding job pulling together this event. And I also do need to recognize Tom Anderson, my dear friend and partner in crime from LSU, SDMI, who's there in the back. He is a tremendous practitioner, a disaster practitioner and resource in Louisiana, an amazing partner in this venture. And I will honestly tell you that everything that Andrew said about me times if I can, I could refer to these three people that I'm up here with. This the distinguished panel that that I've been able to get to come here who have flown in from Nashville LA and Baton Rouge to be here to talk to you about this issue. When Andrew and I co founded the series, the main objectives were really to work collaboratively with a funder, academia and a think tank. And the second objective was also to have a discussion about flamethrower disasters when they weren't going on. And that's one of our main issues, as many of you who have lived through disasters, trying to get work done, trying to be strategic, trying to build relationships, trying to give out money or raise money in the middle of that chaos. And to collaborate with people is very difficult. So we wanted to have a forum where we could do that in peacetime, if you will. And finally, I said the rule because I have been through Katrina and lived through Katrina, my rule was no lessons learned. We had been to enough lesson learned, we really wanted to talk about innovations and solutions and really think through that. And to quote my one of my mentors, Billy shore, who was the former president of share our strength, a hunger prevention organization here, he said, you know, it's not that we don't know, you know, we know the problem. And it's not that we don't know the solutions, we did we actually do know the solutions, we don't have the creativity to implement the solutions. And I always think about disaster. When I think about that quote, I and when I think of philanthropy, I think of flexibility, creativity, experimentation, innovation, entrepreneurship, and not to mention, cash, which is also a big part of implementing solutions. So I got to pick this wonderful, and I mean, cherry picked this wonderful panel, kind of based on three, three issues that I want to frame the discussion. The first is is kind of looking at philanthropy in the entire landscape of disaster management and disaster giving. We tend to wall work in our own silos. And we tend to only work with the folks in our own field. But I want us to take a look of how we look what we can do and what role we can play, and not just as mere gap fillers, but maybe even more than that, along with all the actors in, in, in disaster work. And then also to show innovative, private and public partnerships that we have already been involved in, and hear from you as an audience, some of the things that you think could we can do with the both the public and private sector. And then finally, just to generally learn the trends and the dos and the don'ts, and what we're seeing and really kind of what we hope to see of our field in, in, as it relates to disaster giving. Before I introduce my panel, I do just want to give you a teeny context on philanthropy and in general, because I'm not making an assumption that all of you work in philanthropy and know generally all about giving. This is stuff we do every single day. And I have watched Sheifer series, talk about China and talk about all sorts of things where I've been very confused in the audience, not knowing what they were talking about. So I'm not in any way insulting your intelligence, just that I know that you all have very important jobs doing other things. Just for context, we're talking about philanthropy as private monies given to the greater good. And that it in just in the US $290 billion was given in 2010 for charitable gifts. Of that, what might surprise you is 90% come almost 90% actually come from individuals. So you're going to hear us talking about institutional foundations and we have them represented here today. But actually, it's individuals that make up most of the charitable giving corporations only represent 5% of charitable giving. In general, philanthropic circles, though, when it comes to disasters, corporations certainly have a lot of things to consider and play a very important role, even though they're not as much of a percentage of the giving. And as far as, you know, other most where the money goes, most of the money goes to religion, actually. And that would make sense to know that people give to the things that are closest to them. And religion is very close to people and then health and human services follow probably right after that. Unfortunately, disaster giving doesn't really make the pie chart. In fact, grants from institutions, we're only about $175 million last year. Now that does not include individuals. That's from institutions. So with that, it I, it helps me kind of transition to my first panelist that I want to introduce, who is the president, the CEO of a very amazing new organization called the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, which aims to actually get more money into disaster giving. She is an incredible woman and a dear friend who I have just has enjoyed working with from the Gates Foundation. And she handled Melinda and Bill Gates's international grant making portfolio, their emergency relief portfolio, and as well as the Hilton Foundation's portfolio for many years. And she also consults currently with many other organizations through the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. On my left is Ed Cain, who if you please read his bio, it's pretty outstanding. I will not read it. But Ed is the vice president of grant programs for the Conrad and Hilton Foundation in Los Angeles. It is an institutional private foundation. And I will tell you has the unique distinction of actually having a professional person on staff just dedicated to disasters. They've given $25 million just in the last five years, two disasters. And he has worked in the international space. He has advised President Carter on global development issues and worked with UNDP. He has incredible experience and I can't wait to hear from him. And then to my far right is, I have to be very honest, my closest colleague. This is a hard introduction. John Davis and I had the distinct pleasure of working together at the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. And the Baton Rouge Area Foundation is a community foundation that when I tell you is the New York Yankees. It's the BCS champion. It's that he runs a very sophisticated $600 million shop down there in Baton Rouge and was in my opinion a Katrina hero, a leader, and really showed how philanthropy can lead the way in disaster response and relief and recovery. And some of his work is the most outstanding that I have seen. And I'm so grateful that I get to learn from him all the time. So with that, I want to turn this over to my panelists to give you some brief remarks. And then we're going to open it up for, I'm going to ask some questions. We're just going to have a round robin talk, very casual. And then I'll open it up to you guys to ask some questions. And then we will head off to reception. So that's all this will work today. And I'm going to start with Regine. Well, thank you very much for the introduction. And thank you all for having me here. I want to start off with some of the numbers, the disaster numbers that is. So I apologize if these are familiar to all of you, all of you all, I live in Nashville. So we say all of you all down there. So in 2010, there were 385 disasters that affected more than 217 million people. They claim 297,000 lives and caused an estimated $124 billion in damages. As you all know, in 2011, we have already had 10 $1 billion disasters with the economic total of those disasters coming in over $35 billion. So in in every respect, the impact of disasters is on the rise, the number, the number of people affected. In fact, I'll chime in with another statistic that I know, which is that by 2015 predictions are saying that forecasts are saying that there will be 375 million people affected annually by disaster. So so again, across every, every stat you can get these disasters are having an increased impact on on our communities on our on our globe on ourselves. I have a real belief that the increased frequency and intensity of disasters creates an obligation for each one of us to become better informed and responsive on how we can help people around the world before, during and after disasters. The center that I'm working to launch will in my view help to fulfill that obligation and only fulfill that obligation with the strong board, the strong advisory council and the strong set of experts represented by you all here. The center arose from the knowledge that there's significant opportunities to increase effectiveness of the philanthropic response, both internationally and domestically, just by providing a place for good sound information analysis and just a resource to the philanthropic community. So from this kernel of an idea that there was an opportunity to provide that information and provide that resource to visionaries, Eric Kessler and Laurie Bertman have really worked to build a permanent resource for the community that exists to change the face of emergency related grant making. We have the desire to move this emergency related grant making from this reactive and human emotion driven response to one that's really focused on increasing the effectiveness of the private dollar and with the aspirational goal of increasing the amount of total dollars raised for disasters. Again, all of this focused on the good of the affected community. Head. Well, first, let me say thank you for having me and Laurie. I think this is a terrific initiative and making a real contribution to helping make philanthropy more smart in its grant making in this particular area. Maybe I'll just give you a little bit of background about the Hilton Foundation. Conrad Hilton gave us a fairly simple and precise directive in terms of how he wanted to see his money used and it was simply to improve the lives of the disadvantaged and the vulnerable. And that was with out regard for race, religion or country of origin. Laurie mentioned that we have given twenty five million dollars in grants to this particular sector. We do have a grant program in a number of other areas, but this is one of our priorities. But that twenty five million dollars actually is over the last twenty years. But in the last five years, about half of that amount has been given. And I would just point out that it would be Katrina, the the tsunami. And most recently, we're one of the major responders to the disaster in the Horn of Africa. We've become more strategic over that period of time. Like many in philanthropy today, I think our practices were fairly simple, not guided by too many rules and regulations, codes or principles. The idea would be the board would want to respond more often in an emotional way to a to a disaster. And of course, the first candidate on the list was given to the Great Cross. And that is not to suggest that that is not a worthy cause. But over time, we realized that as certain disasters or certain operators on the ground that are actually better in terms of making use of the money. And I think the most recent example that would be in Haiti, where an institution like Partners in Health were much better positioned to respond to that disaster. We've done a retrospective look at what this 20 years of grant making has meant to the to what kind of impact we may have had. And if we did no harm and actually did some good. And we commissioned an independent study to give us that analysis. We're just finishing up on that study. We'll be posting it on our website. The review has also taken a broader look at the role of philanthropy and disasters and drawing on the lessons learned from our grant making. And I think our lessons are rather significant because it was talking to Regina earlier. There are not that many foundations actually that make this a priority. There's just a handful. The analysis gave us a snapshot of what the current environment is. It was mentioned that I hadn't in my previous lives working for the UN, a major non-governmental organization. I'm pleased to say that the glass is half full. There has been progress, particularly in the official development assistance area where there's been greater alignment and harmonization and practices and response resources like Relief Web to help guide official grant makers. But as it was mentioned by Laurie, that progress isn't equally practiced in the other silos. And I am speaking now after a few years in philanthropy. I can say that philanthropy has a way to go to catch up with some of these more enlightened practices and and principles that should be followed. We also learned and no surprise that there is a willful lack of attention given to preparedness. There is that emotional reaction to the crisis at hand. But interest dies off quite quickly after that and recovery also isn't dealt with as much as it should be. And in the discussion today, I just think that we should, again, drawing on our own experience and what our analysis came up with. There's a few areas that I think would be worthy of further discussion among the panelists and perhaps yourselves. One is the whole issue of when we speak of codes, principles, best practices via the Red Cross, Red Crest and NGO, Code of Conduct or the Sphere Guidelines. Are we obligated, if not to conform to them, to at least be aware of them before we embark on our well-intended philanthropy? Accountability. Having some measure of looking at what exactly did we do no harm and if we did do good, what good did we do? Capacity building. The much neglected area of building capacity of really the front line for coordination and alignment of activities. And those are the in-country actors, principally the government but other civil society actors, and not to superimpose some imported type of operation that doesn't build that capacity where it really needs to be built. And that of course leads to the whole issue of coordination and better collaboration. And then finally communicating our experience and knowledge is in a very transparent way. What have we learned? Where have we made mistakes and where have we had an impact? I love when the panelist does my job for me. Thank you, Laurie. I guess I speak for the regional or local funders. These folks are international experts and have great experience beyond our borders. One of the issues that we came to grips with pretty quickly is that this field is undefined. We really don't know much about how we should be going about. There are no constructs for how we should be preparing to respond to disasters, not really. What we've found through our experience is that really there are multiple scenarios and each scenario develops a different response. So for example, in the United States you have the American Red Cross on point for major catastrophic disasters. Other regional, other national NGOs come play in their space pretty hard like the Salvation Army and others and then the local NGOs kind of fill the gaps and if there isn't a relationship with large funders, the local NGOs who can be pretty powerful don't have much traction to do the role, to play the roles they have to play, particularly catastrophic situations. And sometimes the gaps are big. For example, breaking Laurie's rule and she knew I would during Katrina in terms of relief, the relief end of the four phase, the whole response to these disasters, if there are four phases to it, relief being the second rescue, being the first. During the relief phase we took care of through primarily faith base groups as many folks as the Red Cross did in our catchment area, which was 25,000 kind of at a time in shelters and such and we were the sole funder and so it was a real problem because FEMA never got around to reimbursing those churches and when other disasters happened the next time around they were much less likely to come up and help so many fell off the wagon and didn't in fact come play the roles they had played so nobly and effectively during that major event. Outside the U.S. it seems to me that the disaster response is much better managed. The NGOs are used to playing together, they play much more effectively, they know how to do it. The International Rescue Committee came to Baton Rouge to help us get organized post-Katrina and they they couldn't get all the cogs plugged in. Now you know it was a catastrophic disaster so we understand that but even the IRC had great difficulty trying to get that space organized among the bigger players not the smaller players like us. So we feel the International Place space is really well managed by the large NGOs, although how the small NGOs the local guys play is equally less defined I think and probably a real opportunity to improve our response. Then you get back to the U.S. and you have other issues. You have major events like the Deepwater Horizon event where the Stafford Act is not is not invoked and so you don't have options to deal with FEMA and you know the big players to come help out and what I would tell you is if we hadn't been through some of the challenges that we had before with Katrina and Rita we would have been hard-pressed to organize ourselves locally and deal with the national guys who came in to help us to find a good response mechanism to the challenges that some of our communities along coast faced as a result of that of that event. Finally just as an observation nothing substitutes for experience. If a community has had a major disaster and has learned has responded to it it will respond way better the next time and there's no way to impose that training. Now I'd say all this because in order to know how we prepare for major disasters we have to have to understand what the options are and what the playbook looks like once the disaster hits. Thank you. Great. Great comments. One question that just kind of stemmed from just something you just said. In your estimation what do philanthropists need to know about the Stafford Act and the National Disaster Recovery Framework that's come up and the Spear Sanders. I mean what what type of education is important for the philanthropists to be better grant makers? Well as I said there's been tremendous progress in terms of developing codes of conduct and best practices and this is all well documented in terms of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, NGO Code of Conduct, the Sphere Guidelines and I was told not to talk in UN speak and but I'm afraid these are the way they're they're described. I tried. But we have made it a precondition in our grant making as we've moved to more strategic grant making in this area that our grantees confirmed to us that they are conforming to those guidelines and codes. So we think this is and you know in coordination mechanisms we always ask to what extent the what is their who are they aligning themselves with. We of course assess the situation if you have a tragedy like we saw in Haiti where the very the federal structure was totally decimated you know what kind of surrogate arrangement has been developed that you as a as a as a responder are going to be aligning yourself or aligning yourself with and these are these are just fundamental questions I think that have to be asked and and sometimes aren't. I would add to that that I don't think it's as much issues about the legal status. I mean if FEMA shows up people know that's intended to be a joke but but more that you know one of one of the things that we understand is in disaster communications break down completely and there is no reliable communication in in in times of significant disasters and that translates to coming to information coming out to the donor community and people who care and want to make a difference and want to support financially what they see you know the people popping out of the rooftops the you know the Japanese folks around the nuclear plants etc they want to respond to what they see on TV and they don't know how to respond they know they can write they can support the big national NGOs they can support Paul Farmer and Haiti but they don't know who the local guys are who can make a difference on the ground and who are going to be there after the after the the national folks the international rescue folks are gone and who are really part of the the whole long-term recovery picture and the only thing I would add is having been a grant maker for me those codes and the sphere standards and the good enough guide they I would look for anything I could to get me closer to the ground from from wherever my office was at the time so anything that would give me a closer window on how this grantee or potential grantee was going to be acting and so for me that was a critical lifeline since I wasn't on the ground and yet deeply wanted to support the relief efforts efforts and so that brings me to kind of a question about speed kind of versus deliberation I mean obviously the government sometimes is slow to come in to relief and recovery and kind of quick to end their funding of recovery we've seen that we've experienced that in Louisiana I know John's nodding his head what what is the role of philanthropy when the government leaves and and and John I'm going to throw that at you because I know that you've jumped in on many and many occasions well the problem is and it goes right to the to the subject matter of this of the session is is that is that the recovery process is a very long one it's extraordinarily long so for years we had essentially in term and camps of of of folks who who had had evacuated from New Orleans in right out in our in our own county in East Baton Rouge Parish we have parishes rather than counties and and it was very I think I thought sarcastically called Renaissance Village first but that was really the name of a place that had 2,500 people living in there and most of them were moms with kids in teeny tiny trailers you all probably seen all that but they love to live there for years and they live behind you know razor wire and with with with with National Guard with them 16s at the gate checking credentials so you could come in again protecting the population but it didn't feel like that if if y'all saw that it didn't feel like that and the problem is that by that point we're kind of three years out and you know we've moved on and there still are huge huge issues around how you deal with these populations and these are the most these are the folks who are at the the very end of the the most challenged in terms of where they live and society who have the least opportunities and who are going to be the hardest to replace in society and they end up remaining in these camps the longest with with no hope really and there is a huge connection in my view between between the capacity to to reintegrate people into community and the timeline it takes to do that the longer we delay in reintroducing people to community the more pathological the problems are that they're going to face and so that takes money I mean we're one of the few funders who funded projects in in Renaissance in Renaissance Village because by that point you know everybody had logically moved on fortunately the the country the world was very generous to to Louisiana exceedingly generous and so we have resources to to address that but that is in fact the whole purpose I think of of the effort that you and Regine are trying to get started and that is to be a lot more purposeful thoughtful and it kind of intellectualized this so that you have the most rational response to a long-term challenge would you like to add well you mentioned where philanthropy has some unique capabilities that perhaps more slower moving governments might have and we give you I can give you an example what we've developed in the Hilton Foundation on the idea of being innovative flexible and quick our board meets every quarter and it became very obvious to us that you don't wait three months if a disaster strikes and your board is not going to meet for another three months so we set up a chairmen's and president's quick response fund totaling a half a million dollars and this is simply in working with our staff the president Steve Hilton and his father Barron Hilton both of whom are extremely responsive to disaster situations as is our board in general and we've been able to get money right out the door within a couple of days of disaster and we try to target those types of things that would that are in need immediately of some assistance at the same time we don't we keep our powder dry to some extent if we see a disaster of a certain magnitude like Katrina we recognize that the neglected area of recovery has to be also addressed so in addition to the rapid response we engage with local actors on the ground I think John you can attest to this absolutely where we looked at local consultants in Louisiana and said and there's a lot of pressure sometimes from board members we you know because there's a relationship with a particular school or that they they that has a problem the basketball court got flooded and they need to put new wood down but there are more fundamental issues facing that community and our board said okay let's not react in that way let's let's learn from those on the ground what the priorities are and and so our recovery grant making in the Katrina context was very much driven by local actors while we gave some to the relief we recognized that we had to have a more deliberative and a longer range process of identifying what other needs we could address in the longer term Regine how how do you get the philanthropist to start thinking about recovery from relief as we we know um that emotionally driven response is just never going away I mean that's something that is part of human behavior and it's a very cathartic for people to to give that way how do you start to to move them to start seeing recovery and in the same way and an important investment I mean I think it's a steady steady process right and I actually I see two of you in the audience and I'll be nice and not make you raise your hand that have written papers that talk about the critical need for philanthropists to pay attention to preparedness and recovery and so I think it's about it's about taking where our our community our respective community is now and I don't know if it's a slow but steady or a deluge it was either you take the slow and steady approach or the deluge approach with information and showing how year over year you know a penny what's the what's the thing a pound of cure is a penny of cures or the pound of prevention oh my gosh I can tell that's right penny of prevention is the pound of cure okay so audience can we get some help why not I don't really can I phone a friend chime in any time really we should have re-used that one exactly anyway my point being right we know that a dollar a dollar for pen prevention saves somewhere between four and eleven dollars in relief and that's depending upon the study that you look at so there's there's evidence out there and we can look at the situations today where we're well past a year following a disaster I mean pick one even I'll just say it again Nashville right we can look at Nashville we can look at Haiti and where year out year plus out of an emergency New Orleans year plus out of an emergency you're still seeing very critical shelter healthcare child care infrastructure needs that are unmet and there is a a real obviously I feel passionate about this there's a real need for our private donor community to to sustain their attention over time keep your powder dry keep your powder dry well with this groundswell of disasters this year I mean has it has it really translated into an upticking of grant making or have you all seen some donor fatigue I'm gonna throw that out okay I have not seen donor fatigue what I have seen to use your word uptick I have seen an uptick in the philanthropic community a desire to make sure that every dollar awarded be it from an individual to a family foundation to an institutional foundation that every dollar awarded is hardwired for maximum impact and that's well and speaking just from our personal experience as I've indicated the trend has been upward in terms of our board's response maybe more disasters when I say the 500,000 quick response that's per disaster so potentially if there were three disasters in a given year and not say we respond to every single disaster but there is a considerable amount of compassion by our board and I think it's very much driven by the knowledge and this is the important point I should make that the money that we are giving is going to good organizations that are following good practices and who can account for what how the money was spent and now not to say there isn't room for improvement but I think we were a little bit in the fog in the past but now we have a much I think the board like many of our other programmatic areas feels more confident and as a result is prepared to be more generous and I would say that would probably encourage others to be generous as well but I think there's one other observation because we receive we're a we're a vehicle for philanthropy or people send us money for specific uses and so when when particularly Louisiana has had a bunch of wonderful misadventures here recently what we have seen is giving has become much more international so for example in response to to Deepwater Horizon I think we had something like 15 or 20 gifts from from Norway now don't ask me why but we we had a lot more international gifts coming in so I think folks I think we have embraced the fact that we're a global village we see that with our donor population giving to things that happen outside of Louisiana our donor population responds to virtually every major event that happens now maybe because we live in Louisiana and we've been on the sharp end of that of that stick but but it's true that that that our donors are responsive and then national and international folks have been very responsive to challenges that they see facing us in these international in these in these disaster incidents so many questions I want to barrage you with but I just want to follow that with something you were talking about earlier comparing kind of the international community and the and the U.S. grant making community can you expound on that to the audience? Well I see a couple of familiar faces out in the audience from my days in the international community and as I said I think there's been extraordinary work done to better align official development assistance otherwise known as ODA multilateral assistance getting the U.N. a bit more coordinated not easy hurting cats but it can be done and what strikes strikes me is that correspondingly when you saw disasters like Katrina and the lack of coordination and alignment that some of those practices and principles and I recall one example and I bit reluctant pointed out but someone made the point that the international Red Cross and how it managed its affairs versus the American Red Cross that there could be a lot to be learned by the the U.S. versus the international so there needs to be a dialogue we are not we have tremendous skills in this country in terms of our logistics I've seen the U.S. military operate in certain disaster situations I think they're second to none but we we need to be able to bring the different silos together and and and build on each other's knowledge and and and best practices and and I I think that dialogue is beginning as we've been discussing or this is a global challenge it's not just here in the U.S. and and I there's a lot that's been done on the international stage that I think could be learned by how we we deal here in the United States with disasters that's great and back to kind of accountability obviously this being such a new field you mentioned a little bit about the metrics that you kind of use to fund fund organizations but how do you choose which disaster to respond to I mean we there's disasters there's every week it seems how you know how do grant maker what metrics to grant makers do you to use to to respond to disasters and then to also evaluate their impact well stepping back at our grant making as a whole we give about a hundred million dollars away a year and most of those are in strategic program areas like homelessness in the at Los Angeles County safe water and sub-saharan Africa and we've earmarked a certain amount of money for those for those efforts we do keep some money in reserve anticipating disasters but it's certainly not in the order of five to ten million dollars so it's it's a bit serendipitous if I can be honest depending on the stock market you find yourself at a certain point in your your payout year where you may have more in your coffers than you had expected and not to make light of it but if a disaster happens to fall in that at a particular time when you have that that resource you're inclined to be more more generous frankly in a a linear year when you're really on target with your program delivery in your strategic areas there is some money kept for disasters but it it would be much less in those those situations I've gotten my cue from commander Nelson in the back that says that it's time to maybe open up questions to the audience I have a bunch more questions for this group but I'm going to offer you all the opportunity to ask some questions and I'm going to start with I saw your hand first so your first yes my name is Joel Charney from Interaction first thanks this panel has been excellent really high value very succinct really great very interesting two quick things one is on on the whole question of hooking up with local organizations in an emergency internationally my suggestion would be that there has to be some intentionality around that in other words it can't be something that's done in the immediate aftermath of a large-scale emergency there's got to be some thoughts some planning you know whether it's done on a regional basis or whether it's done on a country basis or thematic it's kind of my advice would be from a philanthropic perspective it's got to be something that you're thinking about year-round because scrambling around at the last minute in the immediate aftermath of an emergency to find the right local institution is is practically impossible my my second comment is to raise something that hasn't come up with come up yet which is the whole question of advocacy I've spent most of my career doing what I would call humanitarian advocacy and there is a role I don't know if it's one to 10 or one to 20 but there can be plenty of money for the response but the response can still be incredibly confused have gaps and so on and there really is a role for kind of the outsider who doesn't have an operational stake in the game who's looking at the situation and saying no wait a second there's this community that you're missing or with this money maybe it's better to do X, Y or Z and I'm seeing a huge diminution in the number of foundations and the amount of money that's available for what I would call humanitarian advocacy and I'm wondering if you see if you're if you agree that that's a trend if you're concerned about it and what comment you might have on on the role of advocacy as opposed to operations well I'd start with amen I think you said and I do think that the advocacy role is a critical one it goes back to that whole mind little vignette about communications and the the incoherence of communications in times of disaster someone needs to be translating that so that people can understand can kind of figure out what's going on and and to argue the case so that so that so that so that there is a response and the response is consistent and continued until the solutions are are in place I couldn't agree with you more I I don't know exactly how that works but has it has it back down I would say you're right that it that you know it seems to me that you that you're absolutely right about that I just want to make a point about John and and John has you know certainly philanthropy can serve a role as a convener and to really get messages from underserved communities up into the government and to change policy and it has been done and I think there probably needs to be more of that and I think the Baton Rouge Area Foundation has has done quite a bit of work in that area so I just wanted to just just a quick point I mean I I couldn't agree with you more on on your both of your points but on the right local institution in the the role of philanthropy I think that the problem I would see is that again back to the silos and who should be doing what I can see a role for national authorities firstly and foremost to be looking at these issues and national civil societies but obviously they don't always have the resources ability to do that then you can look at the official development assistance to trying to deal with that particular problem of having capacity before a disaster versus after it but when you because philanthropy doesn't have that broader reach in terms of all the potential disasters that might be out there and but point well taken that we shouldn't be scrambling looking for the local actor after the fact that should be before the fact but I would hope that by sharing information and these different silos being more in alignment philanthropy could be informed by others that have helped in that regard so that we'd make the right choices Irwin in the back you have your hand up it kind of I did I want to I want to couple of points and then some some thoughts about about the role of philanthropy the first thing is that I don't think we should brush over the the statement that where we have lessons learned effectively we don't actually do lessons learned very well and in 1985 in Ethiopia when the country was flooded with humanitarian relief and aid it overwhelmed any possibility of a rapid recovery of the local agricultural economy there we continue to do this over and over again all over the world we we we send stuff without any regard for the impact of the stuff on the ability of those communities to recover so not only don't we don't we learn it we keep repeating the same sort of mistakes with the same consequences around recovery is first thing second thing there's there's many many lessons that have never even been taught for example how do you really take care of vulnerable populations in communities either domestically or internationally a lot of those problems and the vulnerability has to do with pre-existing conditions that really predated the disaster so is the advocacy really around fixing vulnerability issues improving resiliency before the disaster ever happens which means are we expecting people to advocate around the ending of poverty for instance which wouldn't be a bad idea but you know we have to sort of define what we're talking about we just saw in Japan very recently in northeast in Japan with the earthquake the tsunami then the nuclear catastrophic event that even in Japan which is probably the most prepared country in the world especially around earthquakes and tsunamis that there was really some serious failures in how vulnerable populations were cared for it was cold the shelters weren't adequate medications and the supply chain was not working properly lots and lots of compounded issues which I would have expected all of us in the world to have known and especially Japan and the third thing is the recovery point is really the stepchild of everything to do with disasters we it's gotten the least attention it's been very poorly handled it's really its own real problem if you look at the mega disasters taken place over the last 20 years the really large disasters the record of recovering from those disasters is really very spotty and very poor and it's a lot that we need to know starting with the fact that we always define we've had defined or acted as if we defined recovery by how quickly we're going to rebuild houses the structures the infrastructure as opposed to our families and communities back to some state of normalcy and in the case of those communities that were very deprived of this finish beforehand we want better than normalcy normalcy the normalcy they experienced prior to the disaster very complicated but I think there's some good news on the horizon there in terms of the national disaster recovery framework and so forth so maybe there'll be more attention but this leads me to want to make just two quick comments about the role of private philanthropy which as far as I'm concerned has to be around innovating and creativity setting standards advocacy and all these other things because those are things that government does not do very well and can't do very well what government does is they have the money to do it and 250,000 homes were destroyed in Katrina Habitat for Humanity a wonderful organization built 900,000 homes Brad Pitt built 65 11 of them vacant as of this morning those are nice efforts they're good for the families that go there and by the way those Brad Pitt homes you can't get up the stairs so it's so senior businesses live there I can't even use those houses so there's things that we need to do and the final point I want to make about this is that we have to make sure that the philanthropic community stops demonizing what they call research research is evidence it's data it's information information that should drive policy otherwise we keep doing random acts of preparedness that don't necessarily random acts of preparedness don't necessarily foster good outcomes number one and number two what happens in the absence of data is there's no way as as A.K. was pointing out earlier how do we get accountability if we don't have information and data accountability and good policy are exclusively derived from data you want to call it research you want to call it going to the zoo whatever you call it we've got to have the information and that's where partnerships with the people that know how to do that need to flourish and there's a specific area where I think private philanthropy could fill in some major gaps that are not covered currently by government I just want to point out Erwin Redliner is from Columbia University and the President of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and has done extraordinary work in Louisiana we know him very well and we have collaborated with him on many different ventures and our latest one along with CDP is to analyze these policies that are coming out in the disaster recovery framework as well as the Stafford Act and really understand what our place is in philanthropy as well as understanding the best way to help communities recover faster and return to normalcy and so we have worked with Erwin for many years and I will tell you Erwin is that guy that is on the ground whether the funding is there or not he is there and he has never left but we like to get on the funding so so yes we understand that about research very good points your hands knit up and you've been oh and then you definitely but I'm talking about this first gentleman right here I'm Dr. Whidna I come from New Orleans and I was the first MD or PhD at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters working directly for my chairtoff during Hurricane Katrina that being said I also served in Just Cause and Panama Kuwait City and the Northern Iraq Relief Operations Mogadishu Somalia Haiti and up in Uganda as well and in Mogadishu we set up a civil military operation center which was a coordination center of all non-government organizations all humanitarian relief organizations and I drafted the plan much like the plans models that I did for Panama much like I did for Kuwait and and Iraq and Kirk which gave us a model from the inception of the idea conception of the idea to the final end state and where the mitigation measures both nouns and verbs when you plug them in what we're what we're going to be the resultant outcomes that's important because according to Clausewitz no man or no man in his right mind starts a war unless he knows what it is he wants to achieve and how he wants to achieve it the nouns of a mitigation measures most importantly is money but unfortunately unless you know where that money is going to be in place in that cycle a sequence of events it becomes squandered as the gentleman in the back just pointed out in order to effectively do this you have to have run tabletop exercises with the community before you start actually executing and implementing what it is you're trying to do if you can't do that then you're dealing with a lot of people that are dealing with chaos because that as he pointed out you're dealing with sporadic chaotic implementation of these measures and then the verbs that you're trying to implement and your mitigation measures fail thank you for the statement do you have a question right yes nice patient woman and the rust pretty sure hi my name is Diane McCackran I work with a company called Big Green Purse and we educate consumers about marketplace choices that protect human health and the environment Brad Pitt aside it seems like there is a tremendous opportunity if this can be said without sounding callous for the recovery effort to take to make great strides in environmental protection with all the rebuilding that is going on the simplest things light bulbs insulation in homes and so on there's just a tremendous opportunity to work in these communities to create a higher environmental standard than existed before and I'm wondering to what degree you see yourselves considering that or you see others in the philanthropy community realizing that it's not just you know we saw this with the FEMA trailers get them up as quickly as possible and they turned out to be a human health and environmental nightmare themselves so I'd be really curious to see what the philanthropy community is thinking about in terms of the environmental component of the recovery effort John could you take that I I unfortunately I don't see that as being a huge piece of the of the consideration as we rebuild I really don't we're involved in rebuilding one of the HUD housing projects in New Orleans our foundation is and we've done a great job we focused on the social efforts because we were so offended by the by the concentration of poverty and the humiliation of seeing you know this concentration of poverty popping out of rooftops on TVs it was just it was deeply humiliating to those of us who live there and we swore that wouldn't happen again so we've been involved in rebuilding the St. Bernard housing project and it is indeed it's turned into a model but I'm I'm horrified to tell you that I think we have been insensitive to the to the to those environmental issues that in fact would have been very easy to implement we're part of a partnership so I don't solely take the blame for not having thought that through but we should have we should have thought that through because it's very easy to do to make very small steps that have made a very big difference and I don't think unfortunately we're alone in that so we need to be attentive to that and raise that flag question right there Chris Braini, independent consultant I've heard a number of speakers talk about the need we're good at pushing food, band-aids, whatever out but we don't necessarily we don't want to hold it up we don't necessarily know where it's needed when sounds like the problem is you know granularity speed and granularity of information and one of the greatest technological revolutions sweeping the planet both developed and undeveloped countries is cell phones they have unique identifiers what I think is missing maybe and maybe they've filled up philanthropy organizations can work with folks like Apple Google Microsoft develop a standard application that would be free for people to have an every phone and think of it sort of as like a global individual life alert or disaster individual disaster alert system that could provide two things what your status is or for those in your group injured dead you know lost trapped and what your need is food water medical whatever in a standard format you hit the activate button and it would go out over whatever means by text or web or cell and it would and and you wouldn't have the double counting problem because every need would be tagged to a specific number so maybe that would help solve some of the problem on where things were needed and avoid over counting double counting whatever there's a lot of people in that space try trying to figure that very thing out unfortunately sometimes cell phones don't work in the middle of a disaster sometimes we're right here right up front yep you've had your hand up question good evening Alejandra Guzman from the Organization of American States as I think you've all posed very very adequately tonight one of the greatest emphasis during philanthropic giving and disaster situations is focus in the face of the actual disaster and possibly even a little bit more in the recovery but one of the faces that is almost completely isolated is the face of disaster risk management and disaster risk reduction we're talking about preparedness and the previous faces and although in the international community we've seen great advances towards this with for example the adoption of the Yogo framework of action how do you all see the possible integration or possible impact of the philanthropic community to create local and community resilience in order to prevent in order to reduce disaster and disaster impacts I have a short short answer which is to say I think there's a lot of discussion around DRR and around increasing community resilience and and there are some small steps that have been you know taken they're you know I can list several grants large initiatives that have been launched but I would say that I would say I'd like to see that discussion move into more action and that's my you know I come back I was looking at this disaster recovery framework that's recently that's about a year old now when was it first produced the U.S. and it's it's very detailed document and it it educates us on the continuum and the importance and then preparedness as well as recovery but you know this has been talked about for 20 years and I come back to the international community the whole concept of the continuum and risk reduction mitigation and preparedness it's a willingness to do it and it does come back to the root cause issues as poverty and unfortunately you start to unwind the ball of string you're gonna find your you're gonna get yourself into some much more messy kinds of situations to address than what makes you feel good when you throw a couple of pallets of high-protein biscuits and some plastic sheeting on the tarmac of an airport and we've just gotta get real about that and it's and I think if in the role of philanthropy again you have to keep in mind the resources ultimate the fundamental resources are gonna come from the countries themselves then you're gonna have multilateral official development assistance bilateral philanthropy in that overall context is not that large but we could play a catalytic role in reigniting awareness in the importance of this and why it's a much bigger bang for the buck and that and but the problem again is philanthropy is in the very nascent stages of getting on board with all of these concepts and there's only a few major foundations that are really addressing disasters in any form let alone preparedness side but it's it's something that I think gets back to the advocacy issue but the answers are out there it's just doing it we have a lot of questions out here do we have some time for a couple more questions my timekeepers who are okay we do thank you commander you right there that's you hi hi I'm Lindsay Holman I'm from What Associates I wanted to ask you a question regarding economic recovery as you know as you said earlier the economic impact of disasters is substantial and as of right now there is currently very little to actually no real economic recovery assistance on the on the federal side and there are a dime a dozen organizations out there that want to do the bricks and mortar the the that warm your heart projects building houses building back public services in schools however you have to have jobs for these people to go back to in order for them to occupy these things so what is your organization's ideas on enhancing holistic economic recovery from maybe getting more financial institutions to take part and actually getting some of these things done in terms of planning financial recovery for an area outside of just reimburseing for public services good question so one of the things that that we are engaged in is trying to thanks to to a grant we have from BP is to try to train folk retrain people so that they don't have to so that they can work in different places I mean what we're dealing with is very fragile coastal communities and and Erwin knows and well because he's been doing great work down there but but very fragile coastal communities that are mostly that that are that are populations that have always lived off the water and their long-term trajectory is pretty grim and one of the things that we've done is to find retraining opportunities for them that will allow them to do other things because these are generations that have lived off off the water pretty much and in in the face of the realities of living in a delta community or in a delta which has lost six inches over the last ten years to net water rise for those from subsidence to from from water rise the projection that trajectory gets worse and so the long term is pretty grim we're engaged in trying to find alternative training opportunities for those folks so that they have an option to do something other than that the only thing they know to do which is to fish or to yoystermen or shrimpers and etc you know on that that's a very important point and thank you for raising it I'm probably not going to articulate this very well and there may be someone else in the audience that knows more details about this but if you look at the Horn of Africa situation you've got the Somalis that have come into northern Kenya but you also have the ethnic Somalis from Kenya and the dilemma is that those ethnic Somalis are not eligible to go into those refugee camps and yet in many respects they're suffering the same kind of impact as the others in terms of the drought or they're very much on the edge so there there have been some non-governmental organizations that have come to us actually and and told us that this there is an opportunity to sustain and reinvigorate livelihoods some are being exploited in terms of the marketing of their livestock because they don't know what the ultimate market price is and it gets back to the telephone and cell phone technology so there's some talk about how do you eliminate the exploitive middleman in that regard so it's definitely a type of intervention that's desperately needed there are ideas out there and we're very sensitive to seeing if there's something we might be able to do in that regard good point right there thank you my name is Daniel Lamotte I'm with the National Organization for the Investment of the Haitians and I wanted to find out my question is do you how often does your do your organizations partner with other philanthropies or syndicate projects when they're too big for you or that you want to section off certain portions to other groups thank you you take it they all just looked at the moderator and said you take it so I'm not just being the talking moderator actually probably the best example I can give you about that you know we talk about this cross collaboration but really I think it's very important for different private philanthropic private private foundations community foundations institutional foundations and individuals to work together and the best example I can give you is our Katrina example we all band together in there all the philanthropists of Baton Rouge band together and raised within an hour five million dollars and this was corporate philanthropists all different private philanthropists and we're able to leverage it to close to 60 million dollar fund so there is something to be said for all of us working together and I will tell you that there is probably every disaster project that I work on I usually collaborate with John on and vice versa and he's the first person I call and now I can't wait to now that I have this great relationship with Ed I'll be calling Ed and you know that's why we have created the Center for Disaster Philanthropy to create an international recovery fund where donors can all pull money together and leverage each other's money to have a greater impact in general so it's a very good question a very good point well I can just give you a quick answer on how we do it our foundation board virtually insists unless it's a unique area of research or innovation where you need to be kind of a venture philanthropist and go it on your own and we've done that on occasion as well but typically our grants are always leveraged the board wants to see that there's other buy-in they want to see it scaled up in terms and in fact it was in New Orleans that we contributed to these these joint efforts with respect to Katrina but it's a grant-making principle for us to go out and it makes a little more work for the program officer to and in Regine has worked with us in the past with her networks among others to say these are other foundations that are doing this and if you were to add this we could have a much bigger effect so but there needs to be more of this done and I'm a big advocate of affinity groups within philanthropy and and I would like to see this particular sector philanthropy grow in terms of more networking and more leveraging than we're seeing today would you want to talk about it community? right there right there front row front row that's you I'm Bob Hershey I'm a consultant to what extent are you able to use the internet to get together these various funder groups and get a consensus to what they want to do and what are the major emphasis I'm going to let Regine take that because I just looked at her and told her to talk about that perfect okay it's a good it's a good question so we you know my research shows that funders absolutely want to know what other funders are doing they are craving that information and when I sat in a funder chair you'd pick up the phone and you'd call you'd call the next funder over and say okay hey this is what we're thinking about this is what we're talking about this is how it fits with us what are you all doing right and so you did that at this informal level and it was critically important to me and my work and we're trying to what's the word not replicate but replicate and grow that through the center because we think that you know we talked about the fact that there's not that many foundations or you know small, medium, large foundations that have a dedicated staff person but there's but there might be one staff person here who is dedicated 10% of their time or there might be a family philanthropist who doesn't have staff but is dying for some interaction with some other funders and so we really we're going to grow a community of disaster grant makers that will you know through whatever vehicle through phone through internet through social media through you know in person in person time we'll grow that that community it's a really critical part of us maybe we have time for just one more question and I saw your hand up first so it's going to this guy with speed over here thank you I'm Dr. George Alula I have one question which is coming out of my mind after seeing Katrina and all those tsunami in Japan recently so my question is a kind of how you the disaster specialists which are in the room I am not how can we bring in some solution to reduce level of ocean by irrigating some I think one-fifth size of the world is a dessert so how can we bring those water to the dessert putting all the technology that we have in place to bring all the world global effort to get the dessert to get back the land I will try to explain myself in our houses in modern modern city you have five to three to four bathroom in which each bathroom you have two or three gallon of water stuck there so we just learned that last Sunday the world population come to seven billion and if you know that every human being need about half gallon to drink per day maybe by bringing clean water to all around the world or modernizing the world the rest of the world we can fight those tsunami those disaster that that is very very painful for those who are experiencing it thus my question will be is it possible to find to put the found to irrigate the dessert around the world just to get back the land to the human being thank you I think what your question raises is very important and that is that one of the issues that I think we will all face is the redistribution of population so there are communities you know if you look at Bangladesh and you look at the trajectory for Bangladesh and its its net water rise you know it's very likely that much of it will be gone in the next 40 years at least the southern part of it it's a huge delta and the southern part of it will be gone and the population will be shoved north we're talking about displacing 20 million people so the displacement of people is an international will become a growing international issue we face the same thing I hate to keep coming back my home state but it's my passion but we face the same thing in Louisiana in 50 years it'll be a meter of water and when you think that the highest point in Louisiana bridges you kind of understand what that means I mean you know we just we have no we're flat as a pancake so the water would literally be up around where we live 75 miles from New Orleans north would be the coastline of Louisiana if everything were kept the same so there are huge existential challenges that we face while other parts of the world are threatened with with drought as you so aptly point out so the whole issue of kind of redistribution of people is something that hasn't even been discussed or anticipated when that may be in terms of preparedness preparedness an incredibly important consideration did you want to say one yeah sure sir are you from Mali from Congo okay you know you've just put your finger on what we might call the mother of all disasters it's most the audience probably knows there's almost a billion people that don't have access to safe drinking water and two and a half billion that as a result also don't have adequate sanitation and then if you go down the hierarchy of needs then you go into livelihoods and irrigating the land and there needs to be integrated water management that will address all those issues but it's an enormous challenge one of our foundation strategic program areas is accessing safe water in the construct of a wash paradigm water sanitation hygiene and livelihoods but along the lines John was talking about I mean this is it's a huge it's a disaster waiting to happen it's a a silent tsunami in many respects in terms of the way this is affecting people's lives today we you know we look at the big very visible disasters but this this is really a quiet disaster in and of itself with we kind of are out of time and I know there are a lot more questions but we do have a reception that is I think we're going to open the doors and we have an hour where you can corner some of these wonderfully smart funders not for money but for information and and ask some more questions I will if you want to but I just want to say in summary that you know we kind of ended up where we started where is that you know philanthropy you know is more than a gap filler we really can play a role obviously in the recovery process in preparedness and we are it's important to collaborate amongst each other but also across sectors I would move to my friends at CSIS that we have a part two on philanthropy because I saw a lot of more questions and this is a really great big audience and thank you so much for coming and being here and I think a wonderful you did but you know what you opened