Resiliency Is a System, Not a Moment.

A disaster preparedness platform built mid-storm in Hawaii. A dashboard with roots in a group chat in Puerto Rico. A statewide operations center shaped by Katrina and Rita. Three different approaches engaged the same four concrete steps any community can take to formalize disaster readiness—starting now.

Alyssa Gossley's team was partway through launching Stay Open Oahu, a new disaster-preparedness platform for small businesses, when the Kona Low storms hit, racking up nearly $500 million in damages and dumping more than two trillion gallons of rain amid 135-mile-per-hour wind gusts.

The irony? In the midst of that devastating disaster, Alyssa’s team resorted to exactly what the platform was built to prevent: They called partners one by one, asking who had resources and where.

"We didn't have it in place ahead of the disaster," said Alyssa, program manager for the City and County of Honolulu, "so that was a real-time example of why this program was going to be so important.”

During SourceLink's recent Disaster Resiliency webinar, “From Crisis to Coordination: How Economic Developers Respond to Disaster,” panelists discussed the gap between the system a community may be building and what happens when the disaster occurs before it is finished.

The webinar brought together Alyssa and two other leaders who have rebuilt an ecosystem from inside an actual disaster: Samuel Merced, associate director at Colmena66 in Puerto Rico, and Heidi Melancon, associate state director of the Louisiana Small Business Development Center. My colleague Krista Markley, our director of business development, moderated the conversation.

The webinar was the second piece of a three-part disaster resiliency campaign that launched with the blog “Be Prepared So Your Community Can Count on You.”

Our panelists emphasized that ecosystems do break under pressure, and in the same predictable ways, whatever the disaster. But each also has a solution, they stressed, including four fixes any community can take right away. SourceLink offers multiple paths to help you get started.

What They Learned

For anyone who supports entrepreneurs, runs an economic development organization, or leads a small business support program, the next disruption is easier to deal with if the system is built before the disruption arrives, not after. In Puerto Rico, Louisiana, and Oahu, the same six problems surfaced once the disaster actually hit.

Needs outrun capacity quickly. Samuel said disaster recovery is basically what an entrepreneurship organization does every day, just at far greater volume. Instead of the roughly 30 requests a month his team usually handles, a disaster can bring "200, 250 people asking for help," all of them "in a situation of a lot of stress because they don't know if they're going to be able to reopen.”

Nobody knows who is responsible for what. In the aftermath of the Kona Low storms, Alyssa said, "there was a lot of confusion of where the city was stepping in, where the state was stepping in," and community organizations acted on their own simply because people needed food and a place to sleep right away.

Samuel saw the same disorganization play out in Puerto Rico the morning after Hurricane Maria hit. Help arrived from every direction at once: a memo from the local economic development department, another from FEMA, and yet another from the local SBDC.

"What we have is an overwhelming amount of information," he said, "and everyone is trying to make decisions in different silos and different pockets, and what you get is a lot of people willing to help but very little organization. So, you ended up misusing resources, misusing time."

Goodwill exists, but without direction, it’s wasted. Alyssa saw this constantly on Oahu, where the instinct to help never needed encouragement. "Our businesses really want to be able to help each other, and communities want to be able to help each other too," she said. "But if they don't know how to do that, it ends up being just quickly setting up something, and then the folks who need it the most aren't able to access the resources. Businesses have things, but they're not getting to the right people at the right time."

Samuel described the identical dynamic in Puerto Rico: "The disposition of the community to help was always there," he said. "People just needed someone, or some organization, or some group, to let them know what is the best use of their time and their resources."

Without that direction, help and actual need can miss each other by only a few minutes' drive, as Samuel found when he saw communities with power, water, and internet just 30 minutes away from communities with none of those essentials.

Heidi noted that Louisiana’s “Cajun ingenuity” makes goodwill easier to put to use: informal help from neighbors that a built system can plug into rather than compete with during these disasters.

“We come from a very, very supportive and traditional society. And I can tell you, it's neighbors that come together and support the community during these disasters,” she said.

Businesses tend to make assumptions that don’t hold up. On Oahu, the most common false comfort was insurance.

"Businesses may think, okay, I have insurance. I'm not in a flood zone or I'm not in a tsunami zone, so I don't really need to worry about some of those things," Alyssa said.

The Lahaina fires tested that assumption directly. Business owners learned that coverage takes time and there are often gaps.

“So, are you prepared for the gaps?" Alyssa asked. "And are you prepared if you don't have a commercial space for a year or longer, how is your business going to operate? And then if the commercial space comes back and then now the market rent is four times what it was, are you going to be able to afford it?”

She emphasized the importance of “helping businesses really think through the long-term recovery of what a disaster would be,” not just thinking they’ve dodged a bullet because they have insurance and their documents are in the cloud.

Heidi saw the same overconfidence in Louisiana, where business owners commonly overestimate what federal aid will cover: "There's a misnomer, they believe FEMA is going to make them whole 100%," she said.

Often, they want money right away, especially if their businesses are in shambles.

"Their first thought is, ‘I need money.’ … They have no idea what's going to happen thereafter,” she said. “They may not even have their financial statements in place, or their tax returns, their insurance documents, and their payroll," the paperwork that would help them get that money faster.

Nobody wants to think about resiliency until they have to. For Alyssa's team, after COVID, a wildfire, and a tsunami warning, discussing disaster preparedness with Oahu businesses got noticeably easier.

"These things aren't necessarily a matter of if, but when," she said. "It really did open up the space for businesses to have that conversation.” But, she pointed out, “Were they doing anything about it? No.”

For example, a year-long survey her team ran across the island found businesses "are only somewhat aware of their risk and they mostly aren't prepared.”

Heidi's had a similar experience in Louisiana. Her organization once secured a grant specifically to fund disaster planning work and struggled to give it away. "We couldn't sell it for anything," she said. "And look, it’s not that we didn't try. People do not like to talk about resiliency."

To counter that mindset, Heidi said they repeatedly address disaster resiliency in counseling sessions.

“The saddest part is when you know that they could have had the coverage within their general liability insurance that could make them whole going forward,” she said.

The information needed to respond isn’t ready when the moment comes. Every organization responding to Hurricane Maria was collecting its own data in the aftermath of the devastation, so business owners answered nearly the same questions for four or five different organizations.

"People were filling out multiple surveys daily, weekly, and it was exhausting," Samuel said, describing residents "driving to highways to get signals to fill out the surveys and forms."

When they didn’t receive the expected feedback for the effort, the response was predictable: "They're just not going to fill out anything else after that point," he emphasized.

Sometimes the missing information is even more basic. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Heidi's team discovered they couldn't locate their own staff and clients once phones and power went down.

How They Fixed It

Based on their in-the-trenches experiences, the panelists offered solutions to each of the six problems.

They built capacity that could scale on short notice. Colmena66 can now activate its communication process within 24 hours of a disaster. Once something happens, Samuel said, the organization's IT department sends an email alert to the 25 or 30 partner organizations it has a standing distribution agreement with, using a contact list built into its CRM, and checks who still has power or internet access to respond. Once at least half of those partners are active, the team starts seeing data in real time and can begin making decisions.

Getting to that point though took deliberate rehearsal. Since more than 80 percent of Colmena66's staff end up handling tasks outside their normal roles once a disaster hits, the organization has built in a short onboarding session every May and June that reminds the team how the platform works and who is responsible for sending emails or calling partners.

"This is something that happens often without notice, like the earthquakes, and you need to pivot your team right away," Samuel said. "We need to have some sort of process that they're already familiar with."

Given its short existence—it launched in August—Stay Open Oahu doesn't have these kinds of rehearsals yet. Instead, Alyssa's team has created defined roles, a channel for goodwill, a way to test assumptions, and a fix for the information gap that caught them mid-launch.

They subsequently defined roles and coordinated partners. On Oahu, Alyssa's team built its role around a gap other agencies weren't positioned to fill:

"We have sister agencies in the city that do that work, and even at the state level, but their focus really is on individuals, on policy for sustainability, and on infrastructure. Businesses are part of disaster management, but that's not their core focus. And because of our already established connections to the business community, to resource partners who support businesses, it felt like a natural fit for us to be able to come in and build this system of support mostly preparing businesses and helping them mitigate the impacts of disaster."

The team also identified partners that had never thought of themselves as part of the ecosystem at all. The National Weather Service's Hawaii office is now one, for example, serving businesses that depend on coastline and ocean conditions to plan their operations. Before Alyssa's team reached out, they "hadn't thought of themselves as an entrepreneurial support organization," she said. "Then they realized that they do have a place in the ecosystem."

Samuel said his team has “meetups with our resource partners, at least four a year," with at least one meeting dedicated specifically to getting ready for the next disruption.

Louisiana formalized the same thing at the state level, through its Business Emergency Operations Center. When asked what that center solves that individual organizations can’t solve alone, Heidi offered: "Collaboration number one. You can't depend on the government alone … it’s a partnership between the public side and the private side that comes together to support our communities, our small businesses through a disaster."

They coordinated scattered goodwill. Stay Open Oahu exists largely to map the resources that are available for disaster resilience and recovery. The platform collects resources in one place, Alyssa said, because goodwill without a channel turns into what she’d seen happen on Oahu: businesses and neighbors "quickly setting up something" on their own, with the people who need it most often unable to find it.

Samuel's team built a parallel solution around media. Colmena66 has a standing team dedicated to finding radio, TV, and community channels, ready with "an email address, a phone number, a call to action," so that when reporters call asking how they can help, the answer is already prepared.

They gave businesses a tool to test their readiness. Stay Open Oahu's disaster assessment scores a business on both preparedness and mitigation, across everything from hurricanes to cyberattacks to public health emergencies.

Alyssa said, "Disaster preparedness isn't something businesses really love to think about in the day-to-day," so giving them "a place to start of where maybe their biggest vulnerabilities are" keeps an overwhelming task from feeling impossible. Some of the recommended steps are deliberately small by design, like taking a video of inventory before a hurricane watch.

Colmena66 developed a preparedness quiz, built with FEMA and Puerto Rico's manufacturing extension office, that scores a business and points it toward help.

"If you're lacking in A, B, and C, you should give us a call," Samuel said, “to see how we can better match you with the right resource at the right time.”

Louisiana’s approach isn’t as formal. Heidi’s team addresses preparedness as part of conversations they’re already having with business owners. For example, they are "part of our conversations when we're putting loan packages together," she said.

They made resiliency a routine topic instead of a one-time pitch. When the Maui wildfires opened a window on disaster resiliency, Alyssa's team didn't let it close. They spent roughly a year surveying businesses island-wide on their level of awareness and preparedness.

Heidi's team made the same shift permanent in Louisiana, making disaster planning part of their "own normal operations, our normal conversations with businesses … we practice what we preach."

They fixed the information problem directly. Colmena66's answer to survey fatigue was reciprocity. Partners who distributed a shared survey rather than one specific to their organization could access the results as they came in. "One response in, it was automatically displayed in the dashboard," Samuel said, a design meant to make sure partners "were getting value for their efforts.”

Heidi's team fixed its version of the problem with a new standing practice: "One of the things we practice as an organization is to consistently update our emergency contact list," she said, so the organization can never again lose track of its own people the way it did after Katrina and Rita.

Oahu's version of this fix started almost by accident. "When we launched Oahu Business Connector, which is our SourceLink platform, we knew that we wanted to build disaster resilience in there somewhere," Alyssa said. "We weren't really sure how or where, and then we did the thing that we tell businesses not to do. We put it on the back burner.”

An EDA grant later let the team expand the idea into its own microsite, Stay Open Oahu.

"We were midway through launching Stay Open when the Kona Low storms hit, and we were literally on the phone calling all of our partners asking, 'What are you doing? Who's out there? Do you know anybody who's doing any resources?'" Alyssa said. "We didn't have it in place ahead of time of the disaster. So that was a real-time example of why this program was going to be so important."

Confusion about who was distributing which resources to which businesses led Alyssa’s team to build a set of surveys by funding source—one each for businesses, individuals, and farmers and ranchers. Accompanying this was a statement of what the team was and was not distributing.

Who Gets Left Out Without a System

Alyssa's account of the storms on Oahu describes how disasters don't affect every business evenly, and neither does access to help. For example, geography itself creates economic consequences that have nothing to do with a business's own preparation, affecting businesses that were never physically touched.

After the Kona Low storms damaged the North Shore, a public safety campaign urged visitors to stay away while the area recovered. But the campaign came with a side effect: Businesses outside the damaged zones didn't receive the tourists they count on right at the time when spring break traffic shifts many of them from the red to the black.

The businesses with the fewest existing relationships are the ones most exposed, because they're the last to hear what's available and the last to be able to act on it. That is the real argument for building a system instead of adding another resource. A resource list assumes every business starts from equal footing to find and use it. A navigated system is built to notice the gap between who's connected and who isn't—and then works to close it.

Start Building Yours

If you’re interested in building a disaster resiliency framework in your community, let's have a conversation.

SourceLink works with ecosystems at every stage of this process, and there is more than one way in. Samuel said Colmena66's first attempt "wasn't perfect," and Alyssa's team was still building Stay Open Oahu when the Kona Low storms arrived. Neither needed a finished plan to begin. SourceLink offers three starting points, depending on where your ecosystem stands:

• A disaster readiness consultation for ecosystems that want to understand where their gaps are before deciding next steps.
• An ecosystem preparedness audit for communities that already sense where the gaps are and want a structured assessment to confirm them and set priorities.
• A framework walkthrough call for teams ready to see how a system like Stay Open Oahu or Colmena66's dashboard could translate to their own partners, geography, and risks.

REACH OUT to us so we can help you determine which approach fits.

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