Before the Sirens

Somewhere in your county there is a map of what happens when things go wrong — who opens their doors, who feeds people, who knows which streets flood. Your organization is probably on that map whether you put yourself there or not.

Here is the part most nonprofit leaders miss. When a tornado, a flood, or a week-long power outage hits, people do not run to an agency they have never heard of. They run to the organization they already trust — the food pantry, the church, the youth center, the clinic. In a disaster, every trusted nonprofit becomes disaster infrastructure.

Readiness is not what you think it is. It is not a thick binder on a shelf or a job you leave to the Red Cross. For a small nonprofit it comes down to three things you can build in ordinary time: relationships with the people who coordinate response, documents you can reach when the building can't be entered, and a shared understanding of who does what in the first three days.

We are in the heart of the season — hurricanes, wildfires, heat, and the storms that took the roofs off 46 homes in one Mississippi county in May. The three communities below did the work early, before the sirens forced it. Everything here is built to help you do the same before this season tests you.

A portion of what you pay for this subscription goes to Rooted, a Madison-based nonprofit growing food access and land stewardship across Dane County — exactly the kind of trusted neighborhood organization communities lean on when a hard week arrives. Thank you for making it possible.

Baltimore Turned 17 Neighborhood Nonprofits Into Disaster Infrastructure — Without Asking Any of Them to Change Their Mission

Baltimore's Community Resiliency Hub Program starts from an observation any nonprofit leader will recognize: in a crisis, residents of under-resourced neighborhoods go first to the organizations they already know.

So instead of building new emergency facilities, the city equipped trusted, service-based community nonprofits — including faith-based organizations — already rooted in those neighborhoods, providing training, supplies, and help outfitting each site with solar panels and battery storage. Today there are 17 Community Resiliency Hubs across Baltimore. When the power goes out in a heat wave or a storm, a hub keeps its lights, refrigeration, and phone charging running — and keeps serving the people who walk in the door.

The model is spreading. Groundswell, a nonprofit that develops community solar and resilience projects, has deployed six hubs nationally with 17 more in development, together serving more than 13,500 residents; one Baltimore campus pairs a 110 kW solar installation with 372 kWh of battery storage.

Here is what makes it replicable. Your organization does not need a solar array to borrow the logic. If people already come to you on ordinary days, they will come to you on the worst day — so the question is what small additions (backup power, water, a charging strip, first-aid supplies, staff who know the plan) would let you stay open and useful when the grid or the roads fail. City sustainability offices, state energy programs, and funders like Maryland's Resiliency Hub Grant Program are actively looking for trusted organizations to equip. The trust is the scarce ingredient, and you already have it.

Call your city or county sustainability or emergency management office and ask one question: does our jurisdiction have, or want, a resilience hub program — and what would it take for our site to be part of it?

Sources: Baltimore Office of Sustainability — Community Resiliency Hub Program; Groundswell — Community Resilience Hubs Expanding in Maryland; Grist — "Baltimore is hooking up a Black megachurch with some serious solar battery power".

Hawai'i Raised $209 Million After the Fires. Then It Did Something Smarter: It Built the Next Fund Before the Next Disaster

After the 2023 Lahaina wildfire, the Hawai'i Community Foundation's Maui Strong Fund drew more than $209 million in donations from around the world and has awarded more than $141 million to over 200 organizations doing immediate relief and long-term recovery. Remarkable numbers — but the more instructive move came later, when the urgency had faded and most communities stop paying attention.

In March 2026, the foundation activated the Stronger Hawai'i Fund: a standing statewide fund for disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation, created before the next emergency rather than in the scramble after one. The lesson of Maui was that the money arrives fast but the machinery to move it — vetted grantees, relationships, criteria, staff — takes months to build from zero.

The same pattern showed up at smaller scale this spring. When the March 2026 Kona Low storms flooded parts of Maui and Moloka'i, Maui United Way moved $103,500 to ten nonprofit organizations quickly, because the grantee relationships and the regranting muscle already existed from the wildfire recovery.

Speed in disaster philanthropy is not a fundraising problem. It is a plumbing problem, and the plumbing can only be built in advance.

Here is what makes it replicable. You do not need to run a disaster fund — you need to be known to the people who will. Nearly every community foundation and United Way either operates a standing disaster fund or becomes the default vehicle when something happens, and the organizations that receive rapid-response grants are overwhelmingly the ones already on the funder's radar: past grantees, orgs with current financials on file, leaders the program officers know by name.

Ask your community foundation two questions this month: does a standing disaster or emergency fund exist for our area, and what would our organization need on file to be eligible for rapid-response support? Thirty minutes now buys you days of speed later.

Sources: Maui Now — "Hawai'i Community Foundation activates the Stronger Hawai'i Fund"; Hawai'i Community Foundation — Maui Strong Fund; Maui Now — "Maui United Way awards community-led disaster relief and long-term recovery funds".

A Tornado Destroyed 46 Homes in One Mississippi County. Affected Nonprofits Decided It Would Be the Last One They Faced Alone

In May 2026, an EF3 tornado tore through Lamar County, Mississippi — destroying 46 homes, damaging eight businesses, and injuring four people.

Local nonprofit leaders were candid afterward about what made the response work: the organizations that could help immediately were the ones whose relationships already existed. Groups that knew each other coordinated volunteers, donations, and relief in the first hours, and partners like the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team brought a mobile unit and crisis-trained chaplains alongside the local network.

Then those leaders did the thing most communities skip. Instead of filing the experience away, they began building a standing coordinated disaster response network — so the next event finds the county organized on day one, not day ten.

There is a name and a national architecture for this. Community Organizations Active in Disaster — COADs — are local coalitions of nonprofits, congregations, businesses, and agencies that coordinate preparedness and response within a county or region. They connect upward to state VOADs (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) and to National VOAD, an association of roughly 70 national nonprofit members that has spent decades refining the discipline of cooperation, communication, coordination, and collaboration in disaster.

The uncomfortable truth: in most communities, the coordination network gets built after the disaster that proved it was needed. Lamar County paid that tuition in May. Your county does not have to.

Here is what makes it replicable. A COAD is not expensive infrastructure — it is a contact list, a meeting rhythm, and pre-agreed lanes (who does shelter, who does food, who does case management) among organizations that would otherwise collide in the same church parking lot. If your county has one, joining costs an email and a monthly meeting. If it doesn't, three or four nonprofit leaders and the county emergency manager can start one — and the day to send that email is a calm one.

Sources: Our Mississippi Home — "Lamar County Nonprofits Work To Strengthen Disaster Response"; Center for Disaster Philanthropy — National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters; FEMA — Voluntary and Community-Based Organizations.

Get Your Organization Into the Room Before the Disaster Does

Every county has some version of the room where disaster response gets coordinated — a COAD, a VOAD affiliate, or the emergency manager's partner list. The organizations in that room before the event get resources, information, and assignments; the ones outside it improvise.

Action: Search "[your county] COAD" and "[your state] VOAD." If a coalition exists, email the coordinator and ask to join as a nonprofit partner — most welcome any trusted community organization, whatever its mission. If nothing exists at the county level, call your county emergency management office, introduce your organization, and ask how you would be contacted in an emergency and what role an organization like yours could play. Put what you learn in writing for your team.

ROI: Membership is free, and it is the difference between receiving supplies, volunteers, and rapid grants through an organized channel versus watching them flow past you. It also puts you on the list funders and agencies consult when relief money moves.

Time: 30–60 minutes to find and contact the right network. One meeting a month, at most, after that.

Build the Document Go-Kit Your Organization Will Wish It Had

If your building were inaccessible tomorrow — fire, flood, police tape — could you reach your insurance policy, your lease, and your payroll information by evening? For most small nonprofits the honest answer is no, because those documents live in a file cabinet or on one person's desktop.

Action: Create one secure cloud folder and load ten things: insurance policies with your agent's direct contact, your lease or deed, your IRS determination letter, your bylaws, your board roster with phone numbers, banking details and signatories, your payroll provider contact and schedule, key vendor and IT contacts, your most recent financial statements, and a sealed note on where account credentials are kept. Share access with two officers who do not work in the same building. Print one copy and keep it off-site.

ROI: After a disaster, insurance claims and disaster assistance applications stall for weeks over exactly these documents. A ready folder can move your claim to the front of the line — and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

Time: 90 minutes to gather and load. Ten minutes twice a year to keep it current.

Walk Your Building With Your Phone Recording — Your Future Insurance Claim Depends on It

After a loss, insurers pay based on what you can document, not what you remember. A nonprofit that cannot show what it owned settles for less, later.

Action: Walk every room of your space with your phone, narrating as you go — equipment, furniture, program supplies, serial numbers on anything expensive. Open closets and storage. Ten to fifteen minutes of video is enough; save it to the same folder as your document go-kit. Then call your insurance agent and ask one question: do we carry business-interruption coverage, and what would it require us to document? If the answer surprises you, ask what adding it would cost.

ROI: Adjusters pay documented claims faster and dispute them less — contents you cannot prove you owned are contents you negotiate over, often for less. A 15-minute video removes that negotiation, and the coverage question can surface a gap while it still costs a premium adjustment instead of months of lost revenue.

Time: 30 minutes, including the call. Re-record once a year or after any major purchase.

Draft the One-Page Continuity Plan Your Team Will Actually Use

Continuity plans fail in two ways: they never get written, or they get written at 40 pages and never get read. The version that works in a real emergency is one page — what we must keep doing, who does what, where we go, how we talk to each other. Run this prompt, then spend 30 minutes correcting what it gets wrong about your organization. The correction is where the plan becomes real.

Run a 45-Minute Tabletop Exercise Before Reality Runs One for You

Plans on paper hide their gaps until they are used. Emergency managers close those gaps with tabletop exercises — a guided walkthrough of a scenario, around a table, before anything is burning.

Small nonprofits almost never do this, and it is the highest-value hour of preparedness available. Run this prompt, put the output on a calendar, and give your team the gift of making their mistakes in a conference room.

Draft the Mutual-Aid Agreement That Gives You a Second Building, a Borrowed Van, and a Partner on Your Worst Day

Hospitals and fire departments formalize mutual aid; nonprofits mostly rely on goodwill and improvisation. A simple written agreement with one peer organization — we will share space, equipment, and referrals if either of us is knocked out — converts a warm relationship into an actual plan. Run this prompt to produce a draft worth taking to your counterpart, then to a lawyer for a short review before signing.

The First 72 Hours — A 30-Minute Board Walkthrough of the Three Days You Hope Never Happen

What makes it worth trying: Most nonprofit boards have discussed risk in the abstract and the first three days of a real emergency never. Yet the first 72 hours are where organizations earn or lose years of community trust — and where the absence of three named roles turns a hard situation into a chaotic one. This exercise walks the board through those hours once, calmly, so the organization meets its worst day with assignments instead of improvisation. It works because it is concrete: one named hazard, three rounds of specific questions, three names written down, and one gap assigned for repair.

How to run it (30 minutes):

1. Setup (before the meeting, by the ED): Pick the single most likely serious event for your location and operation — a tornado, a flood, a wildfire smoke week, a multi-day power outage, a building loss. One line on the agenda: "Walkthrough: the first 72 hours after [the event]."
2. Round 1 — the people (8 minutes): The event has just happened, during working hours. Ask: how do we confirm every staff member, volunteer, and on-site client is safe and accounted for — and who, by name, owns that? If the answer is "the ED, probably," ask who owns it when the ED is unreachable.
3. Round 2 — the mission (10 minutes): It is day two. Ask: which of our services must resume fastest, what do the people we serve need right now that no one else will provide, and what is our fallback if the building is out? Capture the honest gaps — this round usually produces them.
4. Round 3 — the voice and the pen (7 minutes): It is day three, and people are asking what is happening. Ask: who speaks for the organization, who is talking to the insurer and the landlord, and who can spend money on emergency needs without waiting for a board meeting — up to what amount? Write the three names and the number down.
5. Close (5 minutes): Name the single most important gap the walkthrough exposed. Assign it to one person with a 30-day deadline, and put a 10-minute report-back on the next agenda.

In-person: A whiteboard or flip chart with three columns — People, Mission, Voice — and a marker to write the names where everyone can see them.

Virtual: A shared document with the same three columns, filled in live, saved where the board and staff leadership can find it later.

Watch out for: The board that turns the walkthrough into a request for a 40-page emergency plan. Resist it. The output is three names, one spending number, and one assigned fix — a plan the organization will actually remember under stress. (Readers of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience will recognize the move: identify the risk, assign ownership, respond in proportion — before events force the conversation.)

You'll know it worked when: Any board member can answer "who does what in our first 72 hours" in one breath — and when the assigned gap is closed within the month. The deeper signal arrives later, on the day the sirens do sound, when the first call is to a plan instead of to a scramble.

The organizations in this issue share one habit: they did the unglamorous work on a calm day. Baltimore equipped its trusted nonprofits before the outage. Hawai'i built its next fund before the next fire. Lamar County's nonprofits turned a literal whirlwind into a network. None of it made headlines, and all of it decided what the headlines would say later.

If the sirens went off in your county tonight, would your organization be executing a plan — or inventing one?

See you next week.

— Ted

P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.

Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell) ​Website​ Author of ​​Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience​​​ I help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve resilience.

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