Unfortunately the CARD mission and efforts were discontinued due to a lack of sustained funding. For those who are interested, you can still view the the CARD website archive.
Before joining CARD in April 2000, Jones worked for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, managing projects supporting nonprofits and access and functional/special needs issues. She was the acting executive director of Northern California Disaster Preparedness Network, a five-year funding initiative designed to address emergency preparedness and disaster response for agencies serving multi-ethnic, at-risk, and other diverse communities. For nearly 10 years she worked in advertising and marketing research at the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York City.
Jones responded to series of questions from Emergency Management about her experiences in establishing CARD as a leader in nonprofit disaster preparedness. She also shares the challenges of working within the larger emergency management community, while sometimes being seen as competition by other nonprofits and state and local emergency management agencies.
Q: What were the origins of CARD and how did the organization get started?
CARD started as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Three community agencies — Eden Information & Referral, BOSS, and the Emergency Services Network — came together in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to address the unmet needs of their consumers and clients. In 1989, we learned something that communities still struggle to accept today: Disasters disrupt the provision of essential services, and that disruption causes exponential suffering and hardship that no amount of post-disaster response from emergency services agencies can overcome.
Elder care, day care, faith agencies, food banks, treatment facilities, day and outpatient programs, and a host of other entities are the trusted providers of everyday essential services for tens of thousands of local residents. Over time, working closely with these agencies, we learned why preparedness and response offerings continued to fail our diverse communities. Our focus became finding solutions and closing the gap between government and the entities that provide essential services.
Q: What were the guiding principles that governed the establishment of CARD?
Initially CARD was about working with government and nonprofit partners to ensure a more coordinated and unified response to disasters. Over time, with many disasters both large and small, it became clear that a coordinated response for many hundreds of untrained and disconnected agencies was not possible without a new plan to move forward. There was a distinct and long-standing absence of a shared language and framework for a united, communitywide response.
Q: CARD managed to survive and thrive longer than any agency attempting to address the issue of readiness for nonprofits and their more vulnerable constituents. What made CARD fundable for so long?
Finding financial backing was a great challenge, particularly in the beginning. When I came on board as the interim executive director in 2000, CARD was near closing for lack of available funding. My first task was to speak with longtime partners, funders, and our nonprofit service providers. There was great appreciation for CARD and our efforts to keep preparedness and planning alive for nonprofits. However, few funders were supporting nonprofit readiness, much less actively looking to innovate or alienate partners in emergency management. The greatest support came from two people at the Office of Emergency Services, Coastal Region, Rich Eisner (regional administrator), and Lynn Murphy (deputy regional administrator). Lynn was my mentor and she recruited me to fill the executive director role at CARD. She was considered the godmother of the fledgling nonprofit preparedness movement, and she knew that the operational areas in the Coastal Region were entirely unable to address readiness and response for diverse communities without an on-the-ground partner making the in-roads and partnerships happen.
CARD worked with our partners at Coastal Region OES and a few cities to leverage other dollars and build more word-of-mouth support. Ultimately we developed offerings that local agencies and businesses were willing to fund. With increased exposure for CARD, and the new tools and approaches we were creating, more jurisdictions requested presentations and adopted our language and tools. When 9/11 happened, CARD's community-inclusive and lower-cost solutions gained popularity.
Q: How did the events of 9/11 and the advent of homeland security funding impact CARD over the years?
I think I could write a book on just the topic of what we learned about readiness and vulnerable communities from 9/11 and the creation of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. One obvious lesson is that it's virtually impossible for local government agencies to sell the American public on planning for terrorism, when we’ve never been sold on sustainable readiness for common threats like earthquakes, floods and fires.
The sudden influx of significant homeland security funding shifted local government priorities and mandates. Jurisdictions moved to fulfilling those mandates, achieving their targets and buying items from approved lists. The significantly less sexy but exponentially more needed activity of building long-term mutually supportive relationships with prepared local service providers still takes a back seat.
Q: What is your best advice for agencies working on business continuity planning?
For anyone truly committed to effective continuity planning, I advise them to rethink and retool their efforts to make actions both mission-centric and immediately beneficial to the entities engaged. Business continuity planning for its own sake or requirements, or just with the hope of avoiding future loss, usually results in compliance-level, disconnected activities. Without a faster and more meaningful return-on-investment, it becomes expense without benefit. How many organizations have binders and brochures, plans and policies, but no sustained commitment or capacity to respond?
Q: What remaining gaps are you most concerned about leaving unresolved?
An enormous unresolved issue, which is true across the country, is that local government jurisdictions do not have the ability to appropriately and sustainably address preparedness, response, and continuity planning — even for the entirely able, well resourced, English-speaking masses. Most jurisdictions build on this long-standing weakness by occasionally adding programs for our more vulnerable/less resourced communities (currently labeled as having access and functional needs.) Despite overwhelming evidence proving that the traditional approaches have not yielded sustained success, as a nation we persist with using the same framework of "preparing for disasters" and planning for post-disaster recovery. While "disasters" generate clicks online, and they trigger actions for entities with related missions, mandates and muscles, they are a tragically ineffective framework for getting the sustained buy-in and resources to create a vibrantly resilient society.
Funders and donors have been conditioned and actively pressured to fund and support particular entities to offer readiness-related services; after investing millions in a particular preparedness paradigm for many decades, funders are often resistant to change. It's rare for funders to delve into the efficacy of established government-sanctioned approaches.
Emergency managers are most frequently generalists in serving the “general public.” CARD served as specialists for a wide range of diverse communities.
Our region no longer has an agency with specialization in vulnerable and at-risk communities, nor do we have an agency acting as the single point of coordination for the many thousands of nonprofits and faith agencies that make up the complex safety net for tens of thousands of residents whose needs cannot be addressed by traditional agencies.
Q: What of CARD’s accomplishments are you most proud of?
All of us at CARD, including our partners, took pride in several accomplishments:
• We created viable, sustainable solutions for communities long-alienated by traditional approaches.
• We assisted and observed agencies change their culture away from binders, brochures and disaster conversations, to making readiness an integral part of how they serve their communities; how they empower their consumers and staff.
• We rewrote, retooled and reconfigured the Incident Command System such that it became one of our most popular offerings, and it allowed even the most vulnerable or underfunded groups to embrace the standardized language and framework for how we respond to disasters in this country.
• We worked with hundreds of agencies across the country to create new tools, approaches and resources – which specifically provided the greatest result for the smallest investment of resources.
Q: What opportunities exist for FEMA to take on the role that CARD played?
FEMA will have to determine its role in supporting local community initiatives. We enjoyed a great relationship with our local FEMA team, but they were understaffed, without budget, and they faced many limitations regarding what they could do or embrace. CARD had extreme flexibility; we were designed to be nimble and responsive to virtually any group seeking preparedness and response solutions. FEMA’s agility has limitations; for example, sometimes FEMA staffers are unable to support hyper-localized efforts, especially if the message doesn't conform to standardized government campaigns.
What messages do you have for state and local emergency managers about how to work in concert with the range of nonprofits that some might consider "in their space?"
First, I'd ask local emergency managers to be brutally honest and ask whether they are willing to speak truth to power. They must acknowledge that there is no way for local government agencies to address the ever-changing needs of their increasingly diverse community. All players in this shared space must accept our interdependence. To have genuine hopes of success, emergency managers must actively welcome, incorporate and engage diverse partners in all aspects of emergency management.
Q: What are some of the key messages that CARD used in your community outreach efforts?
At CARD, we created different outreach messages for different communities, but we also crafted universally appealing messages to be shared with virtually all communities. All communities are urged to reject fear- and threat-based messages. We reminded most communities that preparedness is not about the disasters. Preparedness is about being ready to mobilize assets to be able to accomplish their goals, quickly and effectively, whether those goals are related to disasters or to more positive aspirations. We worked with communities to create messages that motivate and inspire micro-communities. While this flies in the face of the traditional approach of standardizing readiness messages, it entirely aligns with how private-sector companies change, niche and nuance messages to effectively target specific communities.
Q: What was your relationship with other nonprofits, like the American Red Cross, and how did you coordinate or avoid duplication of efforts?
In recent years, everyone on the CARD team enjoyed a supportive relationship with our local Red Cross partners. For many years this was not possible. In the beginning, successive Red Cross managers related to CARD as unwanted interlopers and a threat, something to be barely tolerated, when CARD was a mostly unfunded volunteer agency. But as CARD grew in popularity, and then some of the few longtime funders began to support CARD and the nonprofit readiness movement, the competition for funds grew even more heated. In hindsight, it is clear that the Red Cross was always in an unsustainable position, and they could never actually address all aspects of preparedness, response and recovery for all communities. It wasn't until they reached that level of clarity and honesty of their own limitations, both locally and nationally, that they could see us as more than dangerous competitors, drawing resources from their agency. That’s when partnership became possible.
Duplication of services remains an issue across the region, as multiple entities periodically have short-term interest in this topic, and many one-time grants are made to agencies to address some “unmet” need. This, added to turnover in emergency management and in local government leadership, allows for these “random acts of readiness” and “senseless acts of planning” to continue.
Q: What led to the demise of CARD? Are there lessons for others from your experiences?
The top-level, easiest-to-understand-and-explain cause is the lack of funding and the politics that create that condition. There is a fundamental disconnect between what local government is willing and able to provide, what is actually funded, and what is needed by service providers and the vulnerable constituents they serve. In the world according to the National Incident Management System and the Standardized Emergency Management System, each Operational Area is ultimately responsible for ensuring a consistent level of readiness in their community. Over the years, even as the need continued to grow for preparedness in general, and the unique approach CARD offered in particular, deep cuts have continued to weaken our government partners. The Coastal Region Office of Emergency Services, the office that nurtured and promoted CARD and the nonprofit preparedness movement, is now half the size it was. Steadily losing that support, having local Emergency Management Performance Grants move toward funding government staff and internal priorities, with no incentives or pressure for individual cities or other partners to support our efforts—all of this left us without the fundamental support to move forward. The service providers we supported, the people they serve, and the issues that most matter to them, are simply not the current funding priorities.
A lesson to be learned is we can indeed create communities that are prepared to prosper. We can have service providers ready, willing, and able to work alongside government partners. We can save millions of dollars, reduce liabilities, attract more dollars, and so much more. But we cannot transform readiness by consistently denying communities the appropriate tools and tailored resources they need to prepare, and we cannot continue to pretend that local government can or will make it happen with another generic preparedness program or fear-based campaign.
What mistakes did you make that you learned from and how best should others avoid doing the same?
One of the mistakes I made was feeling bound by CARD's original mission, which directed us to do all things in partnership with local government. And I was naive: I believed that once enough local emergency managers understood why traditional preparedness methods didn't work for vulnerable communities and the agencies that served them, I thought that they would want to change. We believed that if they saw how much more could be accomplished (for less money) with trained community partners, they would at least support their communities in having access to what works.
The level of barriers, the nonstop turnover, the lack of support for anything beyond generic preparedness messaging, the degree to which the nation is committed to "disaster" messages and disaster messengers all combined represented a formidable challenge. Local government entities are extremely vulnerable to the politics of preparedness. Even jurisdictions with incredible preparedness success stories were hard-pressed to continue supporting our innovative approaches. Changing to a culture of empowered readiness, and deciding to end America's disaster victim cycle, is a major undertaking. CARD needed real champions, angel investors and more private-sector partners whose financial interests would be far better served by helping to reinvent how America prepares.
Q: What advice do you have for others for promoting a better network of organizations collaborating to improve disaster resilience in a community?
My advice is this. Gather your most progressive leaders, thinkers and funders together, and decide to change the paradigm locally, and then fight for change regionally and globally. Every business can become more ready, resilient and able to mobilize assets effectively. A multitude of other benefits become available when the conversation provides immediate benefits and positive outcomes for all. CARD was in a unique position: We had multiple disasters, diversity like few communities could imagine, and we were blessed to have the dollars to go deep, rather than simply skimming the surface of this issue. For other jurisdictions, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. The successes are replicable, and the need continues to grow. If we can move beyond the politics and bureaucracy, we could prepare communities across the country to prosper.
