Enhancing equity through disaster recovery compliance
The federal government and HUD’s disaster recovery compliance requirements were created to expand opportunities for underserved communities and marginalized populations, not make recovery more difficult. But, often, these regulations can make grantees feel restricted and less able to achieve equitable outcomes. Here’s how to overcome that.
The federal Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program is a powerful source of flexible and customizable funding that gives local jurisdictions, territories, and states the opportunity to design long-term disaster recovery programs that best respond to their unique disaster event and unmet needs.
This flexibility is bounded by HUD regulations that have evolved over time to add protections for marginalized populations through their mission to primarily serve low-and-moderate income households. These protections include increasingly protective fair housing rules, lead safety and lead-based-paint regulations, citizen participation rules, language accessibility requirements, and job opportunities compliance.
Additionally, all programs funded with CDBG-DR must follow federal rules that cover procurement, labor standards, and environmental compliance. Often these layers of regulatory compliance can make grantees feel limited, rather than inspired by the original intent of CDBG-DR flexibility.
Disaster recovery compliance may, unwittingly, encourage CDBG-DR programs designed out of ease of documenting compliance, rather than meeting the actual needs and wants of the disaster-impacted community. This can result in programs being undersubscribed or only helping those who can meet stringent eligibility requirements that avoid triggering complex compliance rules. In the end, this typically results in programs failing to help those who most need assistance.
With decades of experience as grantee staff or supporting grantees with CDBG-DR program design and implementation, ICF staff have learned that simply checking the box for ease of compliance or designing programs to avoid compliance triggers is not the right solution for helping those continuing to struggle by the time CDBG-DR funds come along.
The challenge of timing and the importance of taking time to understand remaining needs
Core to CDBG-DR flexibility is the idea that states, territories, and local jurisdictions understand their communities and unmet recovery and mitigation needs better than the federal government. This is the heart of why HUD gives broad authority to grantees to design and implement their programs in ways that best address their impacted communities’ unmet needs. However, by the time CDBG-DR funds are available, it’s often months or even years after the disaster has happened.
With people still living in unsafe conditions, displaced, or facing increased housing costs and local governments stretched and struggling to pay for critical infrastructure repairs, there simply aren’t enough public services available to help all who need them. Businesses also face many challenges in re-opening or remaining open which makes understandable the pressure to get CDBG-DR funds out the door as soon as they’re allocated.
Unfortunately, as a result, CDBG-DR grantees might be tempted to go with what feels like the fastest and minimally compliant way to define their unmet needs and design their programs—because even the minimum requirements can take months to pull together.
The data sources that grantees use include a wide range of publicly available local, state, and federal data sets. While these data sources help paint a picture of the damages and the pre-disaster community conditions that impact how a community recovers, they can only go so far.
To ensure the data is comprehensive, HUD requires grantees to engage with other agencies, local governments, non-profits, and the public through public hearings during the program planning process—although there’s a lot of flexibility in how deep and when that engagement happens and for how long.
Meaningful and comprehensive community engagement and outreach offer one of the most important compliance opportunities to design and implement equitable programs and projects.
To achieve comprehensive, impactful engagement and outreach, we recommend employing a process that includes the following three key elements:
1. Take stock of existing, publicly available data from sources like the U.S. Census, CDC, existing analyses of impediments to fair housing, consolidated plans, hazard mitigation plans, and other community plans. Drawing from specific resources is a HUD requirement, but from a practical standpoint, it also is a great way to save time and resources by working from what’s already there.
2. Identify recovery stakeholders who have been active and included in recovery support functions and in disaster case management implementation, organizations that are championing impacted businesses, and organizations supporting culturally specific, underserved, and/or marginalized populations who have struggled to participate in other recovery programs.
3. Develop a comprehensive engagement and outreach plan by taking advantage of community toolkits released by local, state, and federal agencies. Map out how you’re going to engage community members, residents, and other stakeholders in a meaningful way. Some examples of these equitable engagement toolkits and guidebooks include:
Equity by design: from compliance to equitable outcomes
There are many compliance requirements that create opportunities to engage with and understand the core needs of impacted communities and residents and, from these opportunities, grantees can design programs that maximize all funding for those who have been unable to recover before the availability of CDBG-DR.
Implementing and documenting compliance with regulations such as language access planning, procurement, labor standards, Section 3, and fair housing can feel like added bureaucracy to any CDBG-DR program but, if approached from a lens of expanding equity and opportunity, both compliance and maximum participation are possible. Some examples of how this can work in practice are described in the table below.
Our client experience includes working with the State of California Housing and Community Development (CA HCD), and Equity First Consulting (EFC), to generate an equity and belonging toolkit. This toolkit is an appendix to the state’s CDBG grant management manual and identifies strategies and best practices for integrating equitable approaches into all CDBG compliance areas. The development of this toolkit required a strong foundation in CDBG regulations and compliance along with a common goal of expanding equity and improving program design by centering those closest to the CDBG-DR needs. This toolkit required a strong foundation in CDBG-DR regulations and compliance along with a common goal of expanding equity and improving program design by centering those closest to the CDBG-DR needs.
Moving beyond data and statistics to bring disaster-impacted survivors into the program design process ensures a far more equitable program. And, by looking at CDBG-DR program design from the perspective of the program user and gaining that perspective by including representatives of the community in the program design process, CDBG-DR programs are written to truly meet needs and drive participation.
Getting started
Don’t know where to begin? Let us help you! The best disaster recovery programs are those designed with the end user in mind, incorporating community feedback and built upon identified localized needs. Grounding your work in achieving the underlying intent of the compliance requirements can result in equitable recovery programs that provide tremendous benefits to recovering communities.
Our experts
