Thursday, December 4, 2014
Rockefeller Foundation Leverages Federal Spending for Disaster Relief
Over the past two years, everyone’s been focused on resilience in the context of Sandy-like storms, but that’s because we had a Sandy-like storm. But there are a lot of other potential and very likely things that could hit the city, and it’s equally important that the city be ready for those. For example, the natural event likely to hit New York next is a heatwave. Heat can be deadly. There needs to be a broader perspective on building resilience overall.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Army Corps of Engineers are very mature organizations, and what they can do is very tightly controlled by laws and appropriations from Congress and by oversight of the Office of Management and Budget, which has a responsibility to look carefully at how taxpayer money is being spent. These federal agencies are also big bureaucracies that have done things a certain way for a long time. And they tend to keep doing things that way, because it takes a lot of effort to do things differently. Rockefeller asks, “What needs to change, and how can we catalyze that change?”...