Purpose
The purpose of this activity is to learn how to create a recovery coordination organization.
Why?
Communities establish recovery coordination organizations to better organize the complex elements and activities associated with disaster recovery, and to enable the necessary elements to work together effectively. Recovery coordination organizations include human, procedural/ administrative, financial, and legal components. This may include the establishment of a community recovery organization and/or a disaster assistance center.
A recovery committee or organization is a representative and centralized decision-making body that ensures your community’s best interests are central to recovery, and that strives to make recovery as efficient and effective as possible. By bringing together the voices of all major stakeholder groups and coordinating recovery activities, the recovery organization helps to ensure that recovery is fair and equitable and proceeds in a way that is aligned with the community’s plans and strategies. It helps create both inclusion and oversight. Through the efforts of its members, recovery gaps are identified, redundancies are eliminated, synergies are created, and ultimately, needs are met.
When?
During early recovery, prior to when the community disaster response operations are demobilized. (Days 31-60)
Tips
- Recovery planning organizations are much more effective when statutory authorities exist to guide their creation, their membership, and their function. Download a Pre-disaster Recovery Planning Ordinance Template.
- Although a local government department or agency may assume recovery responsibilities in smaller events. In moderate to major disasters a new body is formed whose membership addresses a broad range of interests, skills, and capabilities present in your community.
- A structure appropriate for recovery coordination may already exist if your community was previously impacted by a disaster, or if pre-disaster recovery planning was conducted.
- The coordination team should be a “high-level problem-solving team that cuts across specialties to see the big picture and to understand how the parts fit together, comprised of people who are willing to tell top leaders when something doesn’t appear to make sense, who have good ideas, who can work together, and who can handle responsibility.” For more information, View the APA Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery Guide (Pages 127-128).
- Function- or sector-specific structures may be formed to address more specific planning and decision-making needs.
How does my community do this?
- Set up a Disaster Assistance Center (DAC), if needed. If the questions from and/or the needs of community members become increasingly complex and require subject-matter experts from a wide range of governmental and non-governmental entities, it may be helpful to set up a Disaster Assistance Center (DAC). For assistance setting up a DAC, contact your DOLA regional manager.
- Identify recovery coordination needs. The establishment of recovery coordination is often the responsibility of the community recovery leader or manager.
- Work with leadership to determine the coordination team’s size and type. The selected coordination structure should be appropriate for your community and the event.
- Determine whether a suitable recovery coordination organization exists or whether a new one needs to be established.
- Identify and recruit coordination team members. Recovery coordination will also require a significant amount of time from different government workers. The recovery leader should work with departmental managers and private and nonprofit sector stakeholders to identify team members and needed resources.
Community Call Out: Denver, Long-term Recovery Committee
A Long-Term Recovery Committee (LTRC) was established in Denver in May of 2020 to address the coordination of recovery activities for the COVID-19 pandemic. Denver’s Mayor initiated the LTRC per the City’s emergency operations plan by appointing two officials, a city council member and the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, to co-chair the effort. Membership on the LTRC included representatives from executive city departments and agencies and several nongovernmental and private sector stakeholders.
The purpose of the LTRC is to oversee and advise the mayor on coordinated recovery strategies within the City and County of Denver, including economic recovery, ongoing public health support, government operations, and city finances. The committee’s initial work occurred while the Emergency Operations Center was still activated and led by an Emergency Operations Center Director. Upon Emergency Operations Center demobilization, the LTRC began reporting to the Mayor in coordination with the Chief of Staff.
The LTRC is supported by workgroups organized around objectives listed in the community recovery plan. The purpose of these workgroups is to complete the tasks listed under their assigned objective and advise the LTRC on further actions.