The Center for Disaster Philanthropy Midwest Early Recovery Fund
“The Midwest Early Recovery Fund team uses these tools for decision-making, gut-checking assumptions, and engaging with other potential partners and funders in support of communities recovering from low-attention disasters.” - Cari Cullen, Director, Midwest Early Recovery Fund
The Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Midwest Early Recovery Fund leverages IP3 ASSESS to streamline its data collection and analysis to inform grant-making, and recovery and relief support to communities affected by natural disasters.
The Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Midwest Early Recovery Fund supports equitable, sustainable recovery from disasters in a 10-state region. The fund helps communities transition from disaster response to community-led recovery and resiliency. The region’s small, rural communities often experience “low attention” disasters, making investment and recovery resources hard to find.
Challenge
The Midwest Early Recovery Fund team uses data to prioritize investment and action in geographic areas impacted by a disaster. When a disaster hits, the team collects data regarding the impact of the disaster, and maps that against the baseline vulnerability of the affected communities and their capacity to respond. Before leveraging IP3 ASSESS, data collection was time consuming and difficult to pull together quickly to respond to disasters and make informed funding decisions. Tired of spreadsheets and manual data collection, the Recovery Fund team reached out to IP3 for assistance.
Solution
IP3 ASSESS is now a tool in the Midwest Early Recovery Fund team’s toolbox. The platform is configured with data organized by a custom disaster-response framework IP3 developed for the Fund. With IP3 ASSESS, staff are able to quickly configure affected areas upon news of a disaster. Immediately, data are aggregated and summarized for those geographies. Report templates are generated in seconds and are ready to be customized with narrative context and shared with partners and communities. The Fund also leverages the Scorecard module to score areas based on a custom set of data indicators and weighting, and organize affected areas by high/medium/low priority for funding. This has led to faster, more informed decision-making and funding for community disaster relief and recovery, as well as year-end reporting for the Fund.
IP3 ASSESS streamlines data use across the Fund’s process, from data sourcing and collection, to analysis, interpretation, and decision-making. Now, staff have accurate, timely information about low-attention disasters to make better data-driven decisions and provide consistent, up-to-date data to partners engaging and supporting communities in disaster recovery and relief.