The Origin Story

With the horrific collapse of Surfside’s Champlain Towers South building in 2021, The Miami Foundation saw first-hand how challenging disaster recovery efforts can be. It was difficult to nimbly mobilize funds and resources when our community needed them the most; as we found, the disbursement timeline for relief aid can often be far too delayed to make a difference. This experience left the Foundation’s leadership pondering:

“How do we take a proactive approach to disaster resilience in our community? How do we create a fund so that there’s always a dedicated source of funding to support disaster recovery, as opposed to seeking out funding the moment disaster strikes?

The evidence also validated the “preparedness-first” approach: an analysis of 23 years of national mitigation efforts shows that for every $1.00 spent on mitigation funding, $6.00 is saved on future disaster costs. Ultimately, several key partners1 came together for a united philanthropic effort that focuses on a multipronged approach to addressing disasters in Miami: The Miami Foundation’s Disaster Resilience Fund.

The Approach

In addition to our Disaster Resilience Fund, we invest in organizations that keep our community ready for a range of challenges through the Miami Strong Disaster Resilience Network, a collective of grassroots organizations across Miami-Dade County that step forward in times of need. This is not limited just to hurricanes and tropical storms; our evolving definition of “disaster” also includes extreme heat and flooding, among other threats facing Greater Miami. The nonprofits we support largely work in one of the three categories:

1. Disaster preparedness: nonprofits working to advance equitable resilience building, community education, and preparedness
2. Disaster resilience: nonprofits supporting long-term recovery
3. Disaster relief and recovery: frontline nonprofits that work on recovery and relief efforts after a disaster event

The Impact

• Since 2023, The Miami Disaster Resilience Fund has grown by 17% to about $8 million ready to activate when crisis hits our community
• In the first round of grants from the Fund, we awarded an initial investment of $178,000 to five organizations that support a network of 18 nonprofits advancing equitable resilience building, community education, and preparedness

2024 Highlights:

✅ This year saw us make a bold and innovative investment in a parametric insurance policy, making us only the second philanthropic institution in the country to do so. Learn more about this pioneering effort here.

✅ We invested $165,000 in nonprofits leading the charge on disaster preparedness in our community and partnered with Good 360 to distribute an additional $25,000 in Amazon gift cards to nonprofits preparing their communities for disaster.

✅ We deepened our data-driven approach to mapping the nonprofit disaster ecosystem by launching a survey and sharing the findings with the disaster resilience community at large. Read the findings here.

✅ We partnered with Miami-Dade County’s Office of Innovation and Economic Development to host a convening and publish a report about property insurance in Florida.

Reflections from portfolio lead Nikisha Williams, Vice President of Collective Impact (lightly edited for clarity)

“I am most proud of our approach to preparedness. It’s not just about giving out dollars in community, it’s how we prepare our staff internally, for example. We brought in Jesse Spearo from Miami-Dade County’s Department of Emergency Management to talk about what the county was seeing, and how our staff could prepare to help not only ourselves, but also our community.

I am proud that when we talk about preparedness, we are sending money to nonprofits before the storm even hits. Every time I talk about our work to other people, they are in awe of the way we are preparing for disasters. We’re doing something special here that other organizations aren’t doing.”

The lessons learned – and opportunities recognized:

1. We can be so much more impactful as a collective. Our ability to protect our community from disasters, and to act quickly and impactfully in the aftermath, is much more feasible when there’s a network of funders standing beside us.
2. We realize no two storms have the same path. No matter how prepared we are, we will always have to be flexible and comfortable charting unknown territory. Having a fund ready to activate gives us a huge advantage in helping us stay focused on other aspects of the recovery efforts when we need to show up at the frontlines.
3. We see parametric insurance as a powerful tool and opportunity. We need to come together to explore how we, and others, can activate this tool annually on behalf of our community. While its potential is great, it is also a capital-intensive investment which will demand collective investment from multiple institutions and funders in the region.
4. We recognize Community of Practice (COP) as an effective and scalable model for disaster response. Nonprofits are uniquely positioned to act as first responders when disaster strikes. We are planning to establish a COP that will decentralize resources and information across Greater Miami’s neighborhoods so that organizations can do the work they know best in the communities they know best.

For more information or questions on our Disaster Resilience work, please reach out to Nikisha Williams at nwilliams@miamifoundation.org.