Table 4.

Themes and illustrative quotes relating to impact of disaster preparedness and response on response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Theme	No. of Participants	Illustrative Quote
Resources
Partnerships with other CBOs	12	“And the last thing I’ll say we’re part of the local VOAD, Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. So, we have a role to help communicate, pre- and post-disaster with fellow nonprofits that are also active from the larger level, Salvation Army, Red Cross all the way down to a smaller grassroots level having those conversations with our peers in the disaster community” (Participant 7).
Disaster training	12	“Yes, we have participated in trainings for disaster preparedness within the last year. We’ve tried to see how we can transfer some of those toolkits. Because of the pandemic. Some of them we’re able to transfer and combine the pandemic with beginning of hurricane season on June 1, we’re trying to blend those together. So, we’re also still seeing ways on how we can... Again, it’s information sharing is making people aware of the precautions they should take for both the pandemic in their health as well as hurricane preparedness. In the toolkit of hurricane preparedness, besides the usual bottled water and things of that nature, we’re also now adding mask, make sure you have mask, make sure that you have sanitizer, these types of things are put into the toolkit to make sure that you’re covering both these challenges or disaster” (Participant 1).
Mental health services	8	“Well, one of the things that spawn out after Katrina, when the city and the citizens were able to come back, we had lots of mental health concerns. So, NAMI provide that contracts with different mental health agencies, mostly the clinics in Jefferson and New Orleans Community. And we created little independent projects, services committees and services resource committees, like the SAIL Program. One of the programs to come out of Katrina was the SAIL program, which I came into after I left Houston, Texas and became a certified peer support specialist. What was different, with the SAIL program, not only do we go out to the homes of clients that have been post Katrina affected with mental health concerns, we provided housekeeping, we provided rides, transit to the grocery store, to doctor appointments” (Participant 3).
Community trust	4	“Trust. I’ve only been in this role for three years, but the organization has been around for 10 years, and my board chair, who is my mentor, and my in-person has been doing this for 30+ years. People trust her, people trust me, people trust the organization, and are willing to come to the table when you’re a competitor for the betterment of the community. And it’s because of these organizations’ response to hurricane Katrina, and Rita, and all these other disasters, that was so easily able to bring them to the table for COVID, and they feel like there is value in communicating, and I’m the only one that can do it” (Participant 24).
Response framework	2	“I think it gave us a framework for how to respond, and while, certainly you have to adapt with the COVID in mind, without that framework, we’d have to start from scratch” (Participant 16).
Healthy donor base	1	“If they’re able to respond to COVID. Probably like a healthy like donor base. And I think Katrina brought in a lot of money for habitat locally. And so, however that’s been managed over the last 15 years has got us to the point that we’re at” (Participant 2).
Lessons learned
How to bring people together	6	“I think that the experience from Katrina of everyone coming together and working collaboratively, I mean, hundreds of residents doing this work, both created the expectation that the neighborhood association would be responsive to future disasters, but also the spirit of we come together when something like that happens. I have to say, we’ve been really, really privileged to have a lot of volunteers within the neighborhood come out to support the emergency feeding programs. I’ve had residents, week after week after week for literally months now, who are staffing the food pantry or staffing the hot meal deliveries or distributions, and that’s because I think there’s really an understanding of we look out for each other, and we have an ethos that if I’m supporting another Broadmoorian, it’s better for me too. It’s always better for all of us. So, I think we did learn a lot about how to bring people together in Katrina that we’ve been using in COVID-19, and I think that technology has also made that much more possible, had decreased some of those barriers” (Participant 18).
Response coordination	4	“There’s the Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security that runs emergency preparedness and disasters. And so, I give my support to them, but they run that, they maintain that on their own. The hospitals, because we live in south Louisiana, because of hurricane Katrina and all of the other disasters, are already thinking about and preparing that. So, the role that I play is when the disaster hits, I am a conduit to make sure that people are talking, we’re all coordinating, we’re meeting, to ensure that we’re all on the same page.” (Participant 24).
Connecting survivors to resources	4	“In other cases, we’d find out about people in the 2016 flood who’d been living in mold for months. So, connecting them to resources, getting them out of that situation and getting them healthcare is a critical type of coordination. So, all of that is to say, although COVID certainly looks different than those other disasters, we followed the same protocol, and immediately began trying to get our staff and others safe gathering together with the stakeholders and starting to put into place funding and programs that we thought would be most impactful on the ground” (Participant 17).
Increased confidence in ability to respond	4	“Well, I think all the work we’ve done prior to COVID-19, from Katrina particularly, up until this time has gotten the community to better understand that term resilience. It’s not a new term, or the definition of it is not new. People are using it more often, but people are feeling more confident that they can deal with certain challenges. And in those challenges, they’re feeling more confident that we can get through this” (Participant 1).
Information sharing	2	“I think when it comes to storm related issues or anything else, that may be coming up. We share the same information, like once we hear something that we put out what’s needed to be done in order to maintain, in order to stay safe and how you need to prepare for what’s getting ready to occur. We just share this all, right now, is just this day by day” (Participant 6).
Importance of assessing community needs	2	“I think it helped us realize that we can’t just jump in and provide what we think is necessary. Everybody after a disaster, Oh, great, let’s do such and such, but they’re not asking the people on the ground that are in need. So, it helped us to start asking questions of the people around us, what is it that you need? What could we help? Would it be useful if we did things? And before we actually jumped in and started doing them. And it was a little bit easier, I think, getting coordinated, getting people to work together” (Participant 9).
Avoid mission creep	2	“So, for us it became very obvious we have to stay in our lane and then be clearly defined on that and so again with the city and the city trying to … and I’m not saying who’s right or who’s wrong. I mean everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong in that and so it just causes some misunderstandings to happen and so in a relationship that needs to be built on trust, there was some challenges with that in the past and so for us, my lesson was stay in your damn lane and do that, do it well. Know what you do, own what you do and do it to the best of your ability and just do that. Again, you can add programs, widen your scope, no one’s against that but it’s one of these things where I don’t think people should be chasing money all the time, these one off and these organizations … I’m going to use a national organization, the American Red Cross, not the south east, I’m not talking about here, but the American Red Cross, they’re infamous for mission creep, infamous for that. Just look at what they do, you’re thinking, “How do they do this? And they do this too and they do this? What is all of this?” I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but they do have a lot of mission creep” (Participant 17).
Reliance on technology	1	“You might say COVID 19, or I should say the whole Katrina experience of losing everything, really prepared us and put us well on the path of being a much more portable group of people down here in this region. While there’s still a technological and computer-based divide of some kind, I do find there are a lot more people these days who have laptops, who have the cellphones. You can get a message to them some kind of way, text messaging or an email or something, or any of the other newest platforms that we now have, Slack and you know” (Participant 14).
Mental health self-care	1	“Yes. Because lots of our consumers who’ve experienced Katrina, when COVID came in, they knew they had to take their medications, they knew they had to keep in contact with their resources, like case managers, social workers. And we also knew, if you’ve been through Katrina, the number one, a must thing, is to take care of your mental health, whether that is to stay inside, make sure you have groceries, make sure your medicines are stocked up from the pharmacy and make sure you have a phone. They have outer contact with somebody, to have contact, while you’re going through the COVID-19 in quarantine” (Participant 3).
Staying connected to clients	1	“And so, having had those experiences, I do think that each of the local programs have adjusted their ability to stay connected to the children they’re assigned, regardless of what else may be going on in the world. Because that was their experience with Katrina, they lost touch. They lost that connection, and so they’ve all set up systems that will allow them to maintain contact with their volunteers, and the volunteers with the children, regardless of what else is going on in the world around them. And that has helped children” (Participant 20).
How to recover in an under-resourced community	1	“So, I think South Louisiana is very unique in the diversity of disasters we’ve had. Hurricanes are predictable in New Orleans, flooding happens. We have perpetual work around those two areas. But things like a oil spill or obviously, tornadoes are hard to prepare for because they just kind of pop down and we have to respond to those, COVID. As far as the community impact of those, we know that there’s data that backs up the fact that 53% of our community are either at or below poverty or one single disaster away from slipping into poverty. Meaning that could be in blue skies, a car breaking down, a big bill falling in their lap, a big expense and a disaster we know that’s a flood at home, big expense. Interviewee: You know that’s losing your income, hurt your pocketbook and COVID. So, the trick I think with COVID is the tale of this disaster is going to be longer than we would like to have to see. With a tornado or something more tangible and physical we can sort of control response around a weather event. Controlling response around a mix of a health and economic disaster is a lot harder to predict the long-term arc of so we usually say in a disaster, there’s short term, mid-term, long term and then mitigation. Ideally, mitigation happens before any of that stuff and the cycle. And so how we recover is one variable for our community that are already highly under-resourced and then how we would mitigate going forward. So how we would prevent a similar event in the future from having a disastrous effect on our economy or our workforce, on our businesses is a whole another conversation to have but it’s a lot more complicated than building, a levee building a flood wall, clearing the storm drains and those tangible components. Interviewee: It’s really a lot of from the ground up rethinking what a healthy, equitable economy looks like for all people. Much like we’re having a conversation about what a healthy equitable police force or security would look like for our community. So, there’s a lot of those conversations which are overlapping and kind of inter playing off of each other. But we constantly think about what each disaster brings, recognizing that it affects all people, but it affects people in different ways. If you have a cushion or insurance or if you don’t because you never have those resources to even plan and prepare to begin with how that affects different people in our community differently, recognizing the entire community is affected. Because we lose our workforce, people have to evacuate and not come back, and we lose students which affects the school system and on and on and on” (Participant 7).