Before the Storm: A Different Way to Think About Corporate Disaster Giving

Featured on Bright Harbor with insights from our CEO Jim Starr.

---

Ask any corporate giving officer what their disaster response strategy looks like and you’ll usually hear some version of the same thing. They have partners they trust, a matching gift program ready to go, and funds they can push out fast when something hits. Which is exactly the problem, according to Jim Starr, CEO of America’s Charities. By the time companies are pushing, the window to do the most good is mostly closed.

Starr spent years at the American Red Cross leading volunteer management before moving to America’s Charities, where his organization recently crossed $1 billion raised through workplace giving since 1980. Most of his days now are spent saying the same quiet thing to corporate partners over and over: fund the work before the event, not after it.

“In a disaster, speed and availability are crucial,” he said. “How fast can a relief effort get stood up? How fast can you get people and supplies to the impacted area? How fast can you move dollars to those impacted? And having those things ready, and by ready, I mean funded, is absolutely critical.”

The logic lands. The calendar doesn’t. As Starr put it, nothing spurs action like a burning platform, and the relief sector has spent decades watching corporate dollars arrive in a predictable rush after the cameras show up.

The money shows up. It just shows up too late.

Ask any corporate giving officer what their disaster response strategy looks like and you’ll usually hear some version of the same thing. They have partners they trust, a matching gift program ready to go, and funds they can push out fast when something hits. Which is exactly the problem, according to Starr of America’s Charities. By the time companies are pushing, the window to do the most good is mostly closed.

Starr spent years at the American Red Cross leading volunteer management before moving to America’s Charities, where his organization recently crossed $1 billion raised through workplace giving since 1980. Most of his days now are spent saying the same quiet thing to corporate partners over and over: fund the work before the event, not after it.

“In a disaster, speed and availability are crucial,” he said. “How fast can a relief effort get stood up? How fast can you get people and supplies to the impacted area? How fast can you move dollars to those impacted? And having those things ready, and by ready, I mean funded, is absolutely critical.”

The logic lands. The calendar doesn’t. “Nothing spurs action better than a burning platform,” Starr said, describing the pattern he’s watched for years. “The flood of resources pours in in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.”

Operating in the unknown

The case for pre-disaster readiness has always been strong. What’s changed is how much of the downstream system companies can count on being there when they need it.

A lot of corporate disaster programs were designed around a set of assumptions that used to be relatively stable. A federal disaster declaration would come through in a predictable window. Federal dollars would flow. Employer Emergency Assistance Funds (EAFs), structured around federally qualified events, would activate in lockstep. Workplace giving programs like the Combined Federal Campaign would quietly raise hundreds of millions a year in the background. None of those assumptions are broken, exactly. But none of them are as firm as they used to be either.

FEMA is in the middle of a period of transition, and the operational effect on Starr’s world is less about any single policy change and more about uncertainty itself. “What we’re seeing happening with the changes at FEMA, it’s impacting things like the amount of time it takes to get a disaster federally declared,” he said. “Which as you know impacts the timing and the amount of government assistance that can be provided to those who’ve been impacted.” For companies whose EAFs are structured to activate only on a federal trigger, that ambiguity stalls the very thing the fund was built to do: get help to employees fast.

The Combined Federal Campaign sits in a similar unknown. The program, which has raised hundreds of millions for nonprofits over its history, may not run. “That could be a significant blow to the nonprofit sector at large,” Starr said, “but also all of those organizations that are involved in disaster relief.”

The through line is that companies can’t build a modern disaster response around infrastructure they can’t predict. Which is why Starr’s team has started helping clients rewire the triggers themselves. Rather than waiting on Washington, they’re pointing companies toward state-level declarations as qualifying events. “The states are much more agile and ready to declare an emergency event than the federal government is,” Starr said. That matters most for the smaller events that rarely make national news. “We saw it a while back in California where assistance was delayed. But where we also see it is in these kinds of smaller disasters. A lot of those are the winter storms or tornadoes and things of that nature. And frankly, they’re just not getting to the federal level or federal declaration.”

The shift is the same core idea applied one layer deeper: if you want help to move fast, you build the mechanism that moves fast, and you don’t tie it to anything you can’t control.

What companies doing this well actually do

The pattern Starr sees in the companies that stand out isn’t about bigger checks. It’s a different posture toward the work.

They treat disaster preparedness as part of their ongoing giving, not something they switch on when CNN shows up. They build campaigns that can activate at the first threat of a storm rather than the first images of damage, and they pair them with matching gifts to multiply what employees contribute. They vet and train volunteer teams in advance, because as Starr noted, you can’t show up with a hundred employees and expect a relief organization to absorb them on the day of. “They have to be ready to go when that disaster strikes.”

And they fund Emergency Assistance Funds for their own people. This one matters more than it tends to get credit for.

“Not only is it helping the employees that have been impacted by the disaster, and not only helping the company by helping their employees, it’s actually helping the broader community,” Starr said. The logic is almost counterintuitive. Employees with access to a company fund aren’t competing for scarce community relief dollars, which means those dollars reach people with nowhere else to turn.

The companies that do all this well tend to know their local disaster ecosystem well. They know which nonprofits operate in their markets, who the vulnerable populations are, and what the recovery timeline looks like months after the news cycle has moved on. “They’re engaged with that community before, during, and after a disaster,” Starr said. “It’s more than just writing a check.”

The harder problem

Stepping back from any individual company’s program, Starr sees a broader gap the sector hasn’t solved for. There isn’t, at the moment, a clear national authority for disaster relief the way there arguably once was. “I’m not sure that it’s FEMA at the moment. It has been in the past. And frankly, I’m not 100 percent sure it really should be,” he said. The space, as he described it, is “a little fragmented.”

He does see real opportunity for locally rooted organizations to fill more of that ground. “Those that are closest on the ground know where the needs are greatest. They also know the network that’s in place to be able to provide assistance and can get those activated a lot faster.” The catch, he said, is visibility. “It is a lot harder for smaller, more locally based organizations to be known to those larger corporate and foundation funders.”

Which circles back to attention, the quiet constant in every part of this conversation. “No one really pays attention to the incredible work of the disaster relief sector until a disaster strikes,” Starr said. He pointed to Hurricane Helene, where the work continues in communities most of the country has long since stopped thinking about. “There are still devastated and impacted communities that need a lot of work and a lot of assistance. And no one really knows about it other than those that are directly involved.” Even the start of hurricane season barely registers. “There’ll be a little bit of a flurry of stuff, maybe an article in USA Today, and other than that, you’ll hear nothing until a hurricane’s within striking distance.”

For emergency managers, insurers, and corporate partners, the practical message is narrower than the cultural one. The federal picture will keep shifting. The news cycle will keep moving on. The infrastructure that moves fastest during a disaster is the infrastructure that was already in place before it started, and the companies building that infrastructure now are the ones whose people and communities will be standing first when the next event arrives.

---

To read the full article by Bright Harbor, click here.