Barry Shade, CWS Associate Director for U.S. Disaster Response, talks with a participant at an April 2014 Sandy recovery resource fair hosted by the American Red Cross in New York. CWS was among presenters and exhibitors at the event. Photo: Carol Fouke-Mpoyo / CWS
As communities along the U.S. East Coast mark the second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, Church World Service continues to support the long-term recovery.
Currently CWS is preparing a major presentation to a Nov. 13 forum for an expected 50 to 60 leaders from 14 long-term recovery groups for counties and cities across New Jersey. The event will be held in Toms River, Ocean County, the hardest hit city and county in New Jersey.
Thousands of homeowners across the state still need help to repair, rebuild and/or elevate their Sandy-battered homes. Long-term recovery groups bring community-based partners together to help struggling disaster survivors to reach a “new normal” in safe homes.
It will be the third forum organized by the New Jersey Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster for Sandy long-term recovery groups. NJ VOAD’s Hurricane Sandy Recovery Coordinator Kelly Higgs said the Sandy recovery community is “coming to a crossroads.
“More than half of the state’s 14 long-term recovery groups expect to close down in the next six to nine months, either because of lack of funding or because they have concluded their work,” she said. “The other LTRGs are in this for the next three to seven years.”
At the Nov. 13 forum, CWS will bring its expertise in the life cycle of LTRGs, in this case how to close them down and how to keep strengthening their communities’ disaster preparedness and resiliency. Barry Shade, CWS Associate Director for U.S. Disaster Response, and CWS Emergency Response Specialist Sandra Kennedy-Owes will represent the agency at the day-long forum, which will also include an exercise in strategic planning for the LTRGs that are still facing years of work.
Among people planning to participate is Patrick Weaver, who chairs the Union County, N.J., Superstorm Sandy Long-Term Recovery Group.
“When we started, I had experience running a small business but not a disaster recovery effort,” he said. Weaver said a CWS long-term recovery training in January 2013, less than three months after the storm, “gave me a starting place. Without it, I wouldn’t have felt equipped at all.”
The Union County LTRG has gone on to help scores of households with their Sandy-related unmet needs, and expects to help scores more before completing its work in June 2015. “Concurrently, we’ve participated with others in four meetings to explore the possibility of a county VOAD,” Weaver said. “So the CWS session at the upcoming forum will be especially timely for us.”
The forum is the most recent example of CWS’s support for Superstorm Sandy long-term recovery.
During the past two years, CWS has supported long-term recovery of Sandy-affected communities in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and West Virginia with 17 major, on-site long-term recovery trainings, workshops, forums and consultations.
CWS staff also have provided ongoing mentoring of recovery work in these and other states up and down the East Coast. A full-time Sandy response specialist attended more than 100 community and long-term recovery organization meetings in New York and New Jersey during nine months on the CWS U.S. disaster response staff.
Since the storm hit in October 2012, CWS also approved 15 start-up and sustainability grants for long-term recovery groups in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and West Virginia, totaling $75,000. And the agency contributed 19,500 School Kits, 18,520 Hygiene Kits, 12,720 Baby Care Kits, 11,910 CWS Blankets and 3,693 Emergency Cleanup Buckets – all assembled and donated by local congregations across the United States – with a total value of $1,289,663.
CWS’s Superstorm Sandy response is funded by the agency’s member communions and their members, with additional support from a grant from the American Red Cross.
Funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is supporting NJ VOAD work with the Sandy long-term recovery community through December 2016, Higgs said, including the Nov. 13 workshop and filming of the CWS presentation.