CHAPTER 8

Organizational Networks of High and Low Capital

It started—it literally started by the community for the community. And then little by little, the mayor’s office sent somebody down, and then they worked with us. Then Resiliency Is Us came, and they worked with us. Everybody’s been very good. The military came down, worked with us. All of them are helping us.

—Monsignor Paul, Westville Catholic Church

In this chapter I draw on my observations of and further inquiry into the relationships among local churches, FEMA, and New York State disaster relief and recovery centers as my basis for comparison across the urban areas of Westville, Eastville, Canarsie, Brooklyn, and The Rockaways. My conversational interviews were particularly fruitful in helping me gain a better understanding of how organizations come together to work on disaster response, from a bottom-up perspective. The chapter details the chain and order of events that attracted various organizations to these impacted areas, which are consequential for the relational environment of disaster assistance as illuminated in the chapters of this book. I present four models of emergence of spatialized, organizational, and institutional networks (organization agglomeration, organization isolation, organization hosting, and organization coalition) and discuss them in light of the disaster scholarship.

How Disaster Response Organizations Make Ecologies

While in the field I became fascinated with this question of response building or how and why governmental and nongovernmental organizations and local community-based organizations come together to orchestrate disaster response in different urban areas. This question became even more significant when I observed differences in organizational presence within The Rockaways and between The Rockaways and Brooklyn. What was noteworthy was the lack of governmental and NGO presence in one of the most disaster-impacted areas in Eastville. One important aspect of resource inequality across disaster-impacted urban areas is inequality in the capacity of certain areas to attract and establish a central base for relevant governmental and nongovernmental resource distribution.

My fieldwork supports what we know from the disaster literature: media coverage is important to drawing attention to and consequently drawing resources to more economically privileged urban areas over economically deprived or darker ones. However, I uncovered another response-building mechanism that helps stream pertinent information and resources to some communities at the exclusion of others. This higher-order mechanism of inequality connects institutional, organizational, and spatial levels and is crucial to creating what I describe in this book as ecologies of inequity. An ecology of inequity emerges through on-the-ground response building among disaster response organizations, which induces an emergence of an ecology of privilege in one area, while simultaneously relegating an ecology of disadvantage in a neighboring urban response area.

In Westville, I identified what I am calling organization agglomeration, a chain reaction process by which a network of large and smaller disaster response organizations becomes concentrated around a large NGO nucleus in a disaster response area. I uncovered the opposite in Eastville, where Always With You, the local community-based organization, remains outside this resource network. Resiliency Is Us established only loose, fractious relations with Always With You, which relegates the latter to what I call organization isolation. I identify another type of response building in Canarsie, namely an organization hosting where the Catholic church merely provides the space to host the local government efforts. Finally, I identify more decentralized networking among local community-based organizations and large and small churches among numerous Brooklyn urban areas, which I call an organization coalition.

Westville: Organizational Agglomeration

It is no surprise that more affluent, usually majority White, middle-to upper-class urban areas have better institutional resources than urban areas of concentrated disadvantage, which are almost always predominantly racially minoritized urban areas. What is less clear is how and why these neighborhoods accrue more institutionalized resources after a crisis than economically deprived neighborhoods that may need such resources most. By comparing the organizational relations and presence in Westville to the dearth of organizational presence and collaborative relations in Eastville, it is evident that some urban areas are better draws for large, high-capital NGOs than others.

In the disaster response area of Westville, there were mobile trucks from a variety of organizations, volunteers, food trucks, and mobile health clinics all providing essential services and resources to Westville residents. This created a “nucleus of relief” and a “busy-ness” or “buzz” in that part of Westville. I was curious as to why there was this disparity across the corollary disaster-impacted area in Eastville, which was only a few blocks away. After interviewing key embedded actors of local churches, community-based organizations, and NGOs on the scene, I realized that this was not the result of a centrally coordinated effort, but the result of a chain reaction formation of organizational ties, a key aspect of organization agglomeration.

A casual observer might assume, regarding the emergence of disaster response, that a “lead” governmental organization would solicit the help of a number of organizations and deploy them to a particular location where the need was determined to be greatest or unmet. However, I quickly learned through my interviews with church leaders who were heading major disaster response operations in Westville and also Canarsie that the process was much more diffuse and even happen-stance. I draw on my interview with Monsignor Paul, a sixty-year-old local priest of the large Catholic church and school spanning three blocks in the heart of Westville. Monsignor’s church spearheaded an effort that ended up serving, as he told me, over “ten thousand residents per day.” He explained:

MONSIGNOR PAUL: I started maybe two days after, uh, the storm. Some people came. Young people with clothing. Uh, it started with a very small room and ended up with the whole school building, and then food, and then the government kind of attached itself to us little by little.

SM: How did they contact you? The government.

MONSIGNOR PAUL: They showed up.

SM: Oh, literally?

MONSIGNOR PAUL: It started—it literally started by the community for the community. And then little by little, the mayor’s office sent somebody down, and then they worked with us. Then Resiliency Is Us came, and they worked with us. Everybody’s been very good. The military came down, worked with us. All of them are helping us.

SM: So, how did they get to hear about you?

MONSIGNOR PAUL: Uh, we were really the only ones on the Peninsula at the time doing anything. And so that’s why we ended up with ten thousand people—ten thousand people a day.

SM: Okay. And so all of the organizations that were here? I did come here a few days after the storm, and there were lots of different organizations—

MONSIGNOR PAUL: Well, they came—around that area—they came little by little. Uh, it really started by the community for the community, and then little by little, things got added on. Uh, as we worked, uh, a structure got put up maybe a week later. Uh, and then everything was added—a heating tent, and then the food, and then—whatever else we needed, we just added on to it.

SM: Okay. So, it’s not like you had preexisting relationships with organizations?

MONSIGNOR PAUL: No, no. They just—it just kind of happened. We never had anything like this before, so.

The Westville example illustrates how several governmental and nongovernmental entities ended up creating this “nucleus of relief” in Westville. Monsignor Paul describes a bottom-up process of how random acts of kindness mushroomed into a massive disaster response effort that ended up serving thousands a day. His “by the community for the community” emphasis is the classic bootstrap story that stresses the assertive actions of average White, economically privileged citizens that eventually lead to monumental achievements.

However, by comparing this process and outcome to Eastville, this is as much a story of the emergence of organizational ties and pooling of resources in one area versus another area with equal or greater need. As the monsignor pointed out, the local and federal governments had quickly supplemented Westville’s crisis capital once community efforts were already underway. How were they so successful when I had seen and heard similar “initiating actions” by small immigrant churches in Brooklyn and Always With You in Eastville without such supplementation?

Monsignor Paul’s account illustrates the creation of social capital at the organizational level, beginning with individuals within a large, well-resourced organization, in this example a Catholic church, which eventually attracted the mayor, a large NGO, and the military. The social capital literature talks extensively about the value of organizational ties in brokering the social capital of individuals (Small 2009b), but here we actually see how this occurs temporally and how embedded actors can help forge bonds across organizations. Monsignor Paul also described these emergent bonds as collaborative. This description of the collaborative and consistent presence of governmental and nongovernmental organizations by Monsignor Paul is a stark departure from the descriptions that low-capital small immigrant churches and community-based organizations in Eastville and in Brooklyn offered. Leaders of these low-capital local organizations described the disaster response experience with these entities as fragmented and episodic. Some low-capital community-based organizations even expressed less than amicable relations with large, high-capital NGOs when they sought resources from them for their communities.

My interview with Pastor Ward and Bishop Fabian, two church leaders of Caribbean background serving Canarsie and other Black immigrant communities in Brooklyn, reveals some of the challenges these local church responders and residents of majority Black areas faced. These challenges existed despite experiencing similar levels of flooding as more economically privileged White areas in New York City. These church leaders expressed dissatisfaction with the level, type, and timing of assistance the community received from high-capital organizations such as FEMA, NYS, and Resiliency Is Us. The ministers attributed the disparity in response to race as well as the fact that local officials had not done enough to sound the alarm that Canarsie had suffered a similar fate to some of the more publicized disaster areas. Bishop Fabian, who heads Brooklyn Black Church Consortium, discussed his disaster-relief work:

Good afternoon. My name is Bishop Fabian. I’m the pastor of Never Lose Hope Fellowship. We are here in Canarsie providing food and clothing to the residents who have been displaced and suffered loss from the hurricane. Unfortunately, um, they have been forgotten. They have not gotten any resources. The elected officials are not here. FEMA is really not here. FEMA is only filling out applications. There are people who have no power, who have no lights, who have no water, and this community has been forgotten, so the church has responded, and we have a lot of volunteers. We have workers here all the way from North Carolina [referring to the disaster relief supplies my family organized] and still we haven’t seen the elected officials from this area responding to this great movement.

Bishop Fabian pointed to a two-week lag in the response to this Black immigrant enclave. He lamented that FEMA, the city, and the State had not established a real presence in this community. In such a vacuum, these low-capital churches became the lifeline for their communities. I spoke with Bishop Fabian about the delay in getting assistance:

SM: What do you think is causing that disparity, because we just went to Staten Island, and we did see a lot of help get to some of the neighborhoods there.

BISHOP FABIAN: I think several things happened. One is you have to have local leadership to rise up and make noise. If you don’t make noise, you don’t get the right response, and frankly, um, there are some racial disparities. You go to some neighborhoods where there are White folks, and they’re getting it. You come to our neighborhood, and we’re not getting the resources that we need.

Bishop Fabian understands the disaster response inequality across the neighborhoods he has surveyed and the Black communities he serves in as “racial disparity.” He thinks the necessary response to such a disparity is strong, loud political advocacy. He places this burden at the feet of the locally elected officials. I spoke with Pastor Ward, who has partnered with Bishop Fabian on the disaster response efforts in Canarsie. I ask him:

SM: Has any help gotten to the neighborhood?

PASTOR WARD: Well, the help is scant in some areas and nonexistent in others. FEMA has been around, but what FEMA is doing is registering people, making sure people register with FEMA so they can get help, but what we are concerned about at West Indian Healing Church is people’s immediate primary need. What people need now.

SM: And what do people need now?

PASTOR WARD: What we’re finding is that their homes are flooded, they have no electricity, no heat, and no light. What they need is that: pumps and generators to pump the water out of their homes. They need restoration of power. You know, they need a hot meal. Some people have lost their belongings, so they need clothing. You know, so those are the things that we’re trying to—we’re trying to bring into the community, and we’re so glad that you guys are here today to assist us in doing that because what you’re doing is more than what the governmental organizations are doing. The mayor’s office, for example. In some areas what they do is bring in military food in the military package and give them out to the people, but some people have gone for two weeks without a hot meal. However, in some areas you might see, you know that they’re giving out hot meals. Resiliency Is Us is not as prevalent as we thought that Resiliency Is Us would have been, and also Saving Grace [a national relief organization].

Pastor Ward then stated that he had heard that these large nongovernmental organizations were prohibited from going to an economically deprived Black eastern part of The Rockaways.

SM: Why do you think some neighborhoods are getting help and some are not?

PASTOR WARD: Um, it all has to do with—well, according to, the official thing is, it’s priority. The other thing is, depending on which neighborhoods, the more affluent neighborhoods are being helped before. You know, again, it’s—it’s a disparity that exists in our community, and the thing that we as Black people have to live with. You know, I guess we don’t have to live with it [chuckle], but it’s a fact of life, what we have to deal with.

Pastor Ward’s analysis of the communities he serves is a bit more nuanced than Bishop Fabian’s. He attributes the disparate response, the timing and consistency of response, to wealth disparities, yet for Pastor Ward these are not separate processes. He is acknowledging the racialized patterns of wealth disparity across majority White and majority Black urban areas. White urban areas, which tend to be wealthier, receive better assistance first, “a fact of life . . . we have to deal with.”

Both Pastor Ward’s and Bishop Fabian’s accounts lie in stark contrast to the Westville organizational agglomeration model of official disaster response. Monsignor Paul and Pastor Ward both reference the mayor’s office, Resiliency Is Us, and the military as being important actors in the official disaster response in their respective neighborhoods. However, the key distinction is the kind of neighborhood presence they establish. This contrast reveals the importance of the kind of presence large NGOs establish in neighborhoods. In some locations, Resiliency Is Us’s only presence was through the visibility of their trucks as they came to drop off items to local organizations. Although media accounts and public outcry of disaster inequality across neighborhoods focus on absence or delayed deployment of organizations, it is not sufficient to assess whether organizations are present or disburse resources in communities, but whether they are stationed and visible in these communities as well as to what extent their efforts can be described as collaborative versus antagonistic or aloof with local organizations.

In the case of Westville, Monsignor Paul also pointed out that he did not seek out the collaboration his church received from FEMA and Resiliency Is Us, but that they “added themselves” to the church’s ongoing efforts. How did these organizations know about the Westville location? A crucial importance was the setting up of the make-shift structure that served as the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center. More economically privileged communities enjoy spatial privilege that communities of disadvantage lack. This church had a large multipurpose space that made pitching a large make-shift structure possible. Further investigation, including media reports, revealed that a wealthy Irish contractor who had secured large contracts in the rebuilding of ground zero after 9/11 and would later gain contracts in The Rockaway recovery through the mayor’s Rapid Repairs program put up this tent. This remained a mystery to residents and volunteers. All the residents thought was that a wealthy Irish contractor just set up the structure and left. Another source of Westville’s local crisis capital was Peninsula Circles, which also coordinated fundraising and disaster response that benefited the Westville area.

My interview with Kacie, a volunteer who began working in what would later become the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center only a few days after the storm further explains the cumulative process of how various organizations came to function within this Westville disaster response center:

KACIE: So, once they set up the tent, then the organizations would just—I was here at the center on the days that it happened. LIPPA [utility company] would come in and say, ‘We’re here. We can talk to residents. Can we have a table?’ And now here I am. Nobody. Just absolutely nobody. Oh, and Monsignor going around, and Monsignor will be like, ‘Well, ask her,’ and I’m like, ‘Ask me?’ Is it—’Ask me, why ask me?’ And I’m like, ‘Okay. LIPPA, you can set up there. FEMA, same thing.’ And we—FEMA didn’t—FEMA didn’t find this center for a month.

SM: How did FEMA finally get to you?

KACIE: That’s the point because then they finally started to see the tent, and they started to put their heads in the center and say, ‘Can we come here?’ ‘Of course, you can come here.’

Why would Resiliency Is Us decide to set up in Westville? In deciding where to set up, representatives of this large NGO would drive around to see where there was already activity. They depend on local input as well. My interview with Megan, the Resiliency Is Us’s field manager who later took over the response operations in the Westville disaster response center, revealed that there were both push and pull factors. The considerations were beyond assessing which areas were hardest hit.

SM: Some neighborhoods are visibly destroyed, but some aren’t. How do you know where to set up?

MEGAN: Um, you work really closely with community partners like local volunteers and the city. And our volunteers, we won’t—I mean, we’re human too. If we see that there’s not a need for it, we’ll report it too.

Here, Megan is saying that the input about where to set up comes from the local volunteers in an impacted area, but that Resiliency Is Us also makes the determination about need.

Once Resiliency Is Us set up operations in Westville, several smaller, less well-known NGOs also came into the area. An important aspect of deciding where to set up the base relates to the presence of a giant in the humanitarian aid industry, such as Resiliency Is Us. For smaller organizations looking to gain legitimacy, and future donor funding, working with a large and reputable NGO is an important endeavor. I spoke with a field manager (who was also a board member) for a smaller NGO working with Resiliency Is Us in Westville. Since this smaller organization was from another state, I asked the field manager how their organization decided where they should set up their operations. She responded, “work orders, regional leaders, mapping and work orders from online applications” from their members, leads from the media as well as where Resiliency Is Us had already established. The field manager of this small NGO stressed the importance of getting to work with Resiliency Is Us. When I asked if her organization had preexisting ties with Resiliency Is Us, she said no, but she conveyed that it was important to work with them. She stated that her organization processed “thousands of volunteers” for Resiliency Is Us and hinted that this would help them with playing similar roles in future disasters.

The kinds of ties formed between organizations differed across neighborhoods. While some large churches and NGOs talked about collaborative ties with Resiliency Is Us, other organization relations were distrustful. Greg, the founder of a local community-based organization in one of the hardest hit areas in Brooklyn, talked about having to conceal from Resiliency Is Us the actual numbers of constituents in his community to gain adequate resources for their area. Similarly, the founder of Always With You in Eastville thought Resiliency Is Us was “rationing” supplies and that it was not interested in collaborating with them. Other interviews with volunteers and residents suggested that the NGO was there to “take over,” a claim that Resiliency Is Us volunteers refuted. For local community-based organizations, the ability to create collaborative bonds with “anchor” NGOs such as Resiliency Is Us was an important missing link to resources in the communities. This link of collaborative relations with Resiliency Is Us was crucial to the organizational agglomeration process that occurred in Westville.

Canarsie: A Host Model

The large local church hosted the FEMA disaster response center, where the managers, volunteers, and staff with whom I spoke assisted disaster survivors. This permanent structure differed from the Westville Resiliency Is Us center, a repurposed tent near the large Westville church. At the FEMA disaster response center, there were representatives from the Small Business Administration (SBA), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and other New York City and State agencies and organizations. In a smaller separate room, there was a distribution center with cleaning supplies and food supplies. In contrast to Westville, where Resiliency Is Us was the dominant out-of-town actor in the response center, in this location FEMA was the dominant out-of-town entity.

In Canarsie, as in Westville, the Catholic church, headed by Father Francis, was the initiator of what would become the Westville Resiliency Is Us disaster response center. Like the Westville church, this center ended up serving thousands of residents. However, the disaster response process was quite different. The organization hosting response building in Canarsie, where the church simply facilitated the state and non-state relief organizations. When I arrived at Father Francis’s church, there were several governmental and non-governmental agencies and programs with representatives stationed at various tables throughout a large space. I seized the opportunity to interview Father Francis about the response-building process at this center:

SM: Can you tell me who you are and how all this came together?

FATHER FRANCIS: Father John Francis . . . and it was gratuitous that we happened to have a building here that could be used for FEMA after the disaster occurred, because our school was not rented. And therefore, or used as a school. So, we were able to invite FEMA here to, uh, our parish, so that the people in the Canarsie area could, uh, have the help that they needed. Because the first few days after the, uh—for a long time really after the hurricane, Canarsie wasn’t even recognized as an area that was flooded. They lost so much, they lost everything. And then we had a meeting here in this room.

SM: A meeting with who?

FATHER FRANCIS: A meeting started by, uh, Mr. Perry and Mr. Sampson, the assemblyman and the state senator of the area of New York. And they gathered people here, and the first night we had 1,300 people in this room and in the cafeteria, which is on the other side.

SM: And what date was that?

FATHER FRANCIS: I was here for about ten days. It was before that. A couple days before that.

SM: Before that? Okay.

FATHER FRANCIS: Yeah, just before that, and then FEMA said they would try to

open a place here [in Canarsie]. And then I said, ‘Well you’ve got the place, use this.’ The state senator got everybody together, and then they announced there would be a meeting here at this auditorium, because it was the largest place that was free at the moment. And then we got it. Then through the politicians and got FEMA, and we got the people together. We were able to get people to recognize that the need is here, and this would be a great place to have . . . So, FEMA and the church provided it, you know. So, we were there to be able to serve the community here in Canarsie. So that’s how things got together.

In this instance, the response building began as a political process where a local politician was able to make all the necessary connections with FEMA as well as with residents who are their constituents. The church was significant because of the spatial resource it was able to provide for the gathering and because it was able to extend the invitation to “host” these governmental entities. Father Francis continued:

FATHER FRANCIS: And then it became not only a place for FEMA, but then became a distribution center also. For the longest time it was a large distribution center.

SM: And how did that start—the distribution?

FATHER FRANCIS: Got started through, through three people from, from the area—from Senator Samson’s office, uh, this woman, Valerie, who I don’t know if you’ve met her. She was here with us just now. And Brandon. Brandon works for Senator Sampson. They volunteered to help, and then we were getting all kinds of things from Facebook and all kinds of things people were volunteering. We had one beautiful little thing that happened. We got a big truckload of, uh, nonperishable food in boxes from Porterville, Illinois—Catholic parish there.

Although Father Francis stated at the beginning that the response building was “gratuitous,” this process shared some commonalities with the Catholic church in Westville. They both had access to a large “free space” that could be used by FEMA and other organizations, and both resulted in being a “nucleus of relief” in the respective communities. However, there are key differences here also. While elected officials such as the mayor, the state senator, and others participated in getting federal resources to these areas, in Canarsie the elected officials played a significant role in initiating and facilitating the partnership between FEMA, the church, and residents, which led to FEMA setting up a disaster response center. The local government also played a direct role in getting private donations to this location, which other parishes supplemented.

Brooklyn: Organization Coalition

Yet a third model of response building is Organization Coalition. In contrast to the Westville case, the Greater Brooklyn disaster response effort was due to preexisting organizational and political ties among faith-based and non-faith-based organizations. The presence of hundreds of small and large church partnerships with elected officials prior to the disaster was instrumental in this kind of coalition building. This is due in large part to the high participation of communities in Brooklyn politics. Brooklyn politics, as in many urban areas, is very Caribbeanized due to the high representation of Caribbean American elected officials. Also, many of the church leaders in Brooklyn are from the Caribbean and have been involved in this “social gospel” in responding to the needs of the West Indian community. The fact that the elected representatives are also from small island nations in the Caribbean also helps facilitate what I refer to as a brand of politics that sets expectations for an elevated level of responsiveness from politicians in matters that affect their constituents. These various leaders and their organizations had already been working closely with the local government on issues relevant to the community during routine periods. This means that when the disaster hit, these groups and leaders relied on their existing social capital infrastructure to respond to the disaster. I illustrate this process through my interview with Reverend Dennis from the United Methodist Church located in Brooklyn in an area unaffected by the storm.

I attended the second meeting of what transformed into the Brooklyn Long-Term Recovery nonprofit. A large church hosted this coalition. In attendance were about twenty-five organizations and Resiliency Is Us. At that meeting the organizations decided that they needed to form a separate 501(c)(3) organization to petition for federal funds that would become available in the coming months through FEMA grants. All these organizations were already involved in disaster response and recovery efforts but wanted to gain access to federal funds to rebuild Brooklyn. At the close of the meeting, I had a chance to interview Reverend Dennis, the pastor of the church hosting that meeting. I asked him:

SM: How did you come together to work on the disaster?

REVEREND DENNIS: The meeting today, uh, was formed out of volunteers working in disaster response. So, it’s, it’s a broad spectrum of interfaith, interreligious, nonreligious community groups. Just people working in response to the disaster. And trying to mold, uh, an organization, a structure, so that we can respond in a cohesive manner to the, uh, disaster response.

Once more, I was interested in the same basic question of the process of response building . I asked him:

SM: When was the first time that you met as a group?

REVEREND DENNIS: We met about a month ago for the first time as a group in this place—in terms of the groups working in Brooklyn specifically.

SM: Okay. So, who initiated getting the group together?

REVEREND DENNIS: Well, it was through, um, uh, several groups, actually—ourselves, through FEMA.

SM: Did FEMA contact you or you reached out to them?

REVEREND DENNIS: Well, it was through a sort of mutual contact between one of the FEMA VALs—Voluntary Agency Liaison, and myself and also World Circle and several others.

SM: Okay. So you’re saying that these were preexisting relationships?

REVEREND DENNIS: Not necessarily so. Although we are a part of NYDIS, which is New York Disaster Interfaith Services. And New York VOAD—Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. And, um, so there was some preexisting, uh, relationships, but not in terms of working in Brooklyn—because we haven’t had a preexistent group. So, it came out of, uh, just, um, active activity in the Brooklyn area in response to this storm.

SM: Okay, so, um, do you know roughly how many people were at today’s meeting?

REVEREND DENNIS: Probably about twenty-five, thereabouts.

SM: And of those, how many of them did you, your organization have a relationship with before the disaster?

REVEREND DENNIS: Well, we’ve had a relationship with Resiliency Is Us. When you say organization, what are you talking about?

SM: Just organizational relationships. Knowing them or having worked on something with them before.

REVEREND DENNIS: Well, we have, we’ve had Presbyterian Services and the Lutherans and Presbyterians. We’ve had Resiliency Is Us. We’ve had several others. So, they’re about maybe a dozen or so we’ve had relationships in other places with, in terms of the United Methodist Church and UMCOR—United Methodist Committee on Relief—relating to them in, in various places. Like, for example, in response to Katrina, in response to Irene last year, and so on. So, we’ve had some preexisting relationships on different levels in different places. So, I will say, this office was formed directly in response to the storm.

SM: Right. I hear you. I guess what I’m interested in is, how do organizations come together to respond to a specific need, and whether or not these were preexisting relationships.

REVEREND DENNIS: Okay, okay.

SM: When and how these unfolded.

REVEREND DENNIS: Well, as I said earlier on, we have a preexisting committee structure, based on response to disaster. So that was already in existence.

Having preexisting relationships among organizations meant that meeting organizers announced meetings through preexisting listservs. Many of the leaders of these organizations had worked together on other issues and in some cases had also created interpersonal social capital with others in these organizations on which they were later able to draw during the response to Sandy. The interconnectedness of the politically oriented majority Black and Black immigrant community churches in Brooklyn and other areas also helped facilitate this coalition building. Although brief mentions of elected officials were part of the story, unlike the case of the Canarsie disaster response center, elected officials were not the main actors here. Also, preexisting ties, rather than new organizational ties, were significant in the response building. This coalition among small and large nonprofits and local governments around long-standing issues also proved to be an asset, evident in my conversation with Reverend Dennis. I asked him:

SM: You’re saying that you’ve not had an issue with resources in terms of transportation, getting generators?

REVEREND DENNIS: To some extent. Well, of course, we always need more equipment.

SM: Where did you get the resources from?

REVEREND DENNIS: We have some equipment and resources of our own. Um, one of the ways that we are able to respond fairly quickly to disasters is through the membership of our church nationally giving. So, we have UMCOR, which we can put in a request for funds for disasters.

SM: And how much have you received just for this local community?

REVEREND DENNIS: For this they haven’t specifically said, ‘Here is $20,000 for Brooklyn.’ What happens is it operates through our conference. So immediately a disaster occurs and, and we have a structure through which it works. The bishop is able to ask UMCOR instantly for $10,000. And there is no red tape to go through. They haven’t had to say, ‘Well, we need money for this or that.’ And that’s our immediate response as a United Methodist Church.

SM: So, you got that? You got $10,000?

REVEREND DENNIS: We got the $10,000 upfront.

Large churches are a significant part of the story in all three cases. Large, long-established, high-capital churches, unlike the low-capital storefront immigrant churches in Eastville, have a built-in advantage in responding to disasters. First, they tend to have several branches dispersed throughout the country. This means that at one point or another, they will have gained experience responding to emergency events and can quickly mobilize their resources. These churches can quickly access funding through their headquarters or conferences. Another advantage of these multibranch large churches is that if one location experiences a disaster, unaffected locations in other cities and states can help both in terms of labor and finances. They are also able to attract and deploy volunteer members who do not live in disaster-impacted areas. Even for their affected members, this serves as an “entry point” into the communities to know exactly where the need is.

All three of these models of response building among disaster response organizations seen in Westville, Canarsie, Brooklyn, and Eastville bore out characteristics of the urban areas institutional and organizational environment, the spatial resources of large organizations, and the community social capital potential in the form of financial and political capital of its current and former residents. In Westville and Canarsie, having available space through the presence of high-capital branch churches such as Catholic and Methodist churches was instrumental in attracting attention and pertinent actors. Westville’s Irish ethnic enclave and connections to affluence led to instituting the tent. Similarly, local organizations already having considerable command of pre-disaster resources helped them mobilize instantly.

The coalition of small and large local organizations in Brooklyn positioned themselves to become an instant source of social capital. The political and organizational interconnectedness with large NGOs and federal funding gave them a steady stream of access to pertinent information and resources. This means that they could quickly repurpose their ties toward securing disaster response and recovery funding not just for Superstorm Sandy, but for future disasters. This coalition model gives small Black and immigrant churches access to organizational social capital they would not have otherwise had. Each model presented quite different opportunities and constraints on organization-mediated disaster response, the degree of accessibility of resources, the timing of information spread, and the kinds of disaster experiences of residents across these urban disaster areas discussed in this book.

Eastville: Organizational Isolation

This most vulnerable residential area in Eastville lacks the social, spatial, and institutional infrastructure that would enable Always With You to serve as a host for local and national organizations or to build coalitions and attract lead NGOs to set up their bases there. In the disaster response area near the Eastville Always With You, there is not this interconnectedness of high-capital large churches and low-capital small churches with high-capital governmental organizations. East-ville also does not have the political mobilization we see in majority Black areas in Brooklyn. Eastvillers live in an urban area that has suffered decades of institutional disinvestment, high political disenfranchisement of its residents, and very few organizations outside social services serving the needs of economically deprived urban residents. The low-capital community-based organization Always With You, like the immigrant-serving church in this area, had lacked spatial resources since it operated out of a small storefront space.

In the most vulnerable part of Eastville, many of the residents are the most marginalized economically deprived, which includes formerly incarcerated and substance-dependent persons. Not only are they geographically and politically disconnected from the inland areas of the city, but they are also hyper-segregated from economically privileged areas such as Westville. Therefore, their crisis capital does not become augmented by collaborative relations with governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the way that the three models described above do, albeit they did have engagement with some of these organizations. For example, in Eastville, FEMA applications at one point were located in a grocery store, rather than the mutually reinforcing space of the Canarsie Catholic Church.

Similarly, urban areas such as Eastville are not able to benefit from organizational agglomeration that would in turn attract a nucleus of relief around a large high-capital NGO as are urban areas such as Westville. In Eastville, the transactional relations between Resiliency Is Us and Always With You are quite limited and sporadic. For example, Always With You expresses that Resiliency Is Us delivered bottles of water to them but left shortly thereafter. Another time they came with a mobile clinic but did not hand out any medical supplies in Eastville. Also, when Always With You did receive a donation of their own mobile clinic, Resiliency Is Us did not assist with sharing medical supplies needed to keep the clinic running.

Unlike the participation of Resiliency Is Us in the Brooklyn long-term recovery coalition meetings, Always With You volunteers recall attending community meetings in Eastville with other local community-based organizations and Resiliency Is Us being “notoriously absent.” In short, the most vulnerable part of Eastville’s response building was stymied due to what I am calling an organization isolation model of response. This type of response characterized an absence of a spatialized, collaborative relational field with high-capital governmental and nongovernmental organizations organized around disaster response and recovery.