EPILOGUE

Nine Years Later

I am thinking it’s almost nine years since we first stood shoulder to shoulder handing out disaster supplies on a street corner in Canarsie after Superstorm Sandy, when I make the call to Bishop Fabian. I am finally ready to publish my book and wanted to see how the themes and analyses in my chapters held up after a decade. He tells me that long-term recovery is still ongoing in Canarsie and other coastal areas for homeowners who have not received financial support for the damages incurred since Sandy. He explained the uneven pattern of redevelopment that occurs after a disaster:

FEMA provided resources and money to rebuild New York City and State, strengthen places to the East River, but homeowners here have not been disbursed. The technicality was that they did not have “flood insurance.”

The fact that most homes in Canarsie did not have insurance because they weren’t considered to be in a flood-prone zone was something I had encountered during my fieldwork.

I inquire about what happened with the long-term recovery group to which he and other pastors belonged. I was curious to find out whether the small churches that were part of this large heterogeneous organizational network of the long-term recovery group would actually benefit from social capital in the form of funding. Bishop Fabian explained that the group accessed FEMA funds, but that “big business” and larger, higher-capital religious organizations, with established community programs such as daycare centers, were the real beneficiaries. Small, low-capital churches had some influence in how money would be disbursed but could not directly benefit. He also explained the instability of this network. Small churches slowly disengaged because the process of getting funding even for other organizations in the group was also a long one. He reflected:

FEMA did a good thing. FEMA wanted the community’s input. The leaders of small churches would have a say in how money was disbursed. Small churches did not get resources. Except those with community programs like a daycare, but conducting disaster relief did not qualify you. What happened is unfortunately what happens all the time. The process is so drawn out that people become frustrated and move on to something else. Big businesses ended up getting something out of it, and small community organizations did not get anything.

Bishop Fabian further explained that FEMA handed off the responsibility of directly liaising with the group to New York State. This move introduced a bureaucratic burden that these leaders of small organizations could not endure, particularly since there was no economic incentive.

FEMA thought it was difficult to work with the long-term recovery group since there were several organizations, so it went to the state. The state process became very tedious for members, and they dropped off one by one. So, 90 percent of big businesses recovered. But only businesses stayed on.

In this first scenario Bishop Fabian described, the small churches don’t benefit. However, then he described a turn of events, where the leaders of the small churches that met through the long-term recovery group established a separative coalition network in order to position themselves to capture funding first from the mayor and then eventually from the federal government:

The outgrowth of Sandy and meeting at the long-term recovery group is that small churches have come together to organize. Seven, eight, or nine churches have come together to form a coalition. This was helpful because it allowed us to qualify for the federal stimulus during Covid. It’s a gun violence coalition of faith leaders. We work with the police precinct on anti-violence initiatives, but we do more than that. During Covid we gave out food and PPE [personal protective equipment]. Six churches were vaccination sites. We recently got a commitment for funding to work with small churches who are working on this issue in the community. We got to know each other at the long-term recovery group after Sandy. That was when we recognized that if we don’t work as a unit, we will not get funding.

Organizational coalition networks among Black and West Indian churches in Brooklyn is not entirely surprising. The prominent level of political enfranchisement among Black and West Indian churches makes Brooklyn a fruitful ground for successful coalition building as described in earlier chapters in the context of Sandy. The challenge for this nonprofit is that the fact the governmental grants establish a dependent relationship with the state can undermine collective efficacy (Vargas 2019). Receiving state funding also risks alienating certain parts of the community with a different vision of advocacy on the issue of violence (Vargas 2019). For example, the way that NYPD defines violence would differ from how antiracist, urban movements define violence. The latter’s definition encompasses police brutality against Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies, which the former’s narrowly focused campaigns against gun violence decenter.

Immediately after my call with Bishop Fabian, I called Freddie, the founder of Always With You. I let him know that I was working on publishing the book since we last spoke, and that I was calling to see if my analysis of Always With You still captured their current reality, nine years post Sandy. I learned from Freddie that he had to dissolve Always With You due to insufficient funding to operate. He told me he turned over the small storefront space out of which he operated to a small church. When I asked about the storefront church, he said they also had to give up the space.

However, Freddie mentioned that he is only a few blocks from his old location and that he had founded another organization for “serving marginalized sub-populations in this area,” adding, “because they have always been near and dear to my heart.” I asked him if this organization did the job training that Always With You did, and he said, “I’m here doing the same thing.” He was a bit frustrated during our call, although he was happy to hear from me after several years. He said he was trying to secure a Covid-related loan, but he kept “getting the runaround from SBA.”

He mentioned that he is affiliated with Greenpeace International and was assisted by Occupy Sandy, but he did not have any local connections to local organizations. He mentioned wanting microgrids installed on The Rockaways. This would reduce the peninsula’s dependence on, and vulnerability to, the utility company’s poor management of the electric grid system, which was a major issue during Sandy. I also wanted to confirm that I had not missed that he was ever part of a long-term recovery group like the one in Brooklyn. He confirmed that he has never belonged to such a group.

So now we’re left with a question: How do we get large NGOs and government organizations to recognize the ways their disaster response practices contribute to increased inequality between urban economically deprived communities and more affluent, often adjacent, communities, and to change those practices so that they identify and support local community-based organizations operating in urban economically deprived areas to survive and thrive before and after disasters? It is infuriating that community-based organizations, like Always With You, are so committed to their communities and are best suited to provide the “warmth” that so many Sandy disaster survivors articulated they needed but weren’t able to receive from governmental and nongovernmental organizations, yet the daily survival of these organizations has to be negotiated each day because they are starved for capital.