Municipal Crisis Preparation and Response

The situation

By December 2023, more than 7,500 newcomer families were living in shelters, motels and hotels across 100 communities in Massachusetts. State agencies, community organisations and the businesses hosting those families each held a piece of the picture. None of them could see the others’ piece, and the need was changing faster than anyone could circulate a spreadsheet.

North Carolina had the opposite problem and the same cause. The state has a long history of hurricanes, and its volunteer and emergency responder networks were strong. But preparedness happens between emergencies, when there is no incident to organise around — and there was no shared place to say what a county would need before it needed it.

What ran

In Massachusetts we configured an issue area — Emergency Assistance for New Arrivals — on which agencies and community organisations posted needs and offers against each other continuously. Hygiene items, core relief items, food, medicine. Nothing was built; the configuration took days.

In North Carolina we worked with North Carolina Voluntary Organisations Active in Disaster. The same infrastructure was configured for the opposite direction in time: organisations publish what they will need in a crisis, and suppliers and volunteer groups post offers against those needs while there is still no crisis. Tarps, construction bags, septic repairs.

What it produced

North Carolina’s preparedness posture was tested by a tornado in a county that rarely sees severe weather. The state moved on relocating mobile homes immediately, because offers of heavy equipment services were already on the platform before the tornado arrived. Nobody had to find them.

Through Hurricanes Helene and Milton, between September 2024 and January 2025, 226 organisations that had never shared a system coordinated $1.8M in ninety days — 503 registered users, and $177,140 in the value of needs fulfilled. The organisations doing the coordinating were local. Those figures come from NCVOAD, are publishable, and are dated at the point of extract.

What it shows

The same infrastructure ran an acute humanitarian response and a multi-year preparedness programme, in two states, without being rebuilt for either. That is the argument this company makes, and North Carolina is where it is easiest to check.

It is also one deployment in one country with functioning infrastructure and a coordinating body already in place. It does not prove the same result arrives somewhere with neither.