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I’ve written at length about the need to incorporate all sectors of society in disaster response and recovery operations. For each significant event, there are four unique and often uncoordinated responses: the not for profit (NFP) industry ramping up services for their clients, the private sector enacting continuity operations and extending support to their network, the residents helping each other and finally, the formal public sector incident response and management operations. One is not in command and control, each have stakeholders and they are working diligently to mitigate the harm and return to pre-event operations with the shortest delay. 

There are a myriad of publications in academia and grey literature that speak to the need for coordination, formal training on how to execute a whole of community effort, but little cooperation across the government to population power divide. This is why my profound reaction when my students presented the following idea, an economic recovery task force (ERTF).

An ERTF is not a recovery mechanism at heart, it is a permanent round table where the sectors of society contemplate, coordinate and cooperate on how the economic engine of a city would respond to an event, recover and return to normalcy. This is an effort that brings together the private sector, NFP and municipal government to map out what recovery would look like, specific, focussed - with the intent to create an environment where business resumed at the earliest opportunity. We know that economic activity provides income, allows society to return to normalcy and the loss of access to normal resources is an impediment for residents. If a strategy existed that demonstrated the preparedness of the economic engine for disasters, then confidence rises, investment gains traction and a sense of security and prosperity is maintained.

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