Voluntary Nonprofit Organizations and Disaster Management: Identifying the Nature of Inter-Sector Coordination and Collaboration in Disaster Service Assistance Provision

Abstract

The scope and scale of a community's service assistance demands during a disaster will exceed, typically, the capacity of any single set of governmental, private, or nonprofit sector organizations. As a result inter-sector coordination and collaboration represents a key element in effective disaster management. Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in providing a wide range of early response assistance and mass care services when disasters occur. Here, we investigate the particular ways in which nonprofit organizations engaged in inter-sector coordination and collaboration during a major disaster, Superstorm Sandy. We do so in order to build on the somewhat limited prior empirical literature accounting for the specific nature of nonprofits' disaster service provision efforts. Our analysis offers several contributions to existing literature: it demonstrates the scope of disaster-related services provided, it outlines the key qualities of inter-sector coordination and collaboration actions, and it identifies the way in which the nonprofit sector's early phase relief actions might be connected later to longer term disaster recovery efforts.