Across the United States and around the world, communities are preparing for disasters that have not yet occurred. Emergency response teams are reviewing and refining their playbooks. Public works crews are maintaining levees before flood season. City councils are enforcing new building codes before hurricane season. Community organizations are mapping at-risk households, training volunteers, and planning how to keep people housed, fed, and connected well before the cameras arrive.
But for many of us, these efforts are invisible. Preparedness rarely comes with dramatic images or urgent appeals. When it works, at best nothing is seen to happen, or at the very least, community rebuilding and recovery happens quicker.
This invisibility comes at a staggering cost, including tens of billions in annual losses in the U.S. alone, as well as unquantifiable and profound suffering. But it is one that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to help mitigate.
The Disaster Before the Disaster
Over the past decades of working in humanitarian crises conditions, I’ve come to deeply believe that a disaster is not the storm or the wildfire itself. In 2022, I wrote in the Sarasota Herald Tribune: “A disaster is not the event or hazard itself; a disaster is when that event or hazard meets vulnerabilities.” Notably, it was published just a couple of weeks before Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida.
Hurricane Ian didn’t just damage homes. It exacerbated what was already broken. One year after the devastating storm, Sarasota Herald Tribune reported that families with flood insurance and homeowner’s insurance found themselves trapped in bureaucratic limbo for months, living in campers in their backyards while mold crept up their walls. They interviewed Lindsay Weishaar, a nurse in South Venice, who described her ordeal: “We have been living in crisis mode all the time.” Six months after the storm, her family was still not home — and more than $130,000 in debt.
Lindsay’s story represents the hundreds of other families across Sarasota County that fell through the cracks between FEMA and private insurance, between immediate relief and long-term recovery.
We regularly see generosity in the aftermath of events, especially large-scale disasters, such as Hurricane Ian. Over the years though, we’ve noted that government — including federal agencies like FEMA — the private sector and philanthropy have underinvested in disaster preparedness and mitigation that inevitably contributes to inequitable and slower community recovery in the country and worldwide.
The Invisible Work
There is overwhelming evidence that disaster preparedness saves lives and money. For example, a report published in 2024 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation noted that “every dollar invested in preparedness can save communities $13 in economic impact, damages and cleanup costs.”
And yet, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s data from its annual State of Disaster Philanthropy report repeatedly showed that response and relief receive the highest number of grants and dollars, while preparedness and mitigation, as well as reconstruction and recovery, each receive only a fraction of the already limited disaster-related philanthropy. That was true in 2023, when just 6% of the $1.2 billion in total disaster giving supported resilience, risk reduction and mitigation, and only 12.7% went to reconstruction and recovery.
At a moment when resources are already insufficient, this observation is not a call for competition over limited post-disaster funding. It is a request to reframe how we invest altogether. Rather than concentrating resources only after a disaster strikes, philanthropy should take a community resilience, disaster mitigation and preparedness mindset across all investments, working alongside communities facing recurring hazards to reduce risk, strengthen systems and support long-term recovery before the next crisis hits.
Media coverage is a key driver of donor behavior. Highly visual, catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, wildfires and major hurricanes attract attention, sympathy, and, as a result, funding. By contrast, there are no compelling photos of the disaster that didn’t happen. The community that didn’t suffer catastrophic losses because building codes protected homes, or families who stabilized more quickly because local nonprofits had strong support infrastructures and case management systems in place.
With little media attention, preparedness and mitigation offer limited visibility, and almost no immediate reputational return, particularly in communities distant from donors. But that is precisely where philanthropy must be present. If we continue to follow the spotlight, we will continue to fund the most visible losses rather than reducing underlying risks.
Measuring and attributing impact, which funders value, becomes far more complex when the outcome is a disaster that didn’t happen. Traditional philanthropic evaluation frameworks are not designed for this. They favor what is immediate and countable: meals served, items distributed, shelters built. Prevention rarely produces these kinds of metrics.
Preparedness and resilience also operate on a different timeline. They require long-term, sustained investments in systems, infrastructure, and local capacity over years and, at times, decades. Yet most philanthropic funding is structured in cycles of one to three years.
What Grantmakers Can Do Differently Now
Our communities need dedicated, proactive philanthropic capital — beyond dollars driven by a specific event — to help them recover faster and stronger before and after a disaster strikes. The first round of grants from CDP’s Disaster Preparedness Fund, launched in 2025, supports organizations in communities that face frequent disasters, funding a variety of initiatives from solar power resilience in the U.S. Virgin Islands to wildfire-resistant building codes in rural Colorado and Utah.
As we mark Hurricane Preparedness Week, I invite all who work in and with philanthropy to use this moment to begin or deepen their disaster-related giving, including support for disaster preparedness. A few places to start:
- Fund before the disaster, not just during or after. Flexible, multi-year support and investments in capacity allow organizations to prepare and pivot quickly when a storm, tornado, or wildfire strikes.
- Ask the organizations you already fund about their resilience, then listen closely to what they need. Do they have emergency reserves? Can they operate at surge capacity if/when demand spikes? Where are the pressure points you can help strengthen now, before a crisis hits?
- Follow the community’s lead. The most critical needs aren’t always the most visible. Communities understand where vulnerabilities lie and what will make the greatest difference to their recovery. Start there.
- Embrace that you are already a disaster philanthropist. Disasters intersect with every issue philanthropy invests in, from education and childcare to housing, health care, democratic participation, and more. When disasters strike, they can erase years of progress. Supporting preparedness and resilience is a way to protect the impact on the issues that you have already invested in over many years or even decades.
Philanthropy advances the greater good in ways the market and government often cannot or will not.
The real question is whether we are willing to invest in outcomes we may never see, and in solutions we hope never need to be activated. In many ways, that is the clearest expression of strategic, effective philanthropy.
Patricia McIlreavy is president and CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. Follow her on LinkedIn.
