In a blog published on Medium, JFF CEO Maria Flynn announced that, with the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, JFF has released a Disaster Resilience Toolkit that offers leaders of rural communities in the U.S. South a plan of action for not only restoring economic activity and putting people back to work in the wake of a disaster, but also building long-term resilience to disasters.

A resource like the Disaster Resilience Toolkit is especially timely at this moment because “as we begin to emerge from a time during which our lives were deeply shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now abundantly clear that crisis, and crisis recovery, has become a dominant national theme for the foreseeable future,” Flynn writes. “Whether it is a hurricane, a wildfire, lack of access to quality health care, or our national reckoning with racial injustice, crisis is a given in our society, and in many cases, crises can compound, with one making the others worse and complicating recovery. Left unchecked, crises can undermine the stability and promise of our democratic society. Almost invariably, the most vulnerable members of our communities end up bearing the brunt of the impact.”