Building Resilience: Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund Announces Third Round of Grants

There’s some really good news to share this holiday season about the CDP Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund. We have just completed our third full round of grant funding!

During this round, our grant committee asked us to focus on housing rebuild/repair and building resilience for organizations who are working to support recovery in the 41 counties affected by Hurricane Harvey. With that direction in mind, while following a rigorous review and due diligence process, we are proud to announce that five CDP grants were made this month:

BuildAid Houston– A Project of HomeAid Houston – received $700,000 to provide full home repair services to homeowners across the greater Houston metropolitan area who experienced flooding due to Hurricane Harvey. BuildAid is the Houston area’s home builder community’s response to the devastation created there by Hurricane Harvey. Through this program, qualified homeowners will be matched with experienced builder members of the Greater Houston Builders Association (GHBA) who will walk them through a finish selection process. The funds provided to support BuildAid Houston will result in at least 20 completed houses for low-income, vulnerable individuals and families.

Golden Crescent Habitat for Humanity was awarded $500,000 to help low-income homeowners achieve strength, stability and self-reliance by repairing and/or rebuilding their homes that were damaged by Hurricane Harvey. These funds will be used to expand Golden Crescent Habitat’s reach into more counties to include: Victoria, Goliad, Dewitt, Jackson, Lavaca and Refugio Counties. These are all locations with few other organizations working to rebuild. Funds will be used to help hire project managers designated to the service areas and contractors when volunteer labor is either not available or requires skilled supervision.

Houston Responds received $750,000 over 18 months to support increasing community and organizational resilience. Houston Responds works to mobilize churches for disaster response. These funds will help support building the resilience of the communities they serve by developing and/or expanding coalitions of local churches in disaster response networks; empowering network leadership and training church liaisons; ensuring coordination with community leadership and VOAD organizations; advising and supporting network fundraising to secure long-term viability; and developing a model for church networks that can be replicated elsewhere. Specifically, funding will support these efforts in 15 to 22 regions and will help build networks in each of these regions of 20+ churches representing 10,000+ potential volunteers.

Lone Star Legal Aid was awarded $500,000 to be used to match more than $2 million provided by the Rebuild Texas Fund to help Lone Star continue to provide legal services to Harvey-affected victims. Legal services provided will include evictions, lease terminations and other landlord problems; mortgage difficulties such as foreclosure; repair scams, insurance scams and appeals; property rights, title-clearing, probate and tax problems; environmental hazards; lost/destroyed documents; appealing FEMA decisions; income maintenance; access to health care, education and unemployment benefits; and family law issues and estate matters. Funds will be used to provide attorneys and paralegals with expertise in disaster-related legal issues in 25 of the 41 affected counties. In addition, funds will be used to facilitate outreach to those who can most use the services provided.

TechSoup Global received $200,000 to enable community service organizations in disaster-declared counties of Texas to increase their resiliency by strategically migrating their operations to the Cloud to maintain their operations during disaster. TechSoup will identify local consultants that will be able to support building organizational resilience to develop and implement an organizational disaster resiliency plan. Funds will also be used to deliver an updated Disaster Planning and Recovery Guidebook.

These five grants represent $2.65 million in funding going directly toward supporting recovery and resilience in Texas. Expect to hear more from us soon as we plan to award an additional $1.3 million during an off-cycle grant awards process to support innovative post-disaster low-income housing models after the first of the year. Then, our final round of funding is slated to be announced at the end of the first quarter of 2019.

We are grateful to the many generous donors to the CDP Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund – and to all the disaster recovery funds managed by CDP – who honor the long-term process of recovery by allowing us to continue to have a presence here and in other parts of the world recovering from disaster.