SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B Convergence, Inventory, Matching, and Assignment (CIMA) to Optimize Post-event Housing Repair for Displaced Vulnerable Populations

Many communities across the United States have struggled to adapt to the increasing frequency and severity of weather events. Hurricanes and other weather events, have the potential to inflict wide-spread structural damage to homes, resulting in the displacement of populations. Households displaced due to storm-induced damage suffer enormously.

The length of time between initial displacement from the home and returning, once again, to stable, functional housing varies greatly across populations with low-to-modest income households and medically fragile households tending to have lengthy displacements relative to non-vulnerable households. Following an event, volunteer labor and donated materials from many sources flow into the impacted region.

However, the matching of supply (donated materials and volunteer labor) with the need for repair, particularly among vulnerable households, is less than optimal. This project aims to more-optimally match supply with need—through development of “Convergence, Inventory, Matching, and Assignment” platform called CIMA—so that lengthy displacement times common among low-to-modest income households will be meaningfully reduced, thus addressing fundamental inequities in recovery and wellbeing.

CIMA will fill a known gap in the ability of nonprofit recovery organizations to manage arriving materials and labor, identify households likely to suffer the greatest displacement times, and optimize the scheduling of repairs for these households that are most vulnerable. This Planning Grant supports capacity-building objectives through structured community engagement activities focused on the assessment of the CIMA management platform concept.

Specific activity include: 1) assessing, though community engagement, the potential utility of the CIMA platform, 2) eliciting insights from stakeholders and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the CIMA concept, and 3) refining, with stakeholder recommendations, the specification requirements for CIMA. These objectives will be achieved through Visioning Events, each targeting a different stakeholder constituency: 1) Community/Nonprofit Stakeholders, 2) Government Stakeholders, and 3) Foundation Stakeholders.

Each event consists of four collaborative interactions: 1) discussion of modeled storm-induced flooding with estimates for damage & displaced populations, 2) participants visioning the housing recuperation dynamics for Standardized Displaced Households under current conditions, 3) discussion of CIMA concept and functions, utility and applicability, and 4) participants visioning the housing recuperation dynamics under the intervention of nonprofit regional recovery organizations deploying the CIMA platform. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program, Track B—Resilience to Natural Disasters—and is a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.