The Consortium for Equitable Disaster Resilience is a research organization working to improve the ability of communities to respond to natural disasters. As a member of Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy, CEDR works with graduate research associates and undergraduate researchers to address barriers to equitable resilience in their communities. In September 2024, CEDR was one of four organizations chosen to receive a $550,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation.
In 2021, Hurricane Ida caused catastrophic damage to the New Orleans community. Following this devastation, Regardt Ferreira and his team formed CEDR. Ferreira currently serves as the executive director of CEDR and helps bolster disaster relief in marginalized communities.
“I was approached by the Walmart Foundation to… investigate the barriers historically marginalized communities experience when it comes to disaster relief and assistance,” Ferreira said. “We did research, we did community engagement, and we did some policy advocacy as well.”
With the first round of funding, Ferreira and program coordinator Timothy Davidson worked with a large team of researchers to complete an in-depth analysis of existing scientific literature regarding the difficulties marginalized communities face during the disaster recovery process.
“We did this big scoping review of 100 plus articles spanning the last 25 years. We identified 29 specific barriers that fell under five major themes,” Davidson said.
According to their article published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, “the process is confusing and difficult to navigate, there is exclusion from or lack of access to political power and recovery decision-making processes, exclusion due to discrimination in its many forms, issues in the funding aid ecosystem and politicians and media have an inordinate amount of control over the flow of resources and recovery processes.”
After identifying disaster relief barriers, Ferreira and Davidson partnered Tulane students with community organizations to provide access to resources like grant databases exclusive to the Tulane community. Through their Path to Funding course, Ferreira and Davidson teach students about grant writing and assign them to disaster relief operations.
“Here’s an organizational profile. This is the funding that they’re looking for. Let’s help them find a grant,” Davidson said.
The CEDR employed a novel technique called group concept mapping to involve individual voices in the research process. Their study, Group Concept Mapping and Equitable Resilience in Southern Africa, asked community members what equitable resilience in their communities would look like. Researchers compiled the responses into 67 statements. Ferreira and Davidson then asked participants to group the statements based on similarity and rank their importance to equity and resilience.
A software called GroupWisdom helped sort responses into a similarity matrix, a statistical tool for sorting that arranges statements into a binary matrix depending on how frequently participants associate them.
The similarity matrix enabled the production of a mind map of issues related to equitable resilience. Using machine learning techniques, Ferreira and Davidson could sort the barriers identified by the community into groups and assign themes, such as social justice approaches, legislative and policy frameworks, inclusion, preparedness and mitigation strategies.
The participants also ranked the issues based on the importance and feasibility of solving them. This allowed the researchers to identify which issues to tackle first, streamlining the recovery process.
“So maybe this is some low-hanging, high-impact fruit versus something that is less feasible but would be important,” Davidson said. “Or maybe this is feasible, but it’s not that important to people, so you can have some very interesting dialogue and still have this qualitative data to analyze.”
The result is a visual representation of the most critical issues on equitable resilience in South Africa, identified by the individuals affected by the disaster. “You have the subject of people’s experience, but then you can really quantify it and get the objective side of things, and that’s oftentimes missing from the work,” Ferreira said. “Folks will look at the hard numbers and forget the voice. Here, we have the voice and the numbers to give a larger picture.”
By combining scientific research methodology with input from impacted communities, the CEDR continues to revolutionize equitable resilience and disaster response.
