Searching for Project Impact

In the FEMA “Think Tank” (www.ideascale.com) I recently noticed another recommendation to bring back Project Impact. That suggestion almost always surfaces in discussions of communities, community resilience and community disaster risk reduction. With such frequent mention the idea is clearly worth thinking about.

For the few who are not familiar, Project Impact was a program created by FEMA Administrator James Lee Witt that began in 1997 with seven cities and grew to several hundred cities. It was cancelled in the early days of the Bush administration in an effort to save $25M. The program’s purpose according a FEMA spokesman was to “protect families, businesses and communities by reducing the impact of natural disasters.” It accomplished that goal by bringing together different levels of government and the private and non-profit sectors to work in close partnership to identify specific actions and programs for reducing risks and enhancing response and recovery. By almost every account, it was a very successful federal program.

Its flaw may have been just that – it was a successful federal program. FEMA provided the funding for each city. Cities received federal grants to implement Project Impact and grants to implement the projects it produced. There doesn’t seem to be an instance of a city adopting a Project Impact program that was not subsidized by FEMA. It was a great idea that was widely embraced and achieved substantive results but because it was wholly sustained by federal funding it was not resilient. It was subject to the vagaries of shifting politics and it could never be funded robustly enough to reach all US communities.

Does that mean that we should abandon the idea of bringing back Project Impact? No. But we need to acknowledge the flaw in the original model and find a way to meet the original goal in other ways. Federal resources to assist communities in becoming more disaster resilient are declining and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. There is simply neither the political will nor the available funding to begin a new federally funded, community risk reduction program.

Much more importantly, a fully federally funded program is the wrong way to approach the problem. The Project Impact vision of bringing the full community together to collaborative solve challenges was exactly right. But by tying it to federal funding the program never become the community’s program. Cities acknowledged the power of the process but never internalized ownership. In almost all cases, when the funding went away, the program ended.

Like it or not, communities own the challenges. Communities must own the solutions. Federal encouragement, facilitation and indirect support of Project Impact-like programs in America’s communities are desperately needed. A new federally funded program is not.