Publications

Texas Appleseed is proud to collaborate with community leaders from across the United States - Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico - who have navigated multiple disasters for decades and are building tools and networks to strengthen our response to major storms and climate events to release But Next Time: Storm Survivors Demand Overhaul of Disaster Recovery System. This paper is based on the real challenges experienced by storm survivors across the country, shows how the federal disaster recovery system is broken and calls for action from Congress and the federal government to build a functional recovery system that can handle the increased severity and frequency of storms due to climate change and ensures all families and communities can recover and are better protected the next disaster. We have united, not only across geography, but across race, ethnicity, and economic status, because the cost of inaction is too high for families, communities, and for the entire country. We urgently need a structural overhaul of the entire disaster recovery system that is led by disaster survivors, centers equity, includes mitigation, and addresses the systemic reasons that disaster recovery is not working. Next time, it needs to be different.