New Study Highlights Nonprofits’ Critical Role During Overlapping Disasters

A new study co-authored by Daniel Sledge, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy at the University of Oklahoma Hudson College of Public Health, highlights the critical role nonprofit organizations play when communities face multiple disasters at once.

Sledge and a colleague at The University of Texas at Austin examined nonprofit disaster response during two sets of overlapping crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Texas winter storm, and the COVID-19 Delta wave and Hurricane Ida. Their findings demonstrate how nonprofits can expand disaster-response capacity, adapt during concurrent emergencies and help direct resources to communities with the greatest needs.

The researchers found that nonprofits provide essential surge capacity when government resources and public institutions are already stretched thin. By supplementing government response efforts, these organizations can help communities meet urgent needs that might otherwise go unaddressed.

Despite the added pressure created by simultaneous crises, nonprofits proved surprisingly adaptable. Concurrent disasters did not significantly diminish their ability to respond. Instead, many organizations reported that adapting to one emergency helped them become better prepared for the next.

The study also found that the strength of a community’s nonprofit sector can influence its ability to recover. Communities with greater nonprofit resources experienced measurably better health outcomes following major disasters, suggesting that differences in local nonprofit capacity can contribute to unequal resilience across communities.

Partnerships between nonprofits and government agencies also played an important role. Closer relationships were associated with greater transparency and accountability, as well as more needs-based allocation of resources. The findings suggest that strong government–nonprofit partnerships can expand overall response capacity while helping ensure assistance is distributed more systematically and reaches communities according to need.

The research builds upon Sledge’s previous work examining nonprofit disaster response and contributes to a broader understanding of how communities and institutions can prepare for increasingly complex public health emergencies.

Sledge is a health policy scholar whose research spans public health, American political development and public policy agenda-setting. His work has appeared in publications including the American Journal of Public Health, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Policy History and Studies in American Political Development.

He is also the author of Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State. His article “Linking Public Health and Individual Medicine” received a Paper of the Year Award from the American Public Health Association and the American Journal of Public Health.