By Mae Agna | Development Director
After Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, the island of St. John suffered catastrophic destruction of homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Many residents were displaced, and most were living in homes that were compromised to some degree by storm damage. Based on an immediate needs survey, Love City Strong developed a mold testing and remediation program. Our staff was trained by a team of professionals from the National Organization of Remediators and Microbial Inspectors (NORMI), and we quickly got to work serving the most high risk residents of our community.
The more remediation projects we completed, the more obvious it became that it was just the first step to returning residents to safe and secure housing. Many large scale infrastructure projects were underway, and most of the available labor force were employed by those that were in a financial position to pay for expedited repairs. In response to the deficit in services for high risk and low income residents, we developed the Resilient Housing Initiative (RHI). This is a privately funded program that has completed 38 full rebuilds, and countless smaller, accessibility related repairs in the last 7 years.
As a flexible, community responsive, place based organization, we are constantly revising our programs to better fit the changing needs of our clients. In the years since we started RHI, we have expanded the scope of our intake processes to include smaller scale repairs, and accessibility interventions for seniors and those with functional restrictions.
Another intervention that we have added to our catalog of services is the installation of storm shutters. LCS has partnered with a local business to measure, build and install storm shutters that are tailored to the individual homes in our RHI program, ensuring that these structures are stable and resilient in the face of future weather impacts. Working with St. John/St. Thomas based businesses helps build our internal response capacity, and allows us to keep recovery dollars within the territory.
We are so grateful to GlobalGiving for placing trust in our organization with flexible funding that enables us to pivot and meet our clients where they are. None of these programs would be possible without the continued support of our donors, and we remain humbled by your generosity.
By Mae Agna | Development Director
By Mae Agna | Development Director
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