Menu

At SBP we believe that if you do something well, you must share it. That's why SBP offers the Leader Practitioner Course, a free, 3-day, in-person training that brings together elected officials, recovery leaders, and their management teams in one room, to learn, interact and gain clarity around the biggest challenges facing long-term disaster recovery programs.

Through the Leader Practitioner Course, SBP empowers CDBG-DR & MIT leaders to build predictable, highly effective long-term recovery programs for the communities they serve. Our team teaches the “business” of disaster recovery and the importance of making deliberative operational and financial decisions to arrive at efficient and effective outcomes.

Thanks to generous support from the Walmart Foundation, SBP will offer this training quarterly and will invite state and local governments from impacted communities across the country to attend.

Disaster recovery programs are a complex environment with very high stakes. Without clear and focused leadership, the predictability around recovery resources can create immeasurable suffering for those most in need, and push them beyond their breaking point.

Across the country, more than 100 state and local governments are operating long-term disaster recovery programs to meet the needs of millions of vulnerable Americans who are affected by disasters each year. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development granted $89.70 billion in federal recovery funds through the Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery. However, it routinely takes years for these funds to impact survivors due to a variety of factors.

The primary challenge is how little programmatic direction disaster recovery leaders receive. Granting agencies within the federal government provide resources to state and local governments but offer little information or advice in the way of program design and execution. Disaster impacted states and communities often become siloed, and lack the communication network required to share the most effective techniques and best practices. This information gap leaves many leaders without the tools they need to assess needs, build action plans, contract for services, or implement and scale recovery efforts.

At SBP, we know that the only way to navigate complexity is with strong leadership focused on clear and specific outcomes. With each new disaster, it has become clear that some of the same pain points were surfacing. We knew that to see a real improvement that it wasn’t enough to just tell recovery leaders and operators to become better at goal setting — we needed to show them. To address these challenges, SBP developed the Leader Practitioner Course.