Yesterday was a beautiful day in San Francisco. As I looked down Golden Gate Avenue from the corner at Jones Street, I saw a large crowd, white tents, tables and chairs, and lots of people eating a hearty lunch. And true collaboration in action.

In conjunction with the statewide disaster exercise, Golden Guardian 2013, seven nonprofits practiced their joint plan to prepare and serve hot meals to Tenderloin residents. At 2:00 p.m. when it was all over, members of the Tenderloin Hunger Task Force – St. Anthony Foundation, Glide Foundation, Project Open Hand, Meals on Wheels of SF, SF Food Bank, Salvation Army, and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) – had provided thousands of meals in Disaster Feed SF, and had done so outside on Golden Gate Avenue, without electricity – just like they will likely do in a catastrophic earthquake.

Knowing the critical role that nonprofits play in disaster relief and recovery, The San Francisco Foundation has been supporting the preparedness efforts of nearly 50 key organizations in the Bay Area for the past four years.  These agencies have worked hard to develop plans to recover their operations and to provide critical services in the most underserved communities.

Yesterday all of that hard work paid off. In Disaster Feed SF, staff and volunteers from these seven agencies worked side by side to prepare and serve meals, handle crowd control, and manage a public event. The collaboration was visible in the sea of colored T-shirts (each agency donned a different color), the multi-logoed banner, and the various agency trucks parked out front. It was also quite evident from the jointly staffed command post and the way that staff members from different agencies were conferring throughout the event.

In talking with staff from these agencies, it is clear how committed they are to jointly serving the Tenderloin in a disaster.

 Their success yesterday was the culmination of many years of building relationships through joint non-disaster projects, several years of disaster planning at each agency, and months of planning together for yesterday’s event.

I certainly wasn’t surprised to see this level of collaboration; I have known that these agencies have been working together for a long time. Yet I was still quite proud to be their supporter and gratified to see how ready they are to serve in the face of a disaster.

Earlier that week I had walked along DUMBO’s waterfront under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpass, and was delighted to see 6th graders gathered to plant hundreds of native plants for the riverfront restoration  project below the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Friday, I visited the adorable 80 year old Cuban-American aunt and uncle of one of my best friends (an Oakland teacher), and conversed with them in my rusty Spanish. I walked past the Park Slope Armory on 15th street, into Prospect Park, and over to the Brooklyn Main Public Library. Everywhere folks on the street were swapping stories of survival from past storms, floods and evacuations, but never did I imagine those very pathways I walked would be inundated by 5-8 ft of water, or in the case of the armory, would become a safe haven for evacuees in two short days.

On the plane that night I was outlining my first blog about all the amazing equity and social justice themes emerging from the GFE conference: the concept of quality education as a civil rights issue, the importance of getting technology into the hands of all learners. But somehow the storm, this megastorm Sandy, served to instantiate the message of the fierce urgency of now.

I was aghast at pictures of the DUMBO area under water, the riverfront restoration, all the children’s plantings gone. I received email chains from Brooklyn locals asking for those of us able and in the area to please bring protein bars, hand sanitizers, blankets–anything to help the now freezing victims of the storm–to the local pharmacy (where I had just shopped!) to stuff neighborhood care bags. The resiliency of the Brooklyn neighborhood outreach was (is) so extraordinary! And suddenly, like millions across the nation, I felt guilty for being home in a safe dry comfortable environment. What could I do, two thousand miles away? Give as much as I could afford to the local relief efforts, sure, but what else?

Back at work a week later, I can’t stop thinking about the before and after pictures, and what I can learn and do now. Just as the storm victims couldn’t wait for food clothing shelter and medicine, our nations children (a growing majority both children of color and in poverty) cannot wait any longer for the optimum conditions for learning to emerge. With nearly 30% of our children now living in poverty, their parents under employed, poorly housed, under insured, and at times, underprepared to coach them to succeed in school, our public and private systems must all band together to create a floor of equity, below which no child will fall into the flood. A floor of equity that insures that both academic and non academic conditions for learning are met in every school community.

That’s why this year’s education grantmaking will again be devoted to early childhood programs, education equity programs, and our signature area of full service community school partnerships. That’s why we have a Disaster Preparedness program at the Foundation. That’s why we have an Immigrant Integration program, a Community Development Program, an Arts and Culture program, a Community Health Program, an Environment Program, and a Koshland Neighborhood Program, and why we all work collaboratively, side-by-side, for greater impact together.

Whether Brooklyn or the Bay Area, it still takes a village of public and private partners to re-create community, and to ensure the necessary conditions for learning. Join us as we seek to grow our collective efforts for all children, for our future.

We have identified the following opportunity to support needs in NY:
New York Community Trust has established the New York Critical Needs Fund for Hurricane Sandy and has also vetted a number of local organizations that are serving New Yorkers in need. Learn more on NYCT’s website.

We are exploring opportunities to meet the needs in New Jersey and will post those here when available.