Disaster recovery is never a single-handed effort. From a logistical standpoint alone, there’s a complex value chain of suppliers, distributors, transporters, donors, coordinators and volunteers who need to work in sync to ensure survivors receive the care and resources they need.
Luckily, ALAN exists to connect all of these moving pieces and make disaster relief efforts considerably more efficient. To illustrate, consider the work we recently did to provide clean water to residents of Jackson, MS.
In late July 2022, the Mississippi Department of Health issued a boil-water advisory for residents of Jackson after samples revealed tap water was not safe to ingest. Less than a month later, the crisis heightened when floods resulting from heavy rainfall led to the failure of Jackson’s largest water treatment plant.
During this time bottled water became not only a scarce commodity, but a sought-after necessity for more than 150,000 affected residents of the state’s capital.
Enter ALAN and Good360.
“Good360 had been approached by the Home Builders Association Of Mississippi (HBAM), which wanted to host a bottled water giveaway in the Jackson area,” said ALAN Executive Director Kathy Fulton. “The folks there remembered that we had helped with other water crises in the past, so they contacted us to see if we could find a large donation of bottled water to help.”
ALAN quickly reached out to our network of industry partners, and it wasn’t long before the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) followed up with the good news: Niagara Bottling, an IBWA member organization, would donate a truckload of bottled water.
“This was a Godsend to our citizens, who had not had clean drinking water in Jackson for more than three weeks,” wrote HBAM Executive Vice President Patrick Nelson in a thank you to donors.
But the need for assistance didn’t end there. In order to get the water to its distribution point, a transportation donor was needed. Based on past successes, Good360 contacted The UPS Foundation, which agreed to donate the transportation.
From September 5th through September 13th, UPS delivered 130,000 bottles of water to Anderson United Methodist Church in Jackson, where members of the Home Builders Association of Mississippi (HBAM) were waiting to unload and distribute it to more than 10,000 grateful Jackson residents.
“ALAN and Good360 are perfect pieces to the puzzle of disaster response and recovery. In this case, like many others, we leveraged each other’s logistics and product donation partners. Our collaboration ensured that all available resources and assets were used to get water to Jackson, MS as soon as possible,” said Jim Alvey, Vice President of Disaster Recovery at Good360.
Our work in Jackson shows that when people are in need, organizations from all over are willing to provide help – especially if they have a facilitator to connect all the moving pieces. Partnering with such generous organizations and ensuring that aid reaches survivors as fast as possible is a big part of what informs ALAN’s work and fuels our mission.
“It’s a classic example of why the “N” in our name – network – is such an important part of what we do,” Fulton said. “Between our non-profit and industry association partners and our in-kind donors and local volunteers, it often really does take a village to help another village.”
P.S. Want to donate transportation, warehouse space, equipment or related logistics services to help disaster survivors? Consider making a pre-offer today!
