Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a podcast that explores resilience & grit, generosity & kindness. We start with true stories of kindness and support during and after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Shared Ground
Episode 18: Navigating the Aftermath with Gavin Blair
What happens when the systems meant to protect us fall short? How might we rebuild them with compassion, insight, and integrity?
In this episode of Shared Ground, we talk with Gavin Blair of Bright Harbor about the complex realities of disaster response and long-term recovery. Gavin has spent years working at the intersection of risk, community service, and systemic resilience, supporting survivors, navigating the insurance and FEMA landscape, and pushing for solutions that focus on those affected by challenging situations.
We cover:
- How systems need to innovate in response to the increasing severity and frequency of disasters, and what effective support really looks like
- What FEMA gets right, where it breaks down, and how to work within its limits
- Why insurance systems often fail survivors, and what needs to change
- How to advocate for communities without adding to what they’re experiencing
- And why kindness isn’t just moral, it’s structural
This episode blends the intimate with the systemic, pairing lived experience with lessons for anyone working in emergency response, policy, or community infrastructure. It’s about what resilience really looks like—and how it begins long after the flames are out.
Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.
For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.
Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).
This is Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community. I'm Alan Marks and I'm Sean Knierim. Thanks so much for joining us Today. Alan and I are joined by some of the first time. We're doing this out of the studio and from afar. We have Gavin Blair joining us this morning. Gavin, thank you so much for joining us.
Sean Knierim:I'm glad you're here, and as we start a lot of these conversations, Gavin, and you bring a really interesting perspective over your career. On this, we want to give you a chance to introduce yourself. And then we're just interested in how would you define resilience? So over to you, Gavin.
Gavin Blair:Yeah, my background has been in technology and startups a lot of ups and downs over the years in New York, kind of jumping between industries and cutting my teeth on a lot of the motions you go through building a business and innovating with technology. A more recent role that I had was with Lemonade Insurance, where I was Senior Vice President of Customer Operations and joined very early and, as you may know, lemonade is a disruptor in the insurance space. So, with a lot of fanfare we kind of did our thing and launched all sorts of different insurance products, including property insurance, and I was like a lot of the team at Lemonade, the outsider, insider in terms of working within an insurance industry and, frankly, running a claims team, having not worked in claims before. But that gave me this really interesting vantage point on what it looked like, the realities of insurance, the realities of paying claims, supporting natural disasters, seeing where insurance companies could go and where the lines were when you wanted to go further, because our orientation was obviously very much around the experience and customer experience. So anyway, I took that and in this role with Joel, I'm a COO at Bright Harbor and I've taken a lot of those learnings and a lot of those things and tried to apply it to a space that I was getting very familiar and aware of, which was the disaster recovery space.
Gavin Blair:I think, for me, resilience is I know this resonates with you guys it's a lot about learning your lessons. I think, for me, resilience plays a role in this flywheel of having things happen and deficiencies in the system or the approach for how we, for example, obviously, the disasters. How are we learning our lessons? And then how are we applying them to the next disasters and to not just addressing the incredible needs that are put in front of people after a natural disaster occurs, but actually making progress and moving the solutions and the answers and the overall capacity to respond and prevent and mitigate forward. So I think, for me, resilience strikes that chord around how we can push ourselves to do better.
Allan Marks:Let me ask you a question on that, Gavin, too, because if you think about risk because risk kind of flows through both your insurance work and Lemon lemonade and also what you're doing now on disaster recovery, you know it used to be you could say, gee, this person is high risk because they smoke or they live in a wooden house in the middle of a forest that is prone to fires. And this other person, you know, maybe they're healthier or maybe they're, from a property and casualty insurance standpoint, maybe they're living in a, you know, a concrete box with sprinklers all over the place, in defensible space. So you can say there are different risks and as an insurer you can maybe, with that information, select the lower risk one, and that's fine. Large disasters hit lots of different people, entire areas. Sometimes we talk here, for example, about the wild urban, wilderness interface. We talk about floodplains and flood zones and we try to map that out. But with climate that's of course a shifting, moving target. How do you deal with risk and risk reduction? How does that tie to resilience?
Gavin Blair:Yeah, it's a great point and question. I think it actually comes to the heart of really what this macro problem is that we're dealing with, and for me it's really important to start with that because I think it frames the picture. You have a few trend lines that I think are all coming together. You've got the frequency and severity of natural disasters themselves, place where these disasters are hitting floods in inland America. You've got population trends, so large amounts of Americans are moving to coastal areas. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it's very, very large amounts of folks like relocating to these higher what have become now higher risk areas.
Gavin Blair:You have the insurance industry. I mean, I'm unable to write risk anymore. There is no historic playbook from an actuarial or otherwise perspective for how you like the answers frankly for the insurance industry on how to be able to write risk. And for me that ties us directly to home ownership, like what is now home ownership If you are unable to secure your asset, if you're unable to secure insurance against your asset, you take a mortgage out and you're required to be able to insure that asset.
Gavin Blair:So this kind of like macro picture is the stakes are obviously so high in so many different ways, but it's like this. The hope and promise of homeownership is such like an American thing. In principle, it's the way we think about wealth and it's at risk, and it's at risk for generations coming, and so I think urgency around solving these problems is tied to a lot of very high stakes things, and the last leg to this of course I'll highlight is the government response to the efficacy of FEMA. The ability for us to have support from the state or local government is a sea change right now, and arguably FEMA is about to go through some big changes. And so, again, just a total confluence of events, but I just think the stakes obviously couldn't be higher.
Sean Knierim:Yeah, you used a phrase that I'm wondering if you can unpack this a bit for folks who might not be familiar with the insurance industry. Even if they have the insurance policies, we don't know how it works. You talked about writing risk. What does it mean to write?
Gavin Blair:risk An insurance company, in so much as it's a business, being able to look at a piece of property or something that's trying to be insured and understand what the risk factors are, and this ties into some more dense topics around. Ultimately, insurance companies are run based off of something called like a loss ratio, which is, for every dollar insured, what percentage of that dollar is used for when a loss happens, and so very much. This is the mechanics of an insurance company being able to come and see a home, accurately predict the risk against that home, spread their risk out, you know, manage exposure and, at the end of the day too I don't know what you think, alan, but this is like. This is about it being able to be like a private, profitable, the unit economics around your business. Right, and something maybe we can touch on a little bit is the nationalization of insurance which has happened with the NFIP, but I don't know what you think, alan, about what I shared.
Allan Marks:No, I think it's a really important point. I mean, if you look at insurance, just kind of I'm going to grossly oversimplify this but there's two different approaches to it. One is you have private insurance companies. They can look at past history. It's hard now in some places, either legally or practically, to forecast things if the future loss ratios may be different. But just look, for example, at past history and you can figure out from that whom you want to insure. So there's this idea that we pick our insurance companies but in fact they kind of pick us, and that's why there's questionnaires and that's why they ask you questions that are relevant to the loss that's being insured and that'll be different for health insurance than it is for life insurance or property and casualty or long-term care. They're all going to be different, but they're going to want to know things about you that are relevant to them, deciding if they want to insure you and, if so, what the premium is going to be. And the idea for the insurance company is gather premiums, save them for the day when you need to pay out claims and invest the money in the meantime in ways where your assets and liabilities are hopefully roughly matched and don't go out of business doing it because you charged too little, invested unwisely or had to pay out more claims or higher dollar amounts than you expected to. The other way to get around that is a public insurance plan where it's mandatory, everyone's covered, and that spreads the risk because your pool includes everybody, and that's often what governments might do, especially, for example, in the health insurance area.
Allan Marks:I think right now, some of the physical risks we're talking about are changing, not just in directions that are difficult to predict within local areas, but also at a pace or an acceleration where you've got more extreme losses in a more chaotic pattern. They may be more frequent and the premiums you collected 20 years ago that were invested to pay today's claims won't be sufficient. So you see a sudden increase in premiums or you see a loss of the ability to procure coverage for certain risks in certain places. Gavin, I don't know if that captures.
Gavin Blair:Definitely and especially that latter part, the ability to get coverage for your assets, for insurance to work at all as a mechanism for certain areas. And that footprint's vast now, it's regional, it's across different regions and coasts, and things that we just didn't have to experience before.
Sean Knierim:I think within this conversation, we're probably going to pull up to the macro and then come down into the on the ground side, back and forth, and you've had this career, gavin, that pulls you through here. But you've just chosen, within this wider field that you just described, you've chosen to move into a specific piece of this in the disaster response area. You've chosen to move your family to another part of the country that's in that kind of inland flooding-prone area it turns out from these last months. Can you speak about that decision? So, within this framework, you chose to come into this company, bright Harbor, which is a venture-backed organization that's providing services, and really throw your own time and part of your life in on this. Can you talk about that decision? Why did you choose this as your next step after working in the insurance industry?
Gavin Blair:At the end. I think that problems are best solved and innovation happens best when the focus or the viewpoint is exclusively through the eyes of the customer. I think so much about what we experience and, I think, lament about how progress is made against things is because of that kind of upstream going down problem solving. So what I think drew me and our founder Joel to this problem is because it's the last mile. This is what the actual people and the customers are experiencing. This is how all these things roll down and the practical realities of what it means to get FEMA benefits and to get it's just.
Gavin Blair:I think sometimes again, as I'm sure you guys can relate the customer gets added, among many other things, to what is a kind of framework for solving problems.
Gavin Blair:But I think it's the most powerful framework and I think what you're ensuring is that, at the end of the day, how these things combine and come together solves the actual problem that needs to be solved. It's the most honest and closest to the problem that you can get, and so that's where we want to be. We want to be in the business of actual support, post-loss. You know, I'd say on the other side of it too, sean, there's a lot of folks who have tried to focus on the pre-loss side of disaster recovery and certainly a lot of really important things there, but then the support post-loss ends up not really being a usage thing. Employee benefits are full of products that aren't really usage-based. They're just kind of meant to sit there and be paid for and sometimes used through awkward means. It's really, I think, a lot about learning the lessons and really being able to connect all the dots and have all the insights and grounding that you can through the eyes of the people actually experiencing the outcomes of these challenges.
Sean Knierim:So you guys have worked in a Real quick on that customer side, Alan, and then over to yours. You've worked in, I think, four different or maybe five different disasters right now since the company got formed. Can you give us a sense of who is your customer and what do they need, Like paint a picture of who that human is or that family unit that you guys are serving?
Gavin Blair:What's been special about our experience so far is it has actually been the gambit in terms of folks in different circumstances with different needs and different needs. We've supported a few different types of natural disasters as well, which has been very important for us in terms of our learnings Floods we were, for example, in Rurito, New Mexico, last year. They actually just experienced another cycle of flooding, which it's a town that is going to continue to be affected by flooding.
Sean Knierim:It's not this one-off where you then recover and think about it for another day, 10 months later, similar floods came through, after they had experienced this before right this couldn't be.
Gavin Blair:This is a very popular, beautiful destination in New Mexico, up in the mountains, and it's a tourism town and they're just going to keep, I think, having this kind of flooding happening and it's because of. You know, it actually started because of a wildfire that they were affected by last year. Flooding happened as a result of the wildfire and I don't know if you guys know this, but there's. I'm not an actual expert on some of the environmental pieces, but you know, the ash from the fire goes right on, it can lay on water and then the soil doesn't absorb the water and so flooding happens. But that was an important experience, and there it was homeowners, renters, what was interesting in Rurito.
Gavin Blair:So it was a lot of homeowners without insurance, folks, older folks, who had kind of small homes on the river valley. They're probably on social security. They don't have these are not insured assets for them and they never anticipated needing to be able to insure them. On the other side we've had experiences, you know, after, obviously, helene and milton. I got to see florida on the ground right after helene and just the, by the way, the stark contrast behind the theme house, florida responds to a natural disaster and some of these other areas that have just not really ever had to experience them.
Gavin Blair:I spent a ton of time last year in Asheville, north Carolina, working there for weeks on the ground with folks who had experienced the flooding in Asheville, and so it's a range of experiences, but without exception, you are dealing with single folks, folks with families, people, so renters, homeowners these things do not discriminate in terms of who they impact and affect, and so our customer. Really, at the end of the day, it's quite a large range of types of folks and that just belies, I think, the challenge and the complexity of the problem. So often, as we're trying to think about the tools that we build and the workflows that we build, you've just got all these different combinations of things that can end up being an individual's recovery experience, and so much is specific to all these factors that it's not an easy thing to come in and be able to have answers for and be able to feel like you're making progress again, simply because of that diversity of you know circumstances that people have gone through.
Allan Marks:Let me ask you about that differences. You mentioned regionally. So Florida with thanks to hurricanes, extreme experience, frequent experience across the state dealing with windstorms or flooding and dislocation places perhaps like New Mexico, maybe Asheville that you mentioned, perhaps less so, although that may change. You know, in California we talk about earthquake preparedness but we haven't had a big one in a while. But I certainly remember, you know, northridge, I remember you know Point Mugu and Sylmar and others before that were capable of it and of course Loma Prieta up north. And having been through those, you know we've got experience dealing with that. What makes it different, besides just the experience in different states as far as how they respond? And then how does FEMA or the federal government help that? Or maybe at the moment help it less than they used?
Gavin Blair:to Different states and also just different disaster types, and they really do have some important differences what needs to happen immediately after a wildfire versus what needs to happen after a flood. I'll take one small example of what needs to happen after a flood. That is different in people's recovery journey. When you've experienced a flood, I think you may tend to have less total losses. In a lot of homes, you know at some level of partial damage they've been flooded. They've got to, in some cases, of course, tear the home down and rebuild, but, especially in these more humid environments, if you're not getting in there within days after the flood has happened, you have black mold and just really further destructive things happening within the home. You've got to get all your soft materials out of the home. They can't sit in there, they have to be taken out to the home. They can't sit in there, they have to be taken out to the curb, and that is for mattresses to close. And so what you see in the days immediately after a disaster is piles of these items being pulled out of homes in order to set the stage for remediation, and it's a difference in terms of, obviously, what your immediate priority is, in terms of what you have to solve for with a fire. You're obviously still thinking about those same things in terms of what you have in your home, but you're waiting for an appointment, or to be let back into the area, or waiting for an appointment with your adjuster. Perhaps that's the first time you go back to go home.
Gavin Blair:There is an obvious statement is that different states in the United States have vastly different budgets and capabilities when it comes to a lot of things, and it means that you know, obviously, florida, which is in, I've experienced so many of these events in the past. I remember the week after Helene being just struck by how many like heavy machinery and how much, how many workers were on the streets within days, just like piling away sand and pulling out. You know, all this work was happening at such incredible speed I couldn't believe it, whereas you'd go to an Asheville and it would be months after the disaster and you're just starting to see heavy machinery come in and clearing roads and debris and all that other stuff. So there's a combination of things that I think happen. Of course, in Florida, for example, it's private businesses and contractors and they kind of accommodate to support the speed of that response as well as just again.
Gavin Blair:The playbook is there and you can just see how well that playbook is ultimately executed from the state level down to even the town level and the way that the towns are organized. For small town America, the town, in my mind, plays an incredibly important role in all of this. So you may look to FEMA and you may want to understand what the state is doing, but the town is in the driver's seat of so much and seeing how what mayors do and how they respond has been so critical as that liaison and intermediary between federal government agencies. What accountability they demand and ask for. Are they holding daily meetings? Those end up being a lot of what can fold back or accelerate a recovery, and I think it's again more pronounced in parts of America that are smaller towns the Redoso versus the Fort Lauderdale, florida.
Allan Marks:Is FEMA's capacity kind of being on the ground? Look, for example, the flooding recently in Texas and the criticism about some of FEMA's response or capacity to handle calls and whatnot. How has that changed?
Gavin Blair:It's first, and this is how everyone on the team at Bright Harbor feels FEMA is an integral part of the answer and the ability to have that kind of federal support and coordination and investment is critical. And I think even for what we saw with the Texas, it's more or less. I think you've got a lot of really, really experienced and well-intentioned people at the federal government level immediately trying to respond and bring answers and solutions. I mean some of it. For me, it's less about the funding, it's less about some of the mechanics of coordination and leadership and it's more for me it's almost like the dollar efficiency of a FEMA dollar that I think about. I also think about the incentives that FEMA has in terms of what success looks like as being very, very important and not where it should needs to be. So that's like, I think, a big piece of it.
Gavin Blair:Something I've got to highlight you know, guys, that's been a major part of our strategy at Bright Harbor is we recently brought on Pete Gaynor as president, and he's the former FEMA administrator. He is bringing just world-class insights and talent to the table for us as we think about what solutions we want to bring and how we want to innovate on this problem, as well as how we can partner with the right stakeholders state, federal and otherwise to work together towards those solutions as well. So that's a massive upgrade in our capabilities, and we're really thrilled to have Pete on board.
Sean Knierim:Is there anything that surprised you that he brought to the team, or an insight that you would not have expected before working with him?
Gavin Blair:I mean there's a few things. I mean there's a few things like one of it is, you know, a little more. It's, frankly, just the humanization sometimes of like stuff. We've seen FEMA be on the receiving end of so much, you know, critical feedback, especially after Helene and Milton Talking to somebody who was in a role like he was and appreciating how much intent and willingness and desire to help is there. It's as much then where you put your energy and how energy can be misdirected from the actual problem itself. But I think that's then when you talk to somebody firsthand who's in the job doing the role, you're like, oh right, Like there's another set of problems that we have and it's not inefficient leadership, you know.
Sean Knierim:It's these other things that I think need to be addressed and there are humans on the other side of those government emails and government websites you're working through to respond to this.
Gavin Blair:I think, especially if you are somebody who's working in the FEMA or disaster recovery space of the federal government, you have a deep desire to help people. You've chosen a vocation that comes with challenges and requirements that are not easy, and you've done it because of this kind of like civic duty and desire to help people, and it is an important thing, I think. At the end of the day, to keep in mind.
Allan Marks:Yeah, that public service definitely needs to be celebrated. On that note, because you're in the private sector now doing this work, you mentioned opportunities to innovate. What types of innovations are you working on or do you wish you could be working on or expect to be working on going?
Gavin Blair:forward. A lot of the innovation is, I think, understanding what the problem set actually is and building appropriate solutions and technologies to that. So we've been, I think, and still are, in a lot of ways, stuck in a set of problems that we think existed 20, 30 years ago, like disasters when we grew up, how those played out and what the challenges were there, and half the battle was just getting people to understand and acknowledge how much the game has changed and the challenges have changed, that you can't be thinking about this in any legacy way, and I think a lot of insurance companies continue to still, despite the obvious challenges they have, they think about things very legacy. How would I explain the cost of doing this? Or, you know, is this a claims-related expense? And it's just like you're missing the picture in that regard. And so I think the problem set is really important to acknowledge and that's the work that we've done. We've gone in, we've gone to these communities, we've worked with people on multiple levels, and what it comes down to is it's the need now to have a combination of resources be the key to your success and recovery. There's no single source anymore. It is not single source your insurance company. Your single source is not the federal government. It is the combination of these things, at least at this stage, that need to be coordinated and understood flawlessly, and that's where Bright Harbor comes in, as the role and the kind of capabilities of knowing how those things come together to, ultimately, an individual who is like looking at their personal situation and their personal, you know these are massive, these are financial losses. These are massive financial losses.
Gavin Blair:At the end of the day, there's a lot of layers to natural disasters. For a lot of folks, it's a financial disaster, and so what's missing I think in some regards too, that we've noticed is the sensibility around the financial components to do recovery, and so what's missing I think, in some regards too, that we've noticed is the sensibility around the financial components to do recovery. And so, as we are understanding what resources are available to folks, we're then working with them on understanding the costs of recovery, knowing what they can expect in terms of proceeds from insurance or proceeds from federal government, helping them understand what it would take to actually rebuild and recover, putting numbers on the board, having those types of conversations. I can't tell you how many times, guys, that I've just talked to somebody about this and it literally feels like the first time they've actually had that kind of conversation with somebody who's helping them, and it's shocking because it's the conversation right.
Gavin Blair:It's like with what means do you have to recover or rebuild, buy back the items that you lost and the means that you had, and so that's definitely, I think, a big focus for us and the innovation lies there, and so it's the tools and the technologies that allow us to streamline that for folks.
Gavin Blair:We've got an app and a web experience that pulls together multiple parts of that experience for individuals. Part of that experience for individuals, we've launched you know, just yesterday actually a really cool grant finder tool that it sounds basic but it is not there, for, you know, grant lists spin up in local and localities as disasters happen, but this is a tool that can be used across. Any national disaster pulls from the web. You know, leverages ai technology and it gives people really great, easy ways to stay on top of grants that are happening across communities, and that ends up being one of the set of resources that you can lean on if you're able to know when they are, what time frame you have to apply for to get to them, and you know all those other things. Well, things.
Allan Marks:Well, let me ask you a question on that too, if I may, for a second, just staying on that. So you mentioned tools and technologies and you said across communities. So one of the things that makes natural disasters or any widespread disaster different, you know, than, I say, a single family that just burns down. The house burns down because of something unique to that house. Then you can rebuild it in the same way, in the same place, to the extent you have insurance and other funds to do that. So the tools and technologies and the grants and things available will be very different than if it's a community-wide disaster. How does that inform the work that you're doing for these widespread events?
Gavin Blair:The answer isn't just in the individual's ability to recover, it's in the community's ability to recover. Is that kind of what you're indicating? Yes, yeah, we are always oriented first and foremost around, of course. What we feel like is that individuals need to be able to get back on their feet. I think when you start to look at things at the community level first, there's some great ways in which a community can actually be leveraged to speed up and allow for the collective to recover faster. I don't know if you saw this, sean, but neighborhoods using or finding the same contractor to come and do debris removal and leveraging the power of that you know things like that are, I think. I don't know what the experience was in LA, but I've seen a lot of examples of at a community level and community coordination, neighborhood coordination, being one of the key reasons people are able to do things.
Sean Knierim:I'm thinking about that individual to community level, Alan. We talk about that a lot over these episodes and in a lot of the other work we're doing. Gavin, that financial hit is one of the largest hits and it's really hard to figure this out right. You've worked across many different types of disasters and different communities that may have had experience running through this before, so the requirements of resilience might be different in different places. I'd be interested in any insights you have of kind of the sequence and cadencing of what people might expect the day after our house burnt, three months later.
Sean Knierim:Now, a little over six months later, I'm engaging very differently with all of the challenges we have to face, just because we've come through this individual and collective experience. For your work with impacted individuals and communities, I'd be interested in what you've seen. When are people even ready to have the kind of conversations that y'all are having with them? Even if they're really important to have a couple weeks in, not everyone's going to be able to have that through. So how is that trauma layer I don't know if that's the right designation of the layer, but the emotional layer, just recognizing what you've come through and accepting it how does that layer into the effectiveness of people engaging with all of these services, I mean this is the most human part of all of this.
Gavin Blair:These are unbelievably traumatic events right, and I've seen both sides. So interestingly, I've seen folks who I've really had to go at a slower pace and six months post LA we're just starting to work with them now.
Sean Knierim:Which means a lot of those grants that you're identifying stopped granting like three months ago.
Gavin Blair:Right, SBA loan deadline was in March.
Sean Knierim:I tried to get a pan for my stove the other day, and it's a full price pan, whereas, like four months ago, it would have been different. It's such a fascinating experience.
Gavin Blair:Part of. I think what we all may acknowledge needs to change is the timelines of support and the way those things layer, and especially with an example like an SBA loan application expiring in March. Right, people are looking at SBA loans now because they're actually at the point of rebuilding and understanding their budgets and their budget gaps, but I have seen like really I don't know if I quite read on it two sides of this. There's then the folks who just it's a lot about immediate needs right after the disaster. That's a combination of things from temporary housing to understanding personal property inventories and getting the flames process started. It's a universal. Everyone has to go through those early steps, and the focus should be on those early steps.
Gavin Blair:I will say, though, that I'm always struck by the amount of people that we work with in really short period of time after disaster who are down to business.
Gavin Blair:They want to get right into it as much as they can right away, and, while the things that they can impact and influence are relative to the timeline, it's really a lot of people, a lot of parents and folks feeling responsible for others, trying to do what they feel like they need to step up and do, and that is problem solve, that is, fight for and chase answers, even while they're compartmentalizing and dealing with incredible grief and loss.
Gavin Blair:And for me, it's like the most incredible and inspiring part of all of this is like seeing somebody to be able to show up and have that face, and for us it's just, it's all the conviction we need around our mission, like we're there with them. If you're ready for it, like we're ready for it, we will adjust our playbook for how we think you should handle things based on what you've got capacity and ability to go after. And then I think against it again. It's this anchoring of just these touch points claims being filed, claims being resolved, federal deadlines around support, getting back to the home for the first time, being able to catalog and inventory your loss, getting to the point where you're ready for builder introductions, like all those things you can submit. So, and they are ultimately the backdrop.
Allan Marks:I think psychologically you know there are very few situations in life where you lose control as much or as widely right as a disaster loss. And to reestablish some sense of agency over something and for you to be able to facilitate that and validate it and empower them to kind of take some charge over something that needs to be done but also then can be done, I think during that immediate time period is pretty, pretty valuable psychologically, not just financially.
Gavin Blair:I was talking to a new customer yesterday. She's struggling with FEMA, she's had to go through a number of appeals and I had things I knew we could do with her. We're starting to work on strategies, but the thing I said to her is like, look, I can and don't want to make any promises about what could come of this, but what I can give you is the confidence and peace of mind that you know that you did everything you could. So much of this, and I think what drives early responses to disasters too, sean, is fear of I'm missing something. I don't want to miss it, because it would have been there and it could change how I recover.
Sean Knierim:Or certainty, just certainty, that I am missing something.
Gavin Blair:So much of what we end up I think giving people emotionally and psychologically is that certainty and that level of confidence. You have no stone unturned, you have exhausted. So whether you get that FEMA grant or not, I'm here to make sure that there's that kind of confidence in how you're operating and I think that's huge, as we're looking forward to what might we put in place or places where we think we need to innovate.
Sean Knierim:I've heard quite a bit and I'm living here, so I'm kind of hearing this and internalizing it that the experience that we've had in the Los Angeles area and Altadena and the Palisades has certain distinct characteristics that perhaps we didn't have a playbook or might not have been able to have a playbook before. I'm interested, gavin, like first of all, do you think there's what can we take from what are we seeing in Los Angeles that's like, oh, that's interesting and maybe different or something we can move on. But also you might be seeing stuff in Central Texas or some of the other places that you're working Like this is actually what we need to be looking at, moving forward. Are there different character of challenges that we're facing now, different requirements for resiliency? Is there new stuff happening now that you think is distinct this year from what we might have seen five or 10 years ago?
Gavin Blair:having this conversation, it's hard not to feel like any number of these events are like so singular, right and their consequence and outcome and certainly Texas has got, you know, the flooding like its own just tragic character to it that is just beyond belief. La was this example of a tremendous amount. You know, one of the most socioeconomically fluent areas in the country, this incredible concentration of homeowners all impacted and it, you know, it did actually, in some ways, I feel like, bring such a needed amount of attention and urgency as every disaster you know. Sometimes too, it's just like, yeah, the conversation's back Like, hey, guess what? We just had a record-breaking storm with Elaine, but a few months later LA went through a wild Like this is a problem that is not going away. This is a problem that will not go away, it's going to keep happening until we, you know, it's going to keep happening, period. And we need to have absolutely better answers to that.
Sean Knierim:And you said, you pointed right at the beginning to. You said you pointed right at the beginning to it's not just that it keeps happening, but the increased frequency and the increased severity of these, of these challenges, are needing to be noted unprecedented.
Gavin Blair:And so, outside of that, though, I really think that the problem set it's one that we've really had to understand and dive into, but it's it's. It's the same. It is how insurance companies respond to disasters. It's the the chronic underinsurance of America, and Alan I'm sure he's got thoughts about this, but I don't know if we're working with more than a few folks in LA who are actually properly insured. I'm talking like 90 plus percent are very underinsured, and I would wager that there's a much bigger uninsurance problem than we even think. And I know there's a lot of acknowledgement in the industry around underinsurance, but that's right off the bat, you know, setting people off and a very difficult foot, and it just exacerbates the need for other means and other supports, the resources needing to come together in order for you to be able to make yourself whole again and to be able to, if you're a homeowner, rebuild your home and regain that asset that you had. So that's thing. I think there's so much still playing out right now, obviously, around how the federal government responds to and handles these things, but I do think that, in addition to everyone at least us feeling that FEMA's integral, it's an acknowledgement that FEMA needs to change and that is a niche part in spirit, I think, where we're looking to see how things play out with the Trump presidency and the federal government level. On principle, I think giving more resources to states to be able to tailor and action against natural disasters is important, but for me, it's the individual assistance component of FEMA which is the actual the federal government does that work right, you apply for FEMA, you call FEMA, it's the federal government giving grants. That has a lot of improvements I think to make and part of it's how they're incentivized.
Gavin Blair:I don't know if you guys know this, but one of the metrics that FEMA tracks is cases closed. Right, that's a success metric around. Cases closed, that's not cases approved, cases declined, that's cases closed. Yeah, doesn't say anything about the quality of the case and in some scenarios and I think I read this, you know, even in Elaine it was 60% of FEMA cases they denied. So if you're bringing like just, you know, business sensibility to this and customer sensibility, you know centric sensibility, what does that? What does cases closed do for any type of insight or improvement or the right metric for success on that?
Allan Marks:So that's just an example for me of the opportunity there. Financial response, which is the area of either federal grants or SBA loans for businesses to get back on their feet, or for insurance to cover property and casualty or poor business interruption, whatever it might be we tend not first, we don't treat each of those in a coordinated way, but the other thing we do is we also blend them, sometimes in ways that are not coordinated and don't make any sense.
Gavin Blair:Right, and that's an important insight. I'm sure you guys agree that there's a real sequence to all these things and we discussed a little bit earlier a venture-backed business like Bright Harbor. In the days and weeks after a natural disaster, I think the federal response and the nonprofit community responses can be incredible. You've got these national nonprofit organizations, one of which we partner with in various ways, all Hands and Hearts. They're a wonderful organization that comes in Team Rubicon's, another one Communities really do try to show up.
Gavin Blair:They try to show up with supplies and goods and volunteering. It's a little bit of like what happens when the dust settles and those groups whose mandate is really around the immediate response move on to other immediate responses. There aren't a lot of entities left, you know, and that's where this is just such an open space. Right, Harbor is literally there from the day one but six, nine, 12 months in offering persistent, you know, support and insights and advantage and so much of it is just that these things are all complementary to each other, but we're not like elbowing around to get space to work with people. I think we're often just filling huge gaps that happen as you deal with the long tail of disaster. Recovery is an aerosol, it is not a race, and that's some real important things we've seen.
Allan Marks:Yeah, gavin, great point. And Sean, I think you've I mean that's something you've seen in some of the other conversations that we've been having you know on shared ground about what happens six months later what happens a year later and do people check in and do they have the support they need?
Sean Knierim:Yeah, and Gavin, that point you made is showing how it layers together. On one of the last conversations we had, john Seidman talked about just sending a text to someone six months in like set a reminder to reach out, and there's this layered set of resources or outreach just to let people know that someone else is there. It gets quiet as soon as that. The long slog kind of hits. Gavin, as we've talked about a lot of the challenges that are coming up in the future and you've had so many experiences with individuals, with systems, with communities, be interested like what? What brings you hope? Where are you seeing, you know, the spark of optimism and hope that kind of keeps you grooving in this. Can you share anything that comes to mind? It could be an individual experience. It could be something like what is it that you're seeing? It's like, oh, this is great. This is why I need to be doing what I'm doing.
Gavin Blair:Being able to experience the end of recovery offers a lot of that, just out of baseline, like we are.
Gavin Blair:We are working with a number of customers like right now and this is another side of things. You know, Allan, you talked about being in the driver's seat when are you least in the driver's seat? When you're trying to chase down a vendor or builder to come and do work on your home after a disaster. That is like you are out of the driver's seat, right? No-transcript. I can't tell you the feeling of some of these folks are actually making the decision to pick a builder to start the build process, and that is just like this, incredible. And these are people all in not ideal situation. They're all underinsured, they're all likeinsured, they're all some combination of things. So knowing that there can be that success is what I think drives us, then, to try to really see how we make sure that's available to everybody and how it's driven big picture. I also think there just remains a tremendous amount of public awareness gaining and growing around this problem from multiple sectors.
Gavin Blair:I think it's had to become really painful in a lot of ways, especially the insurance industry, alan. I think it's like it's. Maybe some are still, you know, heading the sand, but it's becoming really hard to ignore the fact that, like the rules have changed in so many levels and new answers are needed. I'm hopeful that the changes with what FEMA represents that element and the empowerment of states will leave will create room for, like, new solutions and answers. These states will leave will create room for, like, new solutions and answers. These states are going to need their own tools and their own, like you know, individual assistance delivery methods and ways to connect with customers. That, I think, will allow for innovation to happen.
Gavin Blair:I also think that what's going to really hopefully come together is data. There's a lot of people who are trying to respond to disasters it could be the state emergency management director or the mayor they're just lacking data. There's a lot of people who are trying to respond to disasters it could be the state emergency management director or the mayor they're just lacking data. They just don't know who's dealing with what and at what stage, and so that's another thing I think that we try to help bring to the table. It's like those actual insights that then let them plan better, do better, and so there's a lot of, I think, positive things like coming together that are going to contribute to the answer, and for us it's just so incredibly, you know, mission affirming in terms of like we've got. We've got ways to solve this and we're here to stay until we do, Gavin.
Allan Marks:thank you so much. This has really been a tremendous conversation. We've been talking to Gavin Blair, Bright Harbor. This is Shared Ground. I'm Alan Marks.
Sean Knierim:And I'm Sean Kinnair. If you enjoyed this episode or know of others that might want to listen to some of the wisdom that Gavin brought us, please do share it on with them or leave a comment and let us know what you think by sending us a direct note, if there's other voices that you want to hear on this podcast. But, gavin, thank you very much, and thanks to everyone who joined us for Shared Ground. Thanks very much. This has been another episode of Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community.
Allan Marks:Follow us on your favorite platform or learn more at www. shared-groundcom. That's www. shared-ground. com.