When disaster hits, most companies and nonprofits are working toward the same goal without knowing what the other has, needs, or is already doing. A corporate funder may have resources ready and no visibility into who’s already on the ground. A nonprofit knows where the need is and is often not in the room where funding decisions get made. That’s not a lack of goodwill. It’s a lack of infrastructure.

Nonprofits and corporate funders have both been naming this gap: nonprofits know where the need is, and funders know what it would take to move faster, but the two rarely connect before decisions get made. Less than 1% of U.S. philanthropic giving goes to disaster work, and most of that goes to response, not the preparedness and mitigation that would make response less necessary in the first place. Even the collectives built to close that gap often reproduce it, with corporates and nonprofits meeting separately, or only with a handful of partners at a time.

Drawing on Before the Next Disaster, EFG’s new white paper from our inaugural Collective Action Summit on Disaster Response, we’ll walk through the framework for building collaboration that holds up under pressure.

Our goal is for you to walk away with tools and frameworks for working collectively across organizations and sectors. We’ll use disaster response as our lens, but you don’t have to work in disaster response to put these lessons into practice. Whether you’re building a coalition, strengthening a partnership, or bringing different organizations around a shared challenge, these approaches can help you work together more effectively.

Summit practitioners will walk through what they built before they needed it. Then we’ll get into what it takes to build that kind of readiness anywhere, not just at the organizations that already have it.