CDBG-DR grantees are under significant pressure to get recovery funds into the community. A successful response must ramp up quickly while establishing a solid foundation that will support the effort over the longer term. You will need to scale up your operations to manage the influx of funds and stand up programs to rebuild a resilient community. Take the following actions immediately to launch your program.
For more on key steps to standing up your CDBG-DR Program, download Key Things to Do When You Receive CDBG-DR Funds.
As part of the CDBG-DR Action Plan, grantees must provide an analysis of the disaster impact and the resulting needs that have not been addressed through other sources such as FEMA and SBA funding or insurance proceeds. This unmet need is codified in the Unmet Needs Analysis component of your Action Plan.
The Disaster Impact and Unmet Needs Assessment Kit guides CDBG-DR grantees through a process for identifying and prioritizing critical unmet needs for long-term community recovery and provides a series of tools, in the appendices, to aid that analysis. It provides guidance on how to:
CDBG-DR Programs are usually larger and more complex than typical housing and community development programs, requiring distinct operational functions to accomplish the diverse activities necessary for effective program management.
HUD has identified operational functions that grantees must implement to carry out a successful CDBG-DR Program. Each function requires operating procedures, staff, and systems to meet its mission. The summaries provided in the Toolbox highlight key actions needed to set up each function and carry it out in an effective and compliant manner.
Some of these functions may be familiar and will require only minor changes or simple expansion to carry them out in your post-disaster environment. Other functions may be entirely new and require significant expansion of your capabilities. Your existing business processes may not be sufficient for the scale of your disaster response effort and you may require new systems, procedures, and staff capabilities. Similarly your staff and subrecipients may not be familiar with critical Federal requirements such as cost reasonableness and duplication of benefits and procurement that, when overlooked, can lead to audit findings. In short, you need to review all ten functions in light of existing capacity and systems to determine your structure and organization.
These functions provide an organizing framework to help you comply with CDBG-DR rules and regulations; however, each grantee will assess how best to implement these functions in their own environment. The size of your grant, existing capabilities, and strategic program goals will influence how you structure your organization. You may combine some functions under one team or separate the roles and responsibilities of other functions into various teams. You may perform some functions with existing staff and partners or contract with other entities to fulfill others. The capacity module provides some tools to help you explore and make these decisions.
Successful program implementation will likely require increasing the size of your staff and cultivating new partnerships with other agencies, subrecipients, and contractors. This section provides tools to assess your capacity and make decisions about how best to build a team that has the skills and resources necessary to implement the operational functions described in the previous section. Here are the key steps to building your CDBG-DR team:
Download a zip file with all tools from this Program Launch Guide.