SBA's Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience partnering with Resilience Innovation Hub

We're the first agency that's on the ground with FEMA from day one, sometimes before day one. And we're the ones that put capital in the hands of disaster survivors first. It just recently launched a business resilience guide that for businesses based on threat, right. Whether you're susceptible to wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, any of those things which you can do operationally to be more resilient as we do that homework for them, or what something low interest, low capital you could do right now to get to what you can do that takes much more capital to do that for businesses, right. Whether you're susceptible to wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, any of those things which you can do operationally to be more resilient.

Are you sensing a little bit more of an awareness that we need to make a pivot in how we do risk, and that is to get really ahead of it and make the investment there?

We're now at all four phases of emergency management, preparedness, response and recovery. Right. All at the same time and rebuild, back to back and rebuild and rebuild. To give you just some real context about that, in 2017, we were averaging a billion dollar disaster about every 22 days, about every three weeks at the rate that we're going. Even at a very conservative rate, the increasing number of disasters. I know a lot of people don't believe in climate change. We just take the numbers. The most conservative estimate of how that continues to grow within the next five years, we'll be averaging a billion dollar disaster in this country about every week for just short of a week. Over those navigators can then do is say, hey, Richard, like there's an SVA program. Let me talk to you about what you can do, right? A couple hundred dollars for the straps on your roof. This is what we can do for flood doors. These are things we can do for wind. This is flooding and fire. Because that's all of those kinds of things that the community navigators can do, can help educate for those communities what they can do to mitigate. And it's a local trust and local and trusted source. And the other thing is help people navigate through the complexity of some of these programs.

Your success is to not do this business anymore, right?

No, that's. You know, when I was in Harris County, I said, you know, I want to work myself out of a job and people are prepared for the disaster to come. I would like not to have to offer SBA loans. Our goal is to do that less.

Right?

But we're doing that more. So we've got a long way to go, but there's a lot of opportunity here. What I'm really excited about, the work that y' all are doing with the resilience hub, is bringing insurance together.