Whether they’re dealing with fires like the ones ravaging Los Angeles or hurricanes like those that wreaked havoc in Florida and North Carolina just a few months ago, when natural disasters lay waste to homes and towns, what low-income residents often need most is quick cash. That, however, can be difficult to come by. Insurance companies can take months or even years to fully resolve claims. The Federal Emergency Management Agency requires significant documentation before it will offer relief, and often denies victims with no explanation.
The nonprofit GiveDirectly is trying to circumvent all this maddening complexity, working with Google to overlay government data on things like median income and food stamp enrollment with damage data gleaned from satellite imagery and local incident reports to get cash in the hands of those who need it most — quickly. After a disaster, low-income residents in especially hard-hit areas are automatically deemed eligible for aid, no opt-in necessary. They’ll get a notification on their phone that they qualify for a direct cash transfer, and can enroll in a matter of minutes, with no additional documentation required.
“Especially as disasters become more prevalent and more severe, having a way to pre-verify vulnerable populations — to get people resources as quickly as possible — becomes so valuable,” Laura Keen, GiveDirectly’s U.S. program director, told me. As she explained, cash is often more useful than “in kind” donations such as clothing or food, as it allows recipients to prioritize specific needs and reduces barriers associated with government-run disaster programs. “You have to have the means and the know-how and the language abilities to apply for that assistance,” Keen said. Still, over 75% of global humanitarian assistance is in-kind.
GiveDirectly set up its fundraising campaign for L.A. fire victims on January 10, and is thus far over 40% of the way to its $1 million dollar goal. While the fundraiser won’t officially close for another 25 days, Keen said the organization plans to send out its first payments “as soon as next week.” While GiveDirectly has yet to finalize amounts, it estimates that recipients will get on the order of $3,000 to $4,000 — significantly more than the nonprofit gave to victims of Hurricane Ian in 2022 or Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. That’s because with these fires, “the damage has been so severe, and we expect people are going to be facing temporary housing costs for a matter of months,” Keen explained. For a campaign like this, Keen said she expects about 88 cents out of every dollar donated to go directly to affected individuals and families, the same efficiency rate as the organization’s Helene and Milton campaign. That remaining 12 cents will go towards transaction fees, offices, and staff.
If these rapid payouts remind you of parametric insurance, you’re on the right track. Parametric insurance also exists to get cash quickly into the hands of those who have experienced disaster, without the need for damage audits. But as is implied by the word “insurance,” it is also an opt-in service that involves the payment of monthly premiums. GiveDirectly’s cash comes out of the blue, free and clear.
To get the actual money out the door, GiveDirectly works with Propel, an app for low-income households to manage government benefits such as SNAP food stamps. GiveDirectly tells Propel what areas its mapping tool has honed in on, and Propel sends out an alert to users in these zones, notifying them that they’re eligible to receive money. Individuals then complete a brief survey confirming their contact information, preferred language, and signing some consent notices.
“The last response that we did in western North Carolina and in Florida last fall, it took them, on average, 68 seconds to complete that enrollment form,” Keen told me. The last time she looked at the data, there were about 2,300 households using Propel in the impacted areas of L.A., a number that’s only growing as the largest fires remain uncontained. Once people enroll, they can expect to receive money directly to their debit accounts within three days.
While quick and simple, this strategy is far from comprehensive. Only about one in four households that receive SNAP benefits has the Propel app. And those that do may not open it regularly, meaning they could miss the alert that they qualify for cash. For Propel users who see the notification, Keen said, enrollment is above 80%, while overall user enrollment is much lower — around 40%. “But typically, we have more Propel users than we have funds,” Keen explained. Basically, it wouldn’t actually be possible to give the target amounts to everyone who meets the criteria. Rather, the strategy is to get money out as quickly as possible, knowing full well there'll be many who are missed. Plus, relying on Propel makes the whole system safe from fraud (something GiveDirectly has dealt with in the past), as Propel users have already verified their eligibility for government benefits. “So we just have very high confidence in who we're supporting,” Keen told me.
Domestic disaster relief was not initially on the agenda for GiveDirectly, which was started in 2008 by a group of econ grad students at Harvard and MIT as a way to get money into the hands of some of the poorest people in the developing world. Since the organization began accepting public donations in 2011, it’s mostly retained this international focus, making its first foray into domestic cash transfers in 2017, when it provided physical debit cards to victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas.
“At that time, we had pretty rudimentary targeting,” Keen told me. “We would just drive to different areas, talk with as many people as we could, visually look for signs of damage, try to source any open source information where we could, and then overlay that with administrative data.” Since then, the company has integrated artificial intelligence into its hurricane relief efforts, training algorithms to generate damage assessments for thousands or even millions of structures. But fire damage is much more uniform (if a house burns, it’s usually 100% destroyed) and easy to identify from satellite imagery alone, Keen explained.
If GiveDirectly exceeds its fundraising target in L.A., however, it may run out of eligible residents who are reachable via the Propel app, meaning the organization will need to go back to basics: establish an in-person presence in the city., enroll people onsite, and hand out debit cards once more. “Right now our goal is to get to $1 million, and then all of that we can deliver via Propel,” Keen told me. “But if we exceed that, we would definitely explore other options.”
An old copper mine in Arizona. John Moore/Getty Images