United Way B.C.’s emergency fund to help residents recover from 2021’s devastating summer wildfires was still active as the first raindrops from an atmospheric river touched down on British Columbia in mid-November, triggering catastrophic flooding and mudslides. 

Canada’s westernmost province is becoming a case study in the sheer tempo of climate disasters thanks to climate change. On top of an opioid crisis that routinely kills more people every day than COVID-19, B.C. faced temperatures last summer more akin to the Middle East than the West Coast, along with wildfires that burned the town of Lytton off the map.  

When November’s catastrophic flooding stranded hundreds of drivers, cut off First Nations communities, and killed at least four people in massive mudslides, non-profits and charities found themselves juggling their day-to-day social programs while also temporarily reinventing themselves as ad-hoc humanitarian agencies. “Most of the time, we’re not working in an emergency context,” says Louise Smith, operations manager at Archway Community Services. 

That is no longer the case. Food banks are airlifting essential supplies to communities without dedicated food security organizations, including Lytton. Archway Community Services, based in the city of Abbotsford, is providing aid to smaller non-profits or charities in nearby communities. And grantmakers like United Way are increasingly juggling multiple urgent funding streams simultaneously as summer turns into fall and flooding replaces wildfires. 

When B.C.’s floodwaters do finally recede (the province was hit by a fresh round of storms over the weekend), the non-profit and charitable sector will need to regroup and consider how to work together on a strategic level to ensure it isn’t duplicating services, can handle numerous disasters at once, and maintain long-term, day-to-day community support.

Stepping into the breach

When last summer’s wildfires scorched B.C, United Way B.C. raised just under $546,000 through its Wildlife Recovery Fund to support 5,160 people in 86 communities, along with 19 non-profits and charities. Kim Winchell, provincial director of community impact and investment at United Way of the Lower Mainland, says the Fund’s first month was devoted to providing the very basics to B.C. residents: “Food, clothing, menstrual products — anything people would need,” she tells Future of Good.

After the first month, Winchell says, it became clear to United Way that many of the B.C. residents who’d survived evacuation needed mental health treatment. (Finding statistics on the exact number of B.C. wildfire evacuees who develop depression, anxiety, or PTSD is difficult, but psychologists routinely warn about the unsettling psychological impact of wildfires and other climate disasters). “We were partnering with our non-profit agencies to deliver mental health and trauma support and to build back communities,” Winchell says. 

Within the next week, Winchell says, United Way will likely shut down its Wildfire Recovery Fund to focus on the floods. According to a public report, United Way B.C. has earmarked $238,000 for long-term community recovery, and Winchell says the Fund’s grants will last until summer 2022. Fast-forward to the B.C. flooding, and it’s clear the cycle established through the Wildfire Recovery Fund will continue — through the United for B.C. Flood Response Fund. While it is still too early to tell exactly how it will be distributed, the Fund’s web page says it will pay for “important needs like housing, food assistance, trauma, and mental health support.”

Meanwhile, Archway Community Services — which normally provides services ranging from parenting classes to therapeutic counselling for addiction and sexual abuse — found itself pivoting to an emergency response organization when the floodwaters rose. “There’s a lot of other organizations in the community who do that type of thing: the Salvation Army and the Red Cross,” Smith says. “We have not, as an organization, often stepped into that role.” 

Archway Community Services’ emergency response during last summer’s wildfires and brutal heat dome included emergency cooling shelters for Abbotsford locals and stepping up its check-ins on vulnerable seniors.  When the floodwaters reached Abbotsford, the non-profit rapidly expanded its existing food bank to provide for locals who’d lost their homes or couldn’t get food during the floods. Supply chain issues and panic-buying have been major problems in B.C. as floodwaters rendered highways impassable (at one point, cutting off Vancouver from the rest of Canada). 

Archway Community Services isn’t a humanitarian agency, nor does Smith expect it’ll become one in the near future. There are other humanitarian responders who’ve done sterling service during the B.C. floods, such as Khalsa Aid and the Red Cross. But the need for community social services to, when necessary, fill the role of frontline responders during climate disasters is becoming impossible to ignore — although Smith doesn’t expect Archway will replace a humanitarian agency. “I think what we’re realizing is we’ve got to be ready to step into it when the occasion arises,” Smith says.

Climate adaptation and mitigation

Community social services, as well as humanitarian agencies and other non-profits, are also learning to adapt their operations to better address climate disasters. Dan Huang-Taylor, executive director of Food Banks B.C, says his organization will be re-examining an emergency preparedness handbook they developed in 2018 to help organizations respond and recover from natural disasters, including floods and wildfires. 

“The handbook encompasses a lot of the disasters that are related to the changes we’re seeing in the climate — fires and floods and landslides and all the other weather events that can occur because of these significantly bigger weather events,” he tells Future of Good. “I think we will certainly look at what needs to be updated.”

Meanwhile, international humanitarian agencies like Khalsa Aid Canada are having to adapt a siege mentality of sorts — rotating volunteer teams constantly to avoid burnout while tackling multiple disasters at once, including B.C.’s wildfires, the ongoing floods, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Jatinder Singh, national director for Khalsa Aid Canada, says over the last year, his organization has done everything from deliver food to migrant farm workers forced to evacuate during the B.C. floods to delivering eye drops to voluntary fire stations during the B.C. wildfires. 

“You have to have the team rotate,” he explains, “so you don’t have the same people go out all the time due to exposure risks. We’ve maintained those protocols, and now, it allows our teams to have a break as well.” Given all the climate and humanitarian disasters Khalsa Aid Canada is tackling, Singh doesn’t foresee any changes to their rotation policy. 

And other B.C. organizations are helping their clients adapt to a harsher, hotter, more unpredictable climate. Ian Cullis, director of asset management at the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association (BCNPHA), says that the past summer’s heat wave and wildfires only highlighted the importance of building homes that can withstand the changing climate. “Building resilient, healthy, comfortable buildings is only going to be more and more important,” Cullis explains. 

BCNPHA is not a front-line responder, but their work includes improving conditions in B.C.’s 3200 non-profit buildings — from single-family homes to 150,000 square foot care facilities. Many of them in the Lower Mainland don’t have air conditioning. Retrofitting homes to improve air flow or use heat pumps is critical, Cullis says, as well as trying to improve carbon savings, educate landlords about redevelopment, and providing free ‘energy audits’. BCNPHA even offers an insurance program for non-profit homes in wildfire zones, where insurance coverage is either prohibitively expensive or impossible to obtain. 

But adaptation in the face of all the supply shortages, blocked highways, and other infrastructure issues is a struggle. Huang-Taylor expects supply chain complications in particular could hamper the efforts of B.C. ‘s food banks to address hunger for a long, long time. “There’s so many different types of challenges that have been presented by these floods, and we know they’re not going away,” he says. 

Planning for climate chaos

When the storm waters subside, Smith thinks Abbotsford’s non-profits and charities need to become more strategic in how they deliver services, especially during crisis situations. “Going forward, we have to get ourselves better organized,” she says. In a recent call with the city of Abbotsford, she says, staff weren’t sure of where to send clients for basic essentials like food or diapers because the local non-profit sector hasn’t organized to handle major disasters. “It had an inefficiency to it that I don’t think we all want to revisit again,” Smith says. 

Smith thinks Abbotsford’s non-profits and charities need to sit down and work out each organization’s role in disaster response going forward to ensure locals can get help in a consistent manner. “We don’t know what the next climate disaster is going to be, but let’s just assume there might be one,” she explains. “What are we going to…contribute, and how can we support and use one another?” 

The lessons learned from crisis response during the B.C. floods and last summer’s wildfires and heat dome are simple: climate disaster is a probability. Plan accordingly. Just as the pandemic taught non-profits and charities to handle services virtually while reaching clients in need, Smith says the floods show Archway how vital it is to improve their speed and flexibility in a world where the tempo of climate disasters is hitting an allegro pace. “I think we’ve just matured a little bit,” Smith says. 

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