Blog #5 Connect, Collaborate, Coordinate

The day began with an early morning meeting with Habitat Maui and Matt Bachman, Executive Director. He talked about the great need for volunteers to help rebuild Maui with absolutely no place to put them. Housing is in severely short supply for residents and fire survivors, and the few volunteers who do come to Maui are either staying in tents, doing homestays, sleeping on the floor of a church or similar facility on the other side of the island with long commute times and heavy traffic; or paying for exorbitant hotel costs, which are approx. $500 per night, even for the most basic economy hotel.

Habitat volunteers building a home in Maui.
Source: https://www.habitat-maui.org

A Vision Is Cast: A Volunteer House in Lahaina!

Habitat Maui has a vision that has just emerged to build a Volunteer House in the heart of Lahaina. Lahaina is the neighborhood where Habitat completed the construction of ten homes in 2020 that burned to the ground in the fires of 2023. You can read their story here: https://www.habitat-maui.org/disasterrelief/. One of the ten families recently told Habitat Maui that they are relocating, so Habitat Maui now has a piece of property to build on. The idea is to build a Volunteer House that will house rotating groups of volunteers for the next several years and then, when long-term recovery is finished in Maui, convert the Volunteer House to a Habitat home again. Habitat Maui would like to hire local construction workers to have the Volunteer House done as soon as possible by the spring of 2025. The Volunteer House will hold approximately 12-15 people. They estimate the cost to build would be $300,000.

(Above) Picture of the Habitat Maui homes in Lahaina before and after the fires in August 2023

PDA Process for Disaster Relief Funding: A Three-Way Partnership

Rev. Edwin Gonzalez-Castillo emphasized that Habitat Maui’s new best friend was the Presbytery of the Pacific and Mission Catalyst Rev. Heidi Worthen Gamble. He explained that the process for PDA funding is through presbyteries. Pacific Presbytery would have to request funding from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and apply on Habitat Maui’s behalf for a Domestic Grant through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. Of course, Pacific Presbytery can’t WAIT to partner with Habitat Maui and get this accomplished! Our whole delegation left very hopeful that this could be the start of a great relationship.

Next Stop: Maui Long Term Recovery Group, Ho’ōla iā Mauiakama

Our next stop was a meeting with the board of the Maui Long Term Recovery Group, Hoʻōla iā Mauiakama, which is a designated, centralized, coordinating group of local organizations whose goal is to assist and restore the impacted individuals and families in the community. Long-term recovery groups are critical to the restoration of communities after a disaster. Often, the news media has long gone by the time a community is ready to begin the long-term recovery phase, yet so much goes on here, led by local community leaders. This is when the church and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance can play a key role by accompanying local organizations and supporting local recovery efforts. Remember: all disasters begin and end locally. The experts are from within the community, not from the outside.

What is the Long-Term Recovery Phase?

Long-Term Recovery is a phase within the disaster cycle that emphasizes the holistic and broad range of work necessary for a community and its residents to achieve recovery. There are three core phases to a disaster: preparedness, relief, and recovery. The preparedness phase is intended to reduce the impact of a disaster and hasten the delivery of relief and recovery services. The relief phase stabilizes life and structures, often by providing temporary fixes (this is the stage that receives almost all of the news coverage). The recovery phase involves bringing permanent solutions to the problems created by the disaster and establishing a “new normal” for the communities affected by the disaster.

Hardship and Overwhelm for Maui

The Maui LTRG leaders told stories of hardship and being overwhelmed by the recovery process. Maui has some unusual factors that make the Maui LTRG’s job even harder: 1) Rising inflation. Inflation has unfortunately soared in Maui since the disaster. They were sharing that some home rentals are now costing up to $12,000 per month for what was less than half that before the fires. 2) Insurance gap of payouts. Homeowner’s insurance payouts are not coming close to meeting the needs of homeowners who had insurance because of the steep inflation and high costs. Maui LTRG is already working with approximately 30 families who were under-insured, with an insurance gap of over $3 million collectively. This is extraordinarily high. 3) Shortage of paid construction workers. Maui LTRG studied the need for housing vs. the number of construction workers on the island and calculated that it would take over 17 years for Maui to rebuild with the shortage of paid construction workers. That is an unacceptable timeline. They desperately need volunteer groups to build housing. However, they, too, expressed the frustration that there is no place to put volunteers. Also, they described the need a Volunteer Coordinator, for which they currently do not have funding for. PDA explained the process that Pacific Presbytery’s Mission Catalyst will be the one through whom the Maui LTRG will submit a grant request. I promised to follow up and help the Maui LTRG discern what it is they most need from PDA.

The following video of the restricted area was taken with permission by a local resident.