PRESENTED BY
// HOW BUSINESSES AND GOVERNMENTS WORK TOGETHER IN A CRISIS James G. Featherstone, Executive Director, Homeland Security Advisory Council
Tell us a little bit about what our leaders here in the city and county, the cities of L.A. County and the region’s public safety leaders are experiencing and contending with this complex environment? Unlike ‘92, we don’t have as many fires, but the complexity and the breadth and scope of today’s crisis is landscaped sized. It’s what we call a horizon-like crisis. And since we can’t see the end of the crisis or can’t see the effect of the crisis, it complicates. Right now, we have a compounding of crises, which pulls on resources. It takes longer. It’s more complex. Also, the demographics of the people that are affected by the two crises that we have going on right now on is much more complex than it was in 1992. As Craig Fugate, the former FEMA administrator used to say, this is a maximum of maximums in the sense that we will see the public sector response taxed here. But it also provides an opportunity for the private sector and philanthropy to assist the government in its efforts to protect lives and property, stabilize the incident, and protect infrastructure and business continuity. How can our region truly “rebuild better”? Ideally, the restoration and recovery starts the moment you get into the response or addressing the crisis. I think there’s a great opportunity here, just as there was in ‘92, for all the various sectors to begin to engage in restoration and recovery.
What are some ways businesses and the nonprofit sector can work together? One of the things I’ve learned is that business is always a lot more actionable than government but government also has a much more broad lift. Government has to serve everyone, all of us. Business serves its constituency or its customer base. Something that we learned in the public safety world a long time ago is that the leadership changes based on primacy of mission and need at the time. So depending on what the big need or the specific need is at any given time, the leadership can evolve. It’s important to have the cultures be able to work together. One of the big benefits that I’ve had at HSAC is to be able to look at the expertise that Peter brings from the private sector, the expertise that Wendy brings in from the government and nonprofit sector, and be able to get advice and guidance from people that represent some really good thinking, very progressive, very actual thinking from different sectors.
This is tricky because this is a novel crisis, although we’ve always been very aware of the possibility of a pandemic and also compounding crisis. We figuratively talk about the silos that exist out there, the private sector, the governmental side, the philanthropic, nonprofits, et cetera. There’s value in those silos, but I think there’s an opportunity to perforate those silos and create a cross flow. A key to resilience is diversity. And we have an opportunity to actually leverage the diversity and the expertise of these various silos can actually bring to the table.
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