Intergovernmental Community Resilience Team

Executive Summary ...

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Introduction

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Common Terms and Acronyms

• ICRT (Intergovernmental Community Resilience Team): The City of Portland/Multnomah County division in Portland’s Emergency Coordination Center that worked to provide resources to historically underserved communities during the first 18 months of COVID-19. During the COVID response, the ICRD was called the “JVIC”.
• CBO (Community Based Organization): An institution that provides and/or is created for the purpose of providing a social benefit. These are usually nonprofit organizations, but the Portland ICRD also partnered with a few for-profit organizations and they are included under the general grouping of “CBO” in this report.
• ECC (Emergency Coordination Center): The space (physical or virtual) where emergency responders from different offices work together on a disaster response. The Portland Bureau of Emergency Management manages Portland’s ECC.
• EOC (Emergency Operations Center): The center of a commanding response agency’s operations. During COVID-19, Multnomah County maintained an EOC since the County takes the lead on public health response, while the City’s efforts are oftentimes an accessory to the County’s response goals.
• ICS (Incident Command System): The organizational framework used universally by emergency management professionals to coordinate response efforts.
• JVIC: The legacy term for the ICRT and interchangeable with “ICRT”. “JVIC” originally stood for “Joint Volunteer Information Center” but the mission and operations of the ICRT significantly outgrew that description and “JVIC” became obsolete. It is included here because many who worked in the ECC during COVID remember the ICRT referred to as the “JVIC”.
• NET (Portland Neighborhood Emergency Teams): A PBEM-managed program of disaster response volunteers.
• PBEM (Portland Bureau of Emergency Management): The City of Portland’s lead bureau for disaster response.
• PMP (Portland Mask Project): A project of the ICRT staffed and run by volunteers to produce masks for community partner organizations during the pandemic.
• VAP (Vaccine Access Project): A project of the ICRT staffed and run by volunteers to arrange vaccinations for elderly and homebound seniors.

COVID-19 and Health Equity

The Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, known as COVID-19, in the United States on January 21, 2020. At the time of this writing on June 1, 2022, COVID-19 has since resulted in 131,000 infection cases, 5,914 hospitalizations, and 1,219 deaths in Multnomah County. Though the pandemic continues, the City of Portland’s Emergency Coordination Center (ECC) activated only during the acute pandemic phase from March 9, 2020, to September 30, 2021; a total of 18 months and 21 days.

The scale of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of fear it spreads, disruption it causes, and lives it takes has not been seen in Portland on such a scale since the “Spanish Flu” pandemic in 1918. Despite COVID-19’s novelties the pandemic conforms to at least one predictable quality shared with nearly all disasters: historically underserved communities experience disproportionate impacts. The pandemic causes immigrants and non-English speakers, BIPOC communities, the elderly, persons with disabilities, and persons living in poverty more death, hospitalizations, unemployment, and suffering in Oregon than other demographic segments.

Most factors causing disproportionalities in disaster outcomes are upstream of disaster preparedness and response work. Racism, ableism, and classism could serve as broad terms that begin to point to the disparities resulting in populations becoming marginalized during and after a disaster in the first place.

Those upstream factors are beyond the scope of this report. Nonetheless, those factors should always shape how government responds in a disaster. That notion is in line with guidance from the Oregon Health Authority concerning the promotion of health equity. Their guidance states:

Oregon will have established a health system that creates health equity when all people can reach their full health potential and well-being and are not disadvantaged by their race, ethnicity, language, disability, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, social class, intersections among these communities or identities, or other socially determined circumstances.

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[i] New numbers show COVID-19 damage to communities of color; leaders call for better data collection. (2020, May 1). Multnomah County. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.multco.us/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/news/new-numbers-show-covid-19-damage-communities-color-leaders-call

[ii] Gould, E., & Wilson, V. (2020, June). Black workers face two of the most lethal preexisting conditions for coronavirus—racism and economic inequality. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/black-workers-covid/#:~:text=While%20unemployment%20skyrocketed%20for%20Black,and%20gender%2C%20February%E2%80%93April%202020

[iii] Graph taken from Burns, J. (2021, March 18). Was Oregon’s COVID-19 pivot enough to address racial inequities? Oregon Public Broadcasting. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/18/was-oregons-covid-19-pivot-enough-to-address-racial-inequities/

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[i] Regional COVID-19 data dashboard. (2020, March 30). Multnomah County. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.multco.us/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/regional-covid-19-data-dashboard

[ii] Kenck-Crispin, D. (2020, March 24). A Century Ago, Portland Faced a Health Crisis That Now Sounds Eerily Familiar. Willamette Week. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://www.wweek.com/culture/2020/03/24/a-century-ago-portland-faced-a-health-crisis-that-now-sounds-eerily-familiar/

[iii] Davidson, T., Price, M., McCauley, J., & Ruggiero, K. (2013). Disaster Impact Across Cultural Groups: Comparison of Whites, African Americans, and Latinos. American Journal of Community Psychology, 2013(Sep), 97–105. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4386718/

[iv] People with Disabilities. (n.d.). Center for Disaster Philanthropy. Retrieved June 1, 2022, from https://disasterphilanthropy.org/resources/people-with-disabilities/#:~:text=persons%20with%20disabilities.-,Key%20Facts,higher%20than%20the%20general%20population.

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Notes