Nearly 1,000 hurricane-affected households in North Carolina and Florida this week will benefit from a new disaster relief program that uses a model not commonly used by philanthropy in the United States: Giving people quick, direct cash payments .

The nonprofit GiveDirectly plans to send $1,000 in payments Friday to households affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The organization uses an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google to identify areas with high concentrations of poverty and storm damage. On Tuesday, it invited people in those areas to sign up for the program through a smartphone app used to manage SNAP and other government benefits. Donations will then be deposited via the app’s debit card.

The approach is meant to deliver aid “in as efficient and dignified a way as possible,” said Laura Keen, senior program manager at GiveDirectly. It removes much of the burden of demand and aims to empower people to decide for themselves what their most pressing needs are.

It won’t capture everyone who needs help, but GiveDirectly hopes the program can be a model that makes disaster relief faster and more effective. “We’re always trying to increase the share of disaster responses that are delivered in cash, whether it’s FEMA or private actors,” Keen said.

The influx of clothing, blankets and food that usually arrives after a disaster can meet real needs, but in-kind donations can’t cover getting a hotel room during an evacuation or childcare while schools are closed.

“There’s an elegance in cash that allows people in these types of circumstances to address their unique needs, which will certainly be very different from the needs of their neighbors,” Keen said. She added that getting money into people’s hands quickly can protect them from predatory lending and reduce credit card debt.

The organization uses direct payments to alleviate poverty around the world, but first experimented with disaster cash payments in the US in 2017, when it gave money to households affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Back then, GiveDirectly enrolled people in person and distributed debit cards that were subsequently activated. The process took several weeks.

Now, the work is done in a few days – remotely. A Google team uses its SKAI machine learning tool to narrow down the most affected areas by comparing aerial images before and after the disaster. GiveDirectly uses another tool developed by Google to compare these findings with poverty data. It sends target areas to Propel, an electronic benefits transfer application, which invites users in those places to sign up.

“They don’t have to find a bunch of documents to prove their eligibility,” Keen said. “We already know they’re eligible.”

However, focusing on areas with many damaged buildings will not lift all low-income households devastated by a disaster. Nor will it reach those already signed up for government benefits, because not all poor people sign up for them, and undocumented residents are not eligible for them. People without smartphones cannot access the app. Propel serves only 5 million of the 41 million people enrolled in SNAP benefits.

In North Carolina, where electricity in some communities has not yet been restored after Hurricane Helene, having a smartphone doesn’t make a difference without a way to power it and a signal to connect to.

Keen said GiveDirectly is aware of the shortcomings of this model. She said some can be mitigated with a hybrid model that uses both remote and in-person enrollment. But the limitations also come down to funding. So far, GiveDirectly has raised $1.2 million for this campaign, including a $300,000 donation from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

Despite the pitfalls, GiveDirectly hopes its model will spark ideas for other direct payment programs.

FEMA overhauled its own cash aid program, called Serious Needs Assistance, in January. The agency increased payments from $500 to $750 ($770 with the new fiscal year starting on Oct. 1) and eliminated the requirement that states apply for the aid first.

Across the states affected by Helene and Milton, more than 693,000 households have received emergency assistance as of Oct. 24, for a total cost of more than $522 million, according to a FEMA spokesman.

But the program still requires households to apply, which has proven problematic when misinformation about the program unleashed in the weeks after Helene. In places with a high cost of living, that $750 might not go very far.

The technology could help FEMA improve its system, said Chris Smith, who managed FEMA’s individual assistance program from 2015 to 2022 and is now director of individual assistance and disaster housing at consulting firm IEM. “I think we need to open our imagination that maybe there are other ways to quickly identify need and quickly identify eligibility.”

But Smith cautions that a publicly funded program does not enjoy the same license to experiment as a philanthropic one. “Ultimately, there needs to be accountability of how any level of government provides assistance to individuals. People will want to know that and having that degree of certainty is very important.”

The government has experimented with other types of unconditional cash assistance, such as when this expanded the child tax credit into a monthly direct deposit payment in 2021. This program briefly cut the child poverty rate nearly in half before it expired.

Research on guaranteed income programs shows that beneficiaries spend the money on what they need, said Stacia West, founding director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Guaranteed Income Research Center. “There is no one who can budget better than a person in poverty,” she said.

In a study tracking the spending of 9,000 participants in more than 30 guaranteed income programs in the U.S., the Center for Guaranteed Income Research found that most money is spent on retail goods, food and groceries and transportation.

West said that one-time cash payments can be a big help for families recovering from a disaster, but the money can make a more profound difference if it’s given over a long period of time.

This happened in two US disasters. In 2016, Dolly Parton funded a program that provided $1,000 per month for six months to people in Tennessee who lost their homes in the Great Smoky Mountains wildfires. The People’s Fund of Maui, a program sponsored by Oprah and Dwayne Johnson, gave 8,100 adults affected by the 2023 Maui wildfires $1,200 monthly for six months.

Keen said GiveDirectly would love to implement such a program if it had the funding, especially since the long-term assistance could help people build resilience in the future. “So you’re not only repairing your house, you’re also fortifying it to a level that’s more protected next time.”

——

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits gets support through AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.