Harnessing Risk Transfer to Support Immediate Post-Disaster Needs of Low- And Moderate- Income Households: A meso-insurance pilot in New York City -Implementation Lessons for Community Organizations-

This report shares implementation lessons from a learning pilot in New York City designed to harness risk transfer to provide immediate and flexible post-flood assistance to under resourced households. Risk transfer refers to tools such as insurance and other financial mechanisms that shift risk from households and businesses in order to provide them with financial protection against potentially large losses.

As detailed in this report, the pilot uses a concept sometimes referred to as meso insurance, group insurance, or community insurance, in which an intermediary helps to secure insurance coverage on behalf of a group. In this pilot program, the Center for NYC Neighborhoods (the Center) purchased a parametric risk transfer product to provide a fast payment to the Center in the event of a qualifying flood. If this occurs, the Center will use the funds to activate an emergency grant program that will provide cash assistance to LMI households suffering financial hardship from the flood. The pilot program is designed to provide faster funding to households than is currently available from other sources and to be more flexible to cover the broad range of costs households can face. The expectation is that such grants could help prevent households from falling into greater f inancial precarity immediately after the flood due to lack of needed resources for immediate response and recovery.

The first part of this report details the design decisions made to move from broad concept to implementation. It provides a detailed overview of the design and structure of both the risk transfer product and the assistance program. In the second half of the report, we turn to the lessons learned on pilot design and immediate implementation.