Alliance for Resilience in Healthcare

The Alliance for Resilience in Healthcare (ARHC) exists to help communities rebuild stronger, more sustainable healthcare systems after disasters, closing the long-term gap left when short-term relief agencies leave.

The Need

When people imagine recovery after a disaster, they often picture the day the local hospital or clinic reopens. The lights come on, the doors unlock, and from the outside it looks like progress. Inside, though, families find a system that was already strained before the disaster and is now even less able to meet their needs. Appointments are harder to get, prevention becomes reactionary, and conditions that once could be managed or even cured grow more severe in the absence of reliable care.

Federal and nonprofit emergency-response teams provide lifesaving support in the first days and weeks after a disaster. They bring essential resources, restore critical services, and help stabilize communities. However, their missions are designed to be short-term. Under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, federal assistance typically extends for up to 18 months after a disaster declaration and most responding organizations conclude their work much sooner (FEMA, 2023).When those programs end, families are left with a healthcare system that is still fragile, and recovery is often declared ‘complete’ while residents remain without dependable care. As disasters become more frequent and recovery takes longer, this “temporary” stage becomes accepted as the new normal and health outcomes deteriorate.

Our Role

ARHC was created to address this unmet need and is focused specifically on the long-term recovery of healthcare systems. We enter after short-term responders have left, when families are still living without dependable healthcare, and work with communities to build systems that are stronger than what existed before and able to hold over time.

Our Approach

ARHC defines community health resilience as a holistic approach to healthcare that includes physical, mental, and social well-being at the population level. It emphasizes accessibility, equity, and addressing social determinants of health to ensure communities can anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from adverse events while maintaining and improving core health functions and systems.

Instead of simply repairing damage, ARHC uses the disruption of a disaster as an opportunity to improve. We partner with local clinics and community leaders to integrate sustainable health infrastructure, practical technology, and community-driven care models so that each project emerges stronger and more adaptable to future crises.