Zack Rosenburg co-founded SBP in 2006 after volunteering in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Zack’s realization that a delayed recovery causes unnecessary suffering shaped SBP’s mission of shrinking time between disaster and recovery. He directs the strategic vision, marketing, partnership development, and fundraising for SBP. Zack plays a direct role in advising local, state and federal government officials, and worked closely with elected officials from South Carolina, New York and West Virginia helping them craft effective long-term recovery programs. He has been featured in Newsweek, US News and World Report, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, was recognized as New Orleanian of the Year and Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project Champion of Justice, and has received the Manhattan Institute Social Innovation Award. Before founding SBP, Zack was an E. Barrett Prettyman Teaching Fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center and he ran an indigent criminal defense practice in Washington, DC.
SBP was founded after hurricane Katrina to address the urgent need for survivors to have a clear and fast path back to their homes. Initially, SBP was reactive, but effective, rebuilding homes for most vulnerable members of communities.
After expanding rebuilding efforts to five states, and enhancing productivity through utilization of the Toyota Production System, SBP realized that, while important, simply “doing” the reactive home-building work was difficult to scale and was not preventative. As a result, SBP studied the reason for its existence, and determined that the driving motivation and purpose of board members, leaders, staff and volunteers was fortifying disaster survivors against their breaking point. Likewise, SBP learned that three factors influence a person’s breaking point: the time between disaster and recovery; the predictability of the path to recovery; and resilience (both vertical and horizontal).
As a result, SBP’s mandate evolved to its current mission: shrinking the time between disaster and recovery. SBPs interventions will include: Rebuild innovatively, driving efficiency; share SBP’s proven effective model with other organizations to increase efficacy across the disaster rebuilding sector; prepare home and business owners in resilience and risk mitigation prior to disaster; advise local and state government officials so they can deploy federal dollars sooner, and in a way that empowers an efficient recovery; and advocate so that what is measured is what matters – a complete recovery.