The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, with support from Walmart, hosted the Disaster Resilience Summit on June 23–24 at the Sam Walton Hall in Bentonville, Arkansas. Nearly 200 leaders from business, government, nonprofits, philanthropy, and community organizations gathered around a shared concept: America has significant disaster response capabilities and an opportunity to connect them more quickly and efficiently to meet the needs of communities in crisis.
Participants emphasized that resilience depends on coordination across the full disaster lifecycle—from preparedness and mitigation to response, stabilization, and long-term recovery. The summit focused on moving beyond recurring gaps in coordination, data sharing, and supply chain access toward the operating models, partnerships, and tools needed to close them.
The summit also introduced a national vision for disaster readiness by 2030: communities are ready before disaster strikes, backed by trusted cross-sector partnerships, and capable of reducing risk, managing crises, restoring essential services, and accelerating recovery.
Participants emphasized the need to work together before the next crisis—focusing on what each sector does best and investing in resilience as a shared responsibility. Supporting local leadership, reducing barriers, and sharing information were also seen as essential to making that vision a reality.
Above all, discussions underscored the importance of building resilience before disaster strikes. That means establishing trusted relationships, mapping capabilities across sectors, and setting up clear communication channels in advance. Doing these activities on “blue sky days” enables partners to act quickly and confidently when communities are under stress.
Some initial takeaways emerged:
- Coordination is the defining challenge: As shared by leaders at the summit, communities do not suffer because partners are unwilling to help. They suffer when roles are unclear, information is fragmented, resources are not matched to needs, and partners are forced to build relationships in the middle of a crisis. A stronger model starts with a common operating picture.
- Trust and agreements must be built before disaster: Trust was described as an operational requirement. Relationships, exercises, shared planning, and pre-negotiated agreements must be in place before the next storm, flood, wildfire, cyber disruption, or infrastructure failure.
- Businesses should be integrated as operational partners: A major theme was the need to move beyond viewing companies primarily as donors. Businesses bring logistics networks, facilities, supply chains, workforce reach, data, technology, and local relationships that can help communities respond and recover. Those capabilities are most useful when they are aligned with needs throughout the disaster lifecycle.
- Resilience is ultimately local: Conversations during the event underscored that national resources matter, but outcomes depend on local capacity to identify needs, coordinate support, communicate clearly, avoid duplication, and sustain recovery. Chambers of commerce can play an important convening role because of their relationships with employers and civic leaders.
Framing the Challenge
U.S. Chamber Foundation President Michael Carney opened the summit by challenging participants to focus on recurring coordination failures after major disasters and to use the event as a step toward a practical 2030 disaster resilience roadmap. His remarks framed the need for a system that is pre-built, trusted, practiced, and ready before the next crisis.
Walmart leaders illustrated how private sector assets can become essential community infrastructure during a disaster. Stores, parking lots, pharmacies, logistics networks, mobile facilities, associates, and local relationships can help stabilize communities, but only if those capabilities are understood and connected to public and nonprofit response systems in advance.
“It's about getting to know what those offerings are and being able to leverage those when you're in a time of need,” said Glenda Fleming Willis, senior vice president of operations in the north division at Walmart Stores.
Governor Andy Beshear offered a practical view from Kentucky's experience with severe disasters. As he described, disaster response has four phases: preparation, emergency response, stabilization, and rebuilding. He reinforced the importance of consistent communication, early activation of resources, medium-term housing options, accessible services, and recovery systems that meet families where they are.
That state-level perspective continued in a conversation between Rob Glenn, vice president of global resilience at the U.S. Chamber Foundation, and Eric Gibson, division director of Kentucky Emergency Management, on the state of emergency management. The discussion emphasized the reality facing emergency managers today: increasingly complex incidents, limited capacity, rising expectations from the public, and a growing dependence on private-sector lifelines. It posed a central question: how can public-private partnerships move from episodic cooperation to a standing operating model for preparedness, response, stabilization, and recovery?
The Role of Public-Private Partnerships in the Wake of Disaster
In a discussion facilitated by Jeanne Benincasa Thorpe, senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Massachusetts, and Lee Siler, director of readiness, global emergency management at Walmart, speakers examined public-private partnerships through the lens of the last decade of disasters.
The session asked four practical questions: What broke and why? What has been fixed? What remains unresolved? And what partnerships, capabilities, or agreements must exist by 2030? Participants reviewed recurring points of friction that have emerged across past disasters. These included fuel and supply chain disruptions, limited visibility into private sector activity, and persistent barriers around data sharing and legal uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic was also cited as a period that exposed supply chain challenges.
We also identified progress. Participants acknowledged the private sector is now more widely recognized as an essential operational peer; emergency management doctrine increasingly reflects the importance of business and infrastructure coordination; and some states have embedded private sector liaisons into emergency operations centers.
But important gaps remain: Participants also pointed out that liability and indemnification concerns still limit deployment, interoperable technology standards are uneven, data silos persist, and local implementation varies.
Bottom line: Attendees agreed that the 2026-2030 window is critical. As they highlighted, weather intensification, aging infrastructure, cyber threats, fiscal pressure, and fragile civic trust are compounding community risk. Public-private partnerships should explore moving from episodic coordination to always-on collaboration — and the time to act is now.
Building a 2030 Disaster Resilience Roadmap
The summit featured “solution sprints” — working sessions during which participants identified what isn't working today, what needs to be in place by 2030, and which actions could drive change. These six sprint areas are intended to inform a roadmap that will help improve cross-sector collaboration:
- Unifying coordination: Establish clear roles, responsibilities, and decision-making structures so that public and private partners can activate quickly and work together without confusion during a crisis.
- Capability planning: Map what businesses and nonprofits can offer and connect those capabilities to emergency operations plans and community needs before a disaster occurs.
- Community support: Strengthen the capacity of local leaders and under-resourced communities by providing shared tools, templates, and support that help them effectively accept outside assistance when it arrives.
- Supply chain alignment: Treat supply chains as essential community lifelines by coordinating transportation, distribution, and access to critical goods before disruptions occur.
- Information confidence: Build shared standards for how information is gathered, verified, and communicated so that decision-makers and the public can trust what they’re hearing during a crisis.
- AI, data, and technology: Support responsible adoption of technology through clear guidelines for data privacy, cybersecurity, and human oversight that communities can trust.
The Bottom Line
The event reinforced the need for communities to have trusted relationships, defined roles, and the systems and capacity in place to move quickly when a disaster strikes. The U.S. Chamber Foundation will use the summit's insights to shape a practical roadmap that helps partners turn those priorities into action.
“In the end, we all have one goal, and that's to make sure that we're out there saving lives,” Willis emphasized.
For more information about this initiative, contact: resilience@uschamber.com
About the author
Desmian Alexander
Desmian (Des) Alexander is manager of global resilience programs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
