In the heart of Texas, Jasper Cooke stands as a sentinel for resilience. With 14 years of experience navigating the intricate terrain of emergency management, Jasper is now at the helm of WSP’s Texas flood modeling team. His journey began in the Federal government at the Department of Homeland Security and then the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has shaped his understanding of both disaster response and its broader societal impacts. Jasper’s perspective has been influenced by a pivotal realization that rather than leveling the playing field, disaster assistance of all kinds has often increased inequality. This fueled his commitment to find solutions to ensure that people and communities get the help they need.
What inspires and motivates you in your career?
There are really three things - working with good people, solving interesting problems and trying to be a benefit to my community. I worked at FEMA previously, and started at Texas Emergency Management in May 2021. About three months later, in August, the Biden administration decided to approve mitigation grant funding for the COVID disaster declaration. This meant that Texas would receive $550 million of hazard mitigation grants that would be available to communities. It was a good opportunity to make communities across Texas safer using that grant funding. It was also a significant multi-layered problem to work through, because it's a lot of money to spend and it can be challenging to negotiate those different priorities and keep everything balanced.
What are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing today and trying to help resolve?
Equity is giving people resources based on how much they need compared to equality, which would be giving the same resources to everybody. One of the constant challenges that we face is measuring outcomes in communities to understand how equity manifests. Community resilience and equity are overlapping topics, and how we measure and track those outcomes in communities is critical. For example, you have a disaster, 500 homes are flooded, and we spend $10 million and that’s it, the job is done. But that's not enough. Part of our approach at WSP is to ensure that we're not just going into a community doing a series of activities and then leaving. We're going in and ensuring the community is better off.
To me, it's really just basic good government. It would be a waste to give people money they don't need. FEMA has a range of programs, and the equity challenges and solutions are different across the different grant programs that FEMA offers. One of the core challenges that I have continued to work on is the equitable review of grant applications for every community.
For example, a big community like Houston, Austin, Dallas or San Antonio has a team of people that are familiar with grant writing, comfortable with federal grants and that can navigate that process. Whereas small rural communities don't have those resources. My direction to the state team in Texas was to sit down and look through every application and give feedback so the smaller communities that don't understand how the process works can take that feedback and learn from it.
