Advancing Climate Resilience: How Liberty Mutual and Strongward Are Helping Communities Prepare

Leveraging its expertise in risk, climate resiliency, innovation and philanthropic investment, Liberty Mutual partnered with its nonprofit partner Strongward to help fill the gap in community-based disaster recovery and preparedness.

At a glance

• The challenge: Many communities - especially smaller and lower-capacity communities - face significant weather-related risks but lack the staff capacity, technical expertise and resources to understand those risks, identify priorities and access funding for resilience efforts.
• The partnership: Liberty Mutual combined expertise in risk, climate resiliency, innovation and philanthropic investment with Strongward 's community-based disaster recovery and preparedness expertise to help fill this gap.
• First initiative - Resilience and Recovery Fellows: In 2024, Liberty Mutual awarded Strongward a $600,000 grant to support Fellows in Massachusetts and West Virginia. The Fellows helped communities identify, apply for and secure disaster mitigation funding. Together, the supported Fellows secured $40.7 million in disaster mitigation funding against an original goal of $10 million.
• Second initiative - Strongward Risk Navigator: Building on the success of the Fellows program, Liberty Mutual and Strongward explored how to make resilience expertise available to more communities. Liberty Mutual's Solaria Labs helped develop the concept and product direction, and a $1.5 million Liberty Mutual Foundation grant supported Strongward in building, testing and refining the free digital tool.The result: The Strongward Risk Navigator is now available to help community leaders understand local disaster risks and identify practical next steps.

What is climate resilience - and why is it a challenge for communities?

At Liberty Mutual, we define climate resilience as the ability to prepare for, adapt to and recover from the physical impacts of extreme weather and hazards. For a community, it is not only about responding after an event. It is also about having the information, capacity and resources to make informed decisions before one happens. That can mean understanding local risks, strengthening infrastructure, preparing residents and businesses, accessing mitigation funding and planning for recovery before a disaster occurs.

However, this work can be difficult, particularly for smaller and lower-capacity communities. Local leaders may know their communities face risks from flooding, severe storms, extreme heat or other hazards, but still lack the staff capacity or technical expertise to determine where to begin. They may also have limited experience interpreting complex risk data, identifying relevant funding opportunities or developing applications for resilience funding.

As a result, communities can struggle to turn information into action. Resources may exist, but finding them, understanding them and applying for them takes time and specialized expertise - capacity that many communities do not have.

This can create a compounding challenge. Without mitigation and preparedness, disasters may cause more severe damage. Recovery can take longer, disrupting lives and local economies and leaving communities with even fewer resources to prepare for the next event. The need is clear: communities need trusted guidance that helps them understand their risks, identify priorities and take practical steps toward greater resilience.

Why is Liberty Mutual focused on climate resilience?

As a global risk expert, Liberty Mutual believes our industry has an important role to play in helping build more resilient individuals, businesses and communities. By applying our expertise in science, data, claims insights and risk analysis, we help understand physical hazards and help inform resilience efforts. Our climate resiliency work focuses on infrastructure and the built environment, community resilience, and engagement with stakeholders working to advance preparedness and adaptation.

This commitment connects directly to Liberty Mutual's purpose: to help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow. Helping communities prepare for physical risks is one way we can help them feel more secure today and better positioned for the future.

That is why partnerships matter. Building climate resilience for communities requires local knowledge, technical expertise, funding and the ability to turn ideas into practical solutions. No single organization can provide all of those elements alone.

How is the partnership with Strongward helping communities build resilience?

Strongward is a national nonprofit dedicated to long-term disaster recovery. It helps communities prepare for and recover from disasters, emerging stronger than before. Strongward brings trusted relationships, knowledge of local needs and experience helping communities navigate preparedness and recovery.

The Strongward partnership brought together Liberty Mutual's expertise in risk, climate resiliency, innovation and community investment with Strongward's deep community-based disaster recovery expertise.

In 2024, Liberty Mutual awarded a $600,000 grant to support Strongward's Resilience and Recovery Fellows placed in Massachusetts and West Virginia. Embedded directly within local and state government offices, the Fellows helped communities identify, apply for and secure disaster mitigation funding that might otherwise have been difficult to access. Together, the supported Fellows secured $40.7 million against an original goal of $10 million-approximately four times the target.

The results demonstrated the value of providing communities with dedicated resilience expertise. The success of the Fellows also revealed an opportunity. If dedicated resilience expertise could help individual communities secure millions in mitigation funding, how could that same knowledge and guidance be made available to many more communities?

How did Liberty Mutual and Strongward innovate to scale access to community resilience expertise?

To answer that question employees from Liberty Mutual's Solaria Labs, the company's enterprise innovation incubator, partnered with Strongward to conduct discovery research with nonprofit organizations, community leaders, resilience experts and government officials. The work helped confirm that communities often lacked not only funding, but also the capacity to identify relevant opportunities, understand complex risk information and determine what to do next.

Building on those insights, Solaria Labs applied its research, design, product strategy and engineering capabilities to explore how a digital tool could help more communities access the same expertise. The team explored the barriers communities face, developed and tested early product concepts, hosted a collaborative design workshop and created an implementation roadmap.

Solaria Labs' innovation expertise helped transform those insights into the concept and product direction for the Strongward Risk Navigator. A $1.5 million Liberty Mutual Foundation grant then supported Strongward in building, testing and refining the tool for broader use.

What is the Strongward Risk Navigator?

The Strongward Risk Navigator, now available at advise.wearestrongward.org , is a free digital tool that helps community leaders quickly understand their biggest disaster risks and identify practical next steps.

Designed for busy teams with limited resources, the tool does not require a technical background or lengthy onboarding. It is intended for emergency managers, local government staff, resilience officers, hazard mitigation planners, nonprofit executives, elected officials and other community leaders.

Users can enter a zip code or county to see a prioritized view of local natural hazards. The tool translates complex information, including data from FEMA's National Risk Index, into plain-language summaries, tailored action plans and relevant resources.

Community leaders can use the Risk Navigator to:

1. Identify local hazards
2. Understand risk in plain language
3. Access action plans covering planning, implementation and funding
4. Explore guides, case studies and other resources
5. Connect with Strongward training and expert support

How is this partnership a model for more community impact?

The partnership reflects the value of how the private sector can work with nonprofit partners in ways that go beyond traditional grantmaking. By bringing together Liberty Mutual's strengths in innovation, risk and community investment with Strongward's deep knowledge of disaster resilience, the organizations created a practical solution designed to benefit communities long into the future. This is our purpose in action: bringing together our expertise, capital and people to help communities build resilience and reduce the time between disaster and recovery - so more communities can feel secure today and confidently pursue tomorrow.