Standing in the Gap: How the Northside Resilience Fund Came Together

Apr 13, 2026

On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado cut a 23-mile path through St. Louis City and County. The ensuing devastation left thousands of residents displaced, destroying more than 5,000 homes and businesses. The brunt of the destruction hit 19 North St. Louis City neighborhoods — Legacy Black communities from which investment and opportunity have historically been withheld. In the weeks that followed, federal, state, and municipal systems slowly mobilized — but, as is often the case after large-scale disasters, a gap emerged between the impact and the relief.

Direct Cash Assistance, Designed for Urgency, Flexibility, and Agency

Launched by Invest STL in partnership with community organizations and funders, the Northside Resilience Fund (NRF) provided direct, flexible cash assistance to households in North St. Louis, our neighbors most severely impacted by the tornado. The goal was not to replace longterm recovery resources, but to meet urgent, immediate needs as residents waited for insurance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and other relief to become available. This required building a program — intake, review, verification, distribution, and support — in real time. This work was based on past experiences launching direct cash assistance initiatives, including a COVID-19 aid fund, Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place, and Small Dollars Action Fund.

In just two weeks, we and our partners created and raised enough initial funding to launch a direct cash assistance program. On a rolling basis over the course of four months, 1,378 North St. Louis households received $3,000 grants to begin their recovery on their own terms — for housing, transportation, utilities, repairs, medical needs, and much more to create a path toward recovery.

This Powerbook Documents What It Took to Do That Work.

This Powerbook captures how NRF came together, how decisions were made under pressure, what worked well, what did not, and what we could — as well as the broader region could — do differently next time. It draws directly from listening sessions with the people who made NRF possible: project leads, volunteers, phone helpline members, and application review staff who shouldered the work daily.

NRF was created to meet urgent needs quickly — and to trust residents to decide what came next.

NRF was not perfect. No rapid-response program ever is. But it demonstrated what is possible when community-based organizations are trusted, resourced, and equipped to act quickly, with care for neighbors and their dignity.

The speed and scale of this work exposed both strengths and strains — lessons that inform how we, and our region, can respond more quickly and equitably with direct cash assistance during future disasters and crises.

Preparing for What Comes Next

Extreme weather does not affect all communities in the same way. Predominantly Black neighborhoods are often hit hardest, as climate-related disasters compound the injustices of historic housing discrimination and systemic racism. (1) Research has shown that formerly redlined neighborhoods experience greater vulnerability to extreme weather than non-redlined areas. We see this nationwide, as Black neighborhoods denied investment are hotter and more flood-prone than wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. (2)

We are dedicated to untethering the past from what’s possible in the future by refusing to accept the restraints of generations of systemic anti-Black racism. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, the lessons from NRF are not just retrospective. They are preparatory. This Powerbook is intended to serve as a practical resource for our Invest STL team, community organizations, funders, and government leaders working to ensure the next direct cash assistance response is faster, more equitable, and better coordinated.

1: The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas,” published in Climate (2020).

2: “A Racist Past, a Flooded Future: Formerly Redlined Areas Have $107 Billion Worth of Homes Facing High Flood Risk—25% More Than Non-Redlined Areas,” Redfin News (2021)

Reflections on 2024: Slow + Steady, Activation + Preparation

Jan 24, 2025

By: Dara Eskridge, CEO

Quiet as it’s kept, we’ve been up to a lot at Invest STL. For those closest to us, you already know we have grown significantly since our first forming in 2012. During the height of the pandemic, we wholly embraced a more pointed mission to facilitate investment in the power of people and their neighborhoods to create communities of justice and opportunity in places that continue to endure the legacy of systemic anti-Black racism. With this mission, we committed to working urgently, boldly, and intentionally to support system-level transformation within a generation and set our organizational clock to shut our doors by 2042.

At the core of this mandate is our devotion to rigorous self-examination and transparently sharing with our community our learnings and trials along the way. Here is the beginning of our open conversation with you as we strive together to make every St. Louis neighborhood a chosen place to live, raise children, and grow old.

Reflections on 2024

Since we started our 20-year organizational sunset clock in 2022, we have been in the “Activate + Prepare” phase (stay tuned for the full roadmap this year). We made significant strides in this phase during 2024, including:

• Continued building our internal infrastructure;
• Continued establishing and fortifying key relationships and partnerships within our community, from resident- and other neighborhood-based groups to local government to regional intermediaries;
• Continued growing our investments in our region’s landscape of Black neighborhoods and the dreams and possibilities within them. 

Here are just a few ways we leaned into activating + preparing in 2024:

• We ramped up our team from 9 to 16 deeply creative and committed professionals. This allows us to fully engage in all areas of our work, including Neighborhood Investing, System Investing, Policy Piloting + Influencing, and Narrative Reframing.
• We developed and codified internal culture-setting practices like bimonthly team development days. These intentional development days root us in the individual histories of Black neighborhoods, foster shared skill building, and conclude with wellness excursions that invite joy and levity as core components to how we engage in this work together.
• Through surveying neighborhood organizations and pulling from other data sources, we sought to understand and bring forth insights about what’s happening in our community through our forthcoming community and economic development ecosystem assessment. Stay tuned for initial learnings and opportunities for action to be shared in early 2025.
• With the will and wisdom of residents and partners in the West End and Visitation Park community, we bottled ahas and guidance for supporting truly resident-led neighborhood planning in our Resident-Led Neighborhood Planning Powerbook. This comprehensive resource aims to help create the conditions for change in how places are planned for and who drives the conversation.
• From the swelling participation of residents in 40+ neighborhoods across our region’s core, we were able to begin identifying networks of collaboration through the Small Dollars Action Fund (SDAF). Check out past SDAF projects in our Action Map.

While we experienced momentum, there are directives of this phase that didn’t receive much attention in 2024. We hold many relationships in this space, but we need to be more thoughtful about initiating key relationships that are the levers for building and sustaining generational change within our ecosystem. Likewise, it’s so easy to be zoomed into the everyday work and its…complications…that we often forget to take a step back to illuminate the bright spots through rich storytelling or simple applause and acknowledgement. We are committed to giving more time and care to these intentions in 2025. 

On that note, there are moments when “enough” feels elusive—“Do we have enough time?” “Do we have enough capacity?” “Is this enough to really make a difference?” As our organization rounds into our final moments to “Activate + Prepare” our foundation, I am reminded that taking fewer yet giant steps in this phase will yield the space for rapid strides in our next phase of “Experiment + Model.”

Over the next year, the mostly quiet and patient work of the last three years will give way to what we hope is an explosion of efforts across our region to try new ways of accelerating wealth, power, and collective action to the benefit of our legacy Black neighborhoods and beyond. 

Looking Ahead

You can look forward to hearing from us in 2025 on: 

• The release of the Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place Powerbook, which will reflect our learnings and guidance on direct cash investments to people to support community-keeping through wealth building.
• For the first time since 2018, the inclusion of more neighborhoods where we are honored to build longer-term, deep investment relationships.
• The opening of our new community space and office in the heart of the Northside as an ode and offering to invite, memorialize, and amplify the multifacetedness of living in this beloved community. We will continue to have our office on Delmar. 

From upcoming local elections to national trends making their way to the heartland, there’s a wave of new developments that stands to significantly impact life and what’s possible in our neighborhoods in the near future. With 18 years remaining in our mission relay—just seconds in the long arc of collective changemaking—we’re rounding the corner to the stretch where quiet as it’s kept and slow and steady will no longer serve our commitment to facilitate a system that will be directed by and to the benefit of residents within a generation’s time. 

Learn more about where we’ve been from our 2024 Reflection and sign up for our newsletter to stride with us as we lace up for an even more dynamic 2025.