The Tactivate Team House: San Juan
expeditionary entrepreneurship
There is a place for expeditionary entrepreneurship in disaster response and recovery operations. Entrepreneurs are experts at solution engineering in chaotic scenarios. They are accustomed to creating new playbooks and to leading multidisciplinary teams. For this reason, the entrepreneurial mindset and approach to problem solving, leadership, and rapid adaptable solution creation has a critical place in the disaster response community. Tactivate provides this capacity with a base, collaboration and deployment platform.
The tactivate Beach House
The immediate response phase to Hurricane Maria is long over. There is incredible work being done by the local community and outside resource groups to creatively solve long-term recovery challenges in PR. Tactivate has kept a presence in the city to focus on creative whole community readiness projects and to help prepare the island for the approaching hurricane season. The Beach House is where we stay, gather and collaborate. If your in town and need a base of operations, let us know.
The tactivate Team House
This House was open during the emergency response stage and is now closed
Tactivate’s Team House in San Juan is designed to serve as a nexus to unite the myriad subject matter experts, tech providers, entrepreneurs and NGOs working to address challenges on the Island. Incredible capacity exists to effect real impact, but often these communities communicate and operate in silos. Tactivate is providing a physical space to organically empower cross pollination, and to provide these various groups with tie-in to the local government, federal / DOD resources, as well as with the local entrepreneurial community to amplify last mile impact.
Space matters. It impacts the spirit, sets the mood and serves as a canvas to create within. The Tactivate Team House is an oasis, providing a work-live space for a multidisciplinary team away from the frenetic tempo of the conventional response community. Out of the box solutions and approaches require out of the box environments to be hatched within.
Entrepreneurship, as a discipline, is not typically a part of the disaster response and recovery ecosystem. The Team House is designed to serve as a comfortable and familiar entry point and resource base for this demographic. In house, are the technological resources, logistical know-how and communications solutions providers to support a wide breadth of creative initiatives. We have the capacity, as a community, to facilitate logistics, communications and on the ground operations.
There is no place in disaster response and recovery for negativity, blame or spite, only rapid action, adaptation and more action. Tactivate and strategic partners view Puerto Rico as an incredible opportunity to entirely reimagine the response process from initial assessment to solution implementation. This is a Sim City opportunity to social engineer new approaches to recovery, indigenous capacity building, economic stability and infrastructure resiliency. The critical parameters guiding all efforts include: building indigenous capacity; implementing long-term sustainable solutions to empower future resiliency; and focus on local economic empowerment vs. promotion of dependence on external aid.
Get into the Game!
When you pair Special Operations, entrepreneurs, local organizations, and the capacity to tie into Federal and local government support resources, there is simply not much that can't be accomplished in short order. As a community we:
Identify a last mile challenge and local capacity to solve it.
Move lightning fast, outside of the traditional system, self-fund, implement, iterate and improve to support those local solutions.
Tie back into, and collaborate with, the traditional response infrastructure to provide situational awareness and to bring additional resources to bear.
That’s how we operate. Want in?
"There is no one size fits all solution or tool kit in disaster response. Each incident is entirely different, entails systemic challenges, cultural nuances and organizational structural challenges that need to be managed. Entrepreneurs are masters of engineering solutions outside the confines of traditional support systems and Puerto Rico needs that capacity. "
- Jesse Levin, Tactivate
Current Team House projects
Re-connecting the EBT system
45% to 65% of the population, depending on the location around the island rely on Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) to purchase food and water. Traditional connectivity was down. Through creative sat. comm. solutions, the team has empowered over $300,000 in EBT purchases to date - stimulating the economy and reducing strain on federal aide.
EMP Case Study
Electromagnetic pulse’s are byproducts of nuclear explosions. When they occur, anything with computer circuitry is rendered inoperable. Communication systems, power grids etc. cease to function. Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico was emblematic of an EMP. This is an unparalleled opportunity to explore response and recovery protocols to deal with such an occurrence. Reading on EMPs: Wired, Forbes, Bloomberg
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Tactivate launches start-ups with Special Operations veterans and solves last mile challenges in disaster zones.
