For years, Rhode Island native Donna Childs spent years assessing risk of all kinds for Swiss Reinsurance Group, the world’s largest reinsurer of property-casualty. Upon her return home, Childs built Prisere LLC in Cranston to identify and map risk in 2011. Now, with more than a decade under her belt, Childs has been named the winner of the Andrea C. Silbert Rising Star Award by the Center for Women and Enterprise (CWE). The award, launched in 2000, is presented annually to a small business who has been economically empowered due to their relationship with CWE.
Thanks to the CWE certification, Childs said she's participated in the executive education programs offered by Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in partnership with IBM, in the WBENC technology executive education program in partnership with Dell, in the digital-excellence program offered in partnership with Google and many others.
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When FEMA started to roll out its Business Ready initiative, the agency tapped Childs to help roll out the program. In Rhode Island, she worked to help the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency deliver the state's first business-continuity conference and, with Prisere, Childs has worked with dozens of clients from governments and C-level executives of global corporations in respect of their risk management and operational continuity strategies.
Reinsurers are at the forefront of the challenges of a changing climate as they bear the costs of the increasingly frequent and severe weather-related hazards, Childs explained. For example, she was a senior member of the team that advised the Japanese Ministry of Finance in respect of the world’s first earthquake bond. "I worked to build capacity for specialty risks, such as offshore wind energy," she said. "That is how I came to appreciate that most of the world lacks risk-mapping and risk-modeling tools essential to insure resilience. And where such tools exist, emerging risks and a changing climate are rendering them obsolete."
With the creation of Prisere LLC, Childs said she aimed to fill that gap by building capacity for climate and disaster resilience with improved risk tools, including risk communications, risk mapping and software apps, training and technical advisory services. RI Inno spoke with Childs' about her continued work in risk management, some of the successes she's enjoyed with Prisere LLC and what she sees for the future of the field.
Can you tell me a bit more about Prisere and what it does?
Prisere develops technology to enable climate and disaster risk resilience. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Prisere LLC for a highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award to advance research and development for technology to strengthen the climate and disaster resilience of residential and small commercial buildings. The work was so successful that Prisere is one of 250 of the world’s leading climate-tech innovators invited to apply to the top Venture for Climate Accelerator. Prisere is one of 12 companies selected from the 220 final applicants from 35 countries. The program is under way, and we are meeting with the venture capitalists representing Amazon, Google and other leading corporate venture funders.
Can you tell us about growing Prisere over the last decade?
Prisere’s clients include the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. Because a single extreme weather event can reverse years, or even decades, of social and economic development gains made by poorer communities — consider the earthquake that devastated Nepal or the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans Ninth Ward — climate and disaster resilience is at the top of the UN policy agenda. Since I returned to Rhode Island to run Prisere here, I have delivered projects for these clients in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Turkey, Jamaica, Mexico and others. I have grown Prisere largely by reinvesting retained earnings and accessing nondilutive funding.
Do you have any success stories to share?
Prisere received a “Common Good” award in recognition of our support of philanthropy and volunteerism in part, for piloting, with the support of the Rhode Island Foundation, the state’s first small-business giving circle. I organized free monthly events with authors and guest speakers for our participating small business owners to help us become more effective in securing grant funds for the charities we support and to become more effective board members of local nonprofits. We raised $395,000 for local community needs.
What do you see for the company in the next year in terms of growth or projects you'd like to see happen?
I am in discussions with the administration of several state governments to invest federal some of their federal ARPA funds in Prisere’s program to accelerate the post-pandemic recovery of their states’ small businesses, to qualify them to participate in the post-pandemic supply chains and to strengthen the resilience of their state economies. Consider, for example, that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency finds that 43% of small businesses fail to re-open following a major disaster, a figure that could be improved with basic resilience planning. But that failure rate will increase, as small businesses entering the 2022 storm season weakened for two consecutive years of revenue losses and extraordinary expenses arising from the pandemic. I see Prisere playing a strategic role in the investment of more resilient, post-pandemic economies.
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