Kellie Bentz is familiar with post-disaster accommodations. She spent months, sometimes with no available bed, living in a crowded church basement as she coordinated volunteers as part of the Hurricane Katrina response in New Orleans in 2005.
Now, she’s one of the professionals spearheading a new Silicon Valley group working on harnessing the programs and reach of technology driven companies in disaster relief.
Bentz, 33, has already amassed a considerable amount of knowledge, primarily with nonprofit organizations, on how to respond to disasters. But as of May, she’s been doing so as the first head of global disaster relief at Airbnb, the online platform for finding and renting homes.
Printing articles to share with others is a breach of our terms and conditions and copyright policy. Please use the sharing options on the left side of the article. Devex Pro members may share up to 10 articles per month using the Pro share tool ( ).
About the author
Adva Saldinger@AdvaSal
Adva Saldinger is a Senior Reporter at Devex where she covers development finance, as well as U.S. foreign aid policy. Adva explores the role the private sector and private capital play in development and authors the weekly Devex Invested newsletter bringing the latest news on the role of business and finance in addressing global challenges. A journalist with more than 10 years of experience, she has worked at several newspapers in the U.S. and lived in both Ghana and South Africa.
