ARC Respond

A coordination program for multi-agency emergency response, piloting now with city and community partners in San Antonio and Cleveland.

Government agencies frequently struggle to coordinate critical public workflows — emergency response, climate resilience delivery, aid distribution — because they lack a shared way to track dependencies and surface blockers across different systems and jurisdictions. As highlighted by FEMA and the GAO, these fragmented federal-local workflows create administrative burdens that ultimately cause delays in delivering aid to vulnerable communities.

“Bringing city, state, tribal, and territorial governments together with the communities they serve, using a middle-out approach — resilience-centered co-design paired with an AI-enabled platform to significantly cut emergency coordination time across heat, flood, and infrastructure emergencies. Working with the cities of San Antonio and Cleveland.”

— Google.org

:How it works

Co-design with cities

Government and community stakeholders map current workflows and define what better coordination looks like on the ground.

Connect existing systems

Link isolated agency data sources without replacing legacy infrastructure.

Surface blockers in real time

A shared live state shows dependencies, ownership, and delays as they happen — not after the fact.

Escalate by policy

Escalations route automatically according to agency-defined policy, before delays reach residents.

:Our Approach

Middle-Out, Not Top-Down

Solutions aren’t designed in isolation and handed down. They’re shaped by the agencies and residents who depend on them during an actual emergency.

Interoperable by Design

ARC Respond connects what agencies already run instead of asking them to replace it — coordination infrastructure, not another system to adopt.

Open and Replicable

The program publishes its workflow templates, governance assets, and implementation playbooks, so other governments can adopt the model independently.

:Pilot Cities

Piloting now in San Antonio and Cleveland, reaching 1.5 million+ residents — with a growing pipeline of additional cities, including through partners like Accelerator for America, positioned to join as the program scales.

San Antonio

Piloting ARC Respond in partnership with Google.org, reaching residents across the region through coordinated multi-agency emergency response.

Cleveland

Piloting ARC Respond in partnership with Google.org, building a shared coordination model across city and regional partners.