Aiding Victims of the 9/11 Attacks

To the Editor:

Eric Frazier (“Rebuilding Shattered Lives,” September 4 ), in praising the Survivors’ Fund as a model, gives short shrift to the September 11th Fund.

As president of the New York Community Trust, a co-founder of the September 11th Fund, I am among many people who believe that the Community Foundation for the Capital Region did great work following the Pentagon bombing. Your readers should also know that the September 11th Fund provided some of the grants that funded it and the 9-11 Airport Worker Resource Center for Reagan employees.

They should understand that had we in New York taken the Washington approach, many victims of the attacks might not have been helped at all.

As Carol Kellermann pointed out in the article, the sheer number of victims alone would have swamped the human-services community. Unlike the military and civilian employees of the Pentagon, a large number of the New York victims had uncertain legal status or were undocumented.

Requiring them to meet with a social worker would have stopped many of them from taking advantage of the job training and employment, mental-health, health-insurance, and ESL programs that we either funded or created. The cash payments to victims of the New York attacks were never meant to compensate for loss, as Mr. Frazier intimates; they were to help survivors’ families pay for funerals, rent, and food in the months after their losses. The 45,000 checks, which were capped at $20,000 per person, supported more than 100,000 people. The case managers we funded were not providing “extra” assistance — they were offering recovery services.

The Survivor’s Fund has every right to feel good about its work. So do we.

Lorie Slutsky
President
The New York Community Trust
New York