Blueprint for Rebuilding

New Orleans looks to the future with help from Rockefeller

Other foundations have donated more to Gulf Coast recovery efforts than the $12.5-million the Rockefeller

Foundation has given to date. Yet few, if any, have taken as hands-on an approach as the New York fund has in this Louisiana city, which still has less than two-thirds of its pre-Katrina population.

Rockefeller is trying to help New Orleans envision its future, even amidst the ruin, and then build institutions capable of constructing that future.

Working closely with the Greater New Orleans Foundation — and at the request of the Louisiana Recovery Authority — Rockefeller has helped finance and shepherd the development of the city’s blueprint for recovery.

The New York fund took the unusual step of sending a program officer, Carey Shea, to live in the city and oversee the process of devising a recovery plan. Ms. Shea, who has more than two decades of experience in housing and community development, has been in the city since last June.

Planning can be contentious in the best of circumstances. But the desperation, frayed nerves, and political infighting of post-Katrina New Orleans made a the job infinitely more difficult. Tackling big questions, like where to rebuild schools and hospitals, whether residents should be allowed to return to low-lying neighborhoods, and what needs to happen to protect the city from future flooding, evoked passionate responses from residents and politicians alike. Rockefeller says it wanted to make sure that poor people and minorities, who were especially hard hit by the hurricane, had a say in shaping the city’s priorities.

‘The Official Plan’

Coming up with a game plan was vital to unlock federal funds for rebuilding projects and, just as importantly, says Ms. Shea, to reassure residents about the city’s future.

“People needed to hear from their city, ‘Yes, this is the official plan,’” she says. “‘These are our rebuilding priorities. Here’s where we’re going to build the first year. Here’s where we’ll be in year three. Here’s where we’ll be in year five.’ They needed that kind of certainty, and the plan offered that.”

Now that the plan is complete, Rockefeller has turned its attention to bolstering local housing and philanthropic institutions so that they will be better equipped to take on the staggering rebuilding effort that is expected to last for many years. It is asking foundations across the country to contribute $25-million to a fund to jump-start housing and neighborhood revitalization.

The foundation’s efforts have meant working directly with elected officials and government agencies, something that is new to Rockefeller, but absolutely necessary, says Ms. Shea. Government funds, she adds, will pay for the lion’s share of the city’s recovery.

“If you’re not dealing with government,” says Ms. Shea, “you’re just not dealing with the heart of the matter.”

But that doesn’t mean the relationship between philanthropy and government in New Orleans has been an easy one — for either side.

“Government’s used to being in control, and by law they’re supposed to be,” says Ben Johnson, chief executive officer of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “Government is used to being the decision makers, and they’ve had to share this, because the funding was coming from a new source.”

During the planning process, dust-ups between the two foundations and local government officials threatened to derail the project, says Ms. Shea.

“There were a couple times when I called the foundation saying, ‘We may have to pull this grant,’” she says. “But our partners always stepped up.”

The government, too, has had its frustrations.

Foundations were crucial early in the crisis, taking on roles that the government was not able to perform, says Ed Blakely, executive director of the city’s Office of Recovery Management. The city is grateful for their help, but now that the government is functioning, he hopes that the dynamics of the relationship will change.

“Some of the grant makers have their own solutions for our problems,” he says. “We feel that we have a pretty good handle on our problems, and we think that it would make an awful lot of sense if the foundations would step back and help us learn, versus suggesting to us what we ought to do.”

Courting Grant Makers

Despite the quick action that foundations took to finance immediate relief efforts, the question of how to get more grant makers involved in long-term recovery efforts weighs heavily on the minds of Gulf Coast nonprofit leaders.

“There’s still a lot of money on the sidelines,” says Melissa Flournoy, chief executive officer of the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Baton Rouge. “There are a lot of national foundations that appreciate the challenges in New Orleans, but aren’t quite sure how to connect or what to do.”

She worries that the window of opportunity to engage those grant makers is closing quickly.

Early next month, foundations will meet in New Orleans to discuss Gulf Coast recovery efforts.

The meeting, the Funders Forum on Sustainable Gulf Coast Transformation, will give grant makers an opportunity to talk about the work they’re doing and how they can better work together, says Linetta J. Gilbert, a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, in New York, which has given $31-million in the region.

“We pass each other in the airport,” she says, “but we haven’t had a chance to really think out loud together about how we can maximize our work.”

The forum’s organizers also hope the meeting will encourage new foundations to get involved and inspire grant makers already providing money in the region to commit to extending their support.

Years to Come

For its part, the Rockefeller Foundation plans to make multiyear grants in New Orleans that will last through the end of 2009. Because the foundation doesn’t intend to stay in the city indefinitely, it is working hard to make sure the Greater New Orleans Foundation has the resources it needs to continue to play an active role in the recovery effort.

The two foundations worked together last year to hire Ms. Shea. The agreement, from the beginning, was that Ms. Shea would oversee the planning process as a Rockefeller employee, and then make the transition into a post with the Greater New Orleans Foundation as head of its Community Revitalization Fund. She will officially move to the local fund in January.

Rockefeller is also helping the Greater New Orleans Foundation raise $25-million from other grant makers, which the local grant maker will use to finance housing and neighborhood-revitalization projects over the next five years.

So far, more than $4-million has been raised, and several foundations have said they are eager to review proposals totaling another $14-million. Those early results have prompted the two foundations to consider increasing their fund-raising goal to $30-million.

Ms. Shea acknowledges that, given the scope of the problems the city faces, even $30-million isn’t a lot of money.

“Is it enough to address what has to be addressed?” asks Ms. Shea. “Absolutely not. But it’s an amount that will be able to get some very important work going, and it’s a realistic estimate — or close to a realistic number — of what’s out there to be raised.”

She says that the foundations that have shown the most interest in the fund are those that have already made grants in the city.

“It’s not like new foundations are saying, ‘You know, we haven’t really paid any attention to this Hurricane Katrina thing. Let’s donate some money to New Orleans,’” says Ms. Shea.

$3.5-Million

The Rockefeller Foundation’s largest grant in New Orleans — $3.5-million to develop the city’s rebuilding strategy — proved to be a baptism by fire in navigating the politics of recovery.

Last spring, when the grant for what would become the Unified New Orleans Plan was announced — the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and the Greater New Orleans Foundation also contributed $1-million each — the city was anything but unified on the subject of planning.

In order to get access to $117-million in federal funds to repair battered roads, bridges, and sewer systems, New Orleans needed to submit a comprehensive, citywide recovery plan to the Louisiana Recovery Authority, a body set up by the state to oversee the distribution of federal rebuilding funds.

Numerous plans had been completed, or were in progress, but none fit the authority’s criteria.

A plan commissioned by the mayor’s office ignited a public outcry because it recommended that some low-lying neighborhoods not be rebuilt but be turned instead into green space or drainage areas. The city council had recently authorized more than $2-million to help neighborhoods that had flooded plan for the future, but there wasn’t enough money for a citywide plan.

So early last year the Louisiana Recovery Authority, seeking a neutral party, asked the Rockefeller Foundation to step in.

For more than a month last summer, Rockefeller met with representatives from the mayor’s office, the City Council, and the City Planning Commission to hammer out an agreement that laid out each party’s role and authorized the process as the city’s official recovery plan.

“Because philanthropy was playing such a strong role in performing what, in a best-case scenario, would really be a government function,” says Ms. Shea, the foundation needed to know that it had the full understanding and cooperation of the government. “The greatest fear about plans is that they’ll be done and sit on a shelf.”

Territorial infighting between the entities and lingering allegiances to other planning processes made for tough negotiations.

Because the foundation didn’t have a political stake in the planning process, it was seen as a threat by some government officials, says Alex Morgan, chief of staff for Shelley S. Midura, who is a member of the New Orleans City Council.

“In a political climate like this, it’s really difficult to accept — or, frankly, to work with — people who don’t put politics before progress,” says Mr. Morgan. People entrenched in the city’s intricate politics, he says, believed that the foundation must have some underlying agenda.

All the parties eventually signed the agreement, but commitment to the plan varied widely.

Ms. Shea describes her role as the planning process moved ahead as that of a project manager. She says she was interested in the content of the plan, but didn’t try to shape it.

“My job was to take this never-been-done-before process,”she says, “that involved literally thousands of people and dozens of paid professionals and an array of parties — both skeptical and enthusiastic and everywhere in between — and move them along.”

High-Tech Tools

The process culminated with a Community Congress that brought together more than 2,500 residents, both living in the city and displaced across the country, to talk about the city’s future. The meeting proved to be a turning point in bringing skeptics around on the plan, according to observers.

Satellite television linked participants in New Orleans to those in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Houston, while residents living in 16 other cities watched the proceedings via Webcast and were able to submit their views over the Internet.

In small-group discussions, led by professional facilitators, participants discussed tough issues facing the city, such as flood protection, stabilizing neighborhoods, education, and health services. Participants voted on different options and ranked their priorities using individual key pads, while laptops at each table allowed facilitators to record discussion points.

Perhaps most important, the demographics of the meeting’s participants came close to matching those of the city before Hurricane Katrina. Where previous meetings had drawn participants who were by and large white and affluent, two-thirds of the participants at the Community Congress in December were African-American, and a quarter had household incomes below $20,000.

“That said to everyone sitting there that it is truly New Orleans speaking about its recovery,” says Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a New Orleans City Council member who called the meeting a “phenomenal” experience.

Getting that level of participation was an expensive proposition. AmericaSpeaks, a civic-engagement organization in Washington, raised $3.4-million from 10 foundations to put on the event, including $500,000 from Rockefeller.

Much of the money was used to encourage people to participate in the Congress. AmericaSpeaks hired organizers in each of the participating cities — two in New Orleans — to reach out to residents, in sometimes creative ways. Organizers went door-to-door in New Orleans, and worked with charities that were helping displaced residents living in other cities and informal neighborhood leaders to spread the word about the Community Congress.

The planning process even threw a tailgate party in Atlanta when New Orleans’ beloved football team, the Saints, came to take on the Atlanta Falcons.

“You meet people where just being there adds credibility to the request that you are making of them,” says Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, president of AmericaSpeaks.

Sudden Shift in Focus

The Unified New Orleans Plan was approved by the state at the end of June, freeing up the money for infrastructure projects in the city.

Taking on such a high-profile and contentious project was new territory for the Greater New Orleans Foundation, says Mr. Johnson, the fund’s chief executive.

Sixteen months ago the planning process wasn’t even on the foundation’s radar screen, he says, “when all of a sudden that became our largest priority, because that was the next most-important thing that had to happen for the recovery of this city.”

The planning process required the foundation’s board members to take much more public roles than they were used to playing, says Ms. Shea.

“Wealth is not loud here in New Orleans,” she says. “Wealth is quiet and dignified, and I think the foundation reflected some of that.”

Early in the planning process, the New Orleans City Council held a public hearing, and asked one of the Greater New Orleans Foundation’s board members to testify.

“I’m sure the last thing he wanted to do was sit in front of the City Council for two hours and answer questions, but he did,” says Ms. Shea.

Reflecting on the many changes the Greater New Orleans Foundation has undergone since the storm, Mr. Johnson says that while the problems the city faces are daunting, it’s an exciting time for philanthropy in the city.

“No place in the United States has gone through what New Orleans is living on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “The next three to five years will determine what this region will look like 10 years from now.”