Building a Better Response

American Red Cross and other charities put together improved plans for dealing with disaster relief

Paige Roberts, who helped to evacuate and shelter people after Hurricane Katrina battered coastal

Mississippi, has spent the past year devising ways to do a better job the next time around. The system failures brought to light by the massive storm continue to weigh on her mind.

“If we had just been wiser, it would have cut down on the amount of suffering and consequently the amount of work afterward,” says Ms. Roberts, executive director of the Southeast Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross, in Pascagoula. She is among those who lost their homes in the storm.

Along with county and state officials, her chapter has introduced numerous changes that it hopes will smooth future evacuations.

It has lined up buses to offer free transportation to shelters, designated a building that can be used by people who require medical equipment such as oxygen tanks, and helped to create a pet shelter so people will not have to worry about abandoning their animals.

It has also made an intensive effort to meet with local Vietnamese and Hispanic groups to educate them about disaster preparation, including providing them with translated materials, and to recruit them as volunteers. “I would like to see translators in every one of my shelters,” she says.

Other relief organizations have scrambled to adopt similar changes, even as they continue to care for Katrina’s victims, knowing that the next major hurricane could be just around the corner.

And while there are many signs of improvements, charity leaders say much more remains to be done. “If a hurricane level three, four, or five were to hit the Gulf Coast this year, we’re better prepared than last year, but we would still not be able to effectively respond,” says Melissa S. Flournoy, president of the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Baton Rouge.

She says nonprofit groups are still struggling to recover from the most destructive natural disaster in the country’s history: “All the emotional, physical, and financial resources have been stressed to the limit.”

While the Federal Emergency Management Agency bore the brunt of the blame for the gaps in responding to Katrina, many nonprofit groups saw Katrina as a signal for change.

“Post-Katrina, there’s definitely been a more intense effort to review the lessons learned, to renew partnerships,” says John Berglund, national disaster-services coordinator for the Salvation Army, in Alexandria, Va.

His organization has intensified its training of volunteers — “post-Katrina it’s actually permeated our internal culture” — and equipped new mobile feeding units with global-positioning systems so that Salvation Army commanders or federal officials can track their locations.

It has also forged new relationships with corporations. For example, Mr. Berglund says, Wal-Mart has agreed that a Salvation Army representative can be stationed at its state-of-the-art emergency-operations center in Bentonville, Ark., during disasters to help coordinate relief efforts across the country.

As the charity that is legally charged with coordinating federal efforts to provide “mass care” — food, shelter, and first aid — to disaster victims, no group has faced more scrutiny and done more soul searching than the American Red Cross.

The organization won praise for mounting the biggest disaster response in its history, sheltering millions of people under stressful conditions, including hurricane damage to its own offices. But critics faulted it for responding slowly or ineffectively in some regions, especially predominantly low-income and black neighborhoods, and failing to work well with churches and other local groups that stepped in to rescue people.

Among the steps the group has already taken, it has:

• Added a dozen new warehouses around the country — in cities including Montgomery, Ala.; Reserve, La.; and Richmond, Va. — to increase storage space for shelter supplies such as cots, blankets, and hygiene kits so they can serve 500,000 people at one time, up from 100,000 pre-Katrina.

• Worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and local Red Cross chapters to negotiate new relationships with food vendors and kitchens. Before Katrina, its goal was to be able to provide 300,000 meals within 72 hours of a major disaster. Its new goal: one million meals.

• Doubled the number of trained disaster workers and volunteers from 26,000 to 52,000 and hired staff members to act as full-time liaisons with state emergency officials in 12 disaster-prone states.

• Scheduled delivery of 40 new emergency-response vehicles, which bring food and drinks to disaster victims, to Gulf Coast states by October 1.

The Red Cross also said it would step up background checks on volunteers, encourage whistle-blowers to report suspected wrongdoing, and hire an outside expert to assess its fraud-reporting hotline. But perhaps the most fundamental change involved the group’s self-image.

“Before, the organization had been in the business of setting up Red Cross shelters and delivering Red Cross meals,” a June report issued by the charity said. “In other words, it employed a ‘Red Cross-centric’ response.” The group vowed to expand its network of partners, especially in underserved areas; to give them supplies, equipment, and training before disaster strikes; and to then let them manage their own relief operations.

Under a new business model, it said, it will work out deals with other charities, promising to pay some or all of their expenses if they operate their own shelters during future disasters.

“There are certain things the Red Cross should do; there are other situations where other groups and organization can do things really well,” says Armond Mascelli, the group’s vice president for domestic response.

Seeking to Collaborate

As part of its new emphasis on partnerships, the Red Cross has strengthened relations with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, including providing disaster training to its members.

Derrick Johnson, state president of the association’s Mississippi conference, says his organization’s relations with the Red Cross were “very strained” after Katrina struck because it had to pressure the relief group to open disaster- assistance centers in several predominantly black areas. However, since then some NAACP members have participated in Red Cross disaster-training workshops, and some may sign up to get other training to be disaster caseworkers, he says.

But the Rev. John H. Vaughn, program director of the Twenty-First Century Foundation, in New York — which has provided about $800,000 to black and community organizations that are helping Katrina victims — says many groups still lack confidence in the Red Cross.

“What you tend to hear among our grantees is, ‘We have to find a way to do this,’” he says. “‘We have to find our own way to respond to disasters and not depend on the Red Cross.’”

Melanie Campbell, executive director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation — which operates the Rebuild Hope Now Campaign, a project to provide long-term help to Katrina victims — gives the Red Cross credit for working to attract more minority-group volunteers. But she hopes it will do more. “My challenge to them is to think broader about the resources that are out there,” she says.

In addition to finding ways to get charities to work together better, a key area of review has been how to improve the relationship between charities and the federal government.

Rick Augsburger, deputy director for programs at Church World Service, in New York, says the umbrella group of more than 40 disaster-response charities that is charged by the federal government with backing up the Red Cross — National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster — is already an effective coordinating body. The main handicap it faced in responding to Katrina, he adds, was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a weak partner.

“For the VOAD sector to work well, there needs to be a very efficient and effective link to the government response,”says Mr. Augsburger. “In Katrina, I think that’s one of the places where things began to unravel.”

He says FEMA’s Voluntary Agency Liaison system, which coordinates disaster planning with the nonprofit sector, is “understaffed and overburdened.”

James McIntyre, a public-affairs officer at FEMA, said in an e-mail message that the agency has taken steps to improve coordination with charities since Katrina, including hiring three new “voluntary agency liaisons” at its headquarters and several more liaisons to coordinate long-term disaster-recovery efforts.

Ande Miller, executive director of VOAD, says the organization tried to involve as many groups as possible in its Katrina coordinating efforts — including the numerous international-relief groups that responded to the disaster outside their normal missions. It maintained an e-mail distribution list of 250 and attracted as many as 100 people to daily conference calls, she says.

While charities generally found those calls useful, the Government Accountability Office said in a report examining the charitable response to Katrina, some complained they attracted too many participants and dealt with issues that did not concern everyone. Ms. Miller says that criticism has some merit.

“It’s something we’re looking at,” she says. “It’s an interesting challenge in that those who are new to disaster have many questions that the others already know. The other side is, should the experienced disaster responders [learn] what the questions are from those who are new to the arena?”

Ms. Miller says the organization is also exploring ways to expand its reach — for example, by sharing more information with black churches and extending membership to international- relief groups.

The Government Accountability Office’s report also noted that the Coordinated Assistance Network — an information-sharing system that was set up by seven charities after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — was still in a pilot phase when Katrina swept through. Some groups that tried to use its database of hurricane shelters found the information inadequate or faced technology glitches, it said.

The network, based at Red Cross headquarters in Washington, allows dozens of participating charities to provide and view information about disaster victims to ensure they get the services they need and avoid duplicating benefits.

Noah Simon, the group’s national program manager, says that since Katrina, the network has decided to reserve its database for information needed by charities involved in long-term recovery work, rather than information about shelters.

The database, he says, now includes two million records of Katrina victims who have been helped by charities, mostly the Red Cross — a caseload far greater than participants ever anticipated when they set up the network.

Some groups prefer to go it alone, however. AmeriCares, a relief group in Stamford, Conn., that shipped supplies to shelters in Katrina’s wake and now gives grants to groups doing recovery work, has not tapped into the Coordinated Assistance Network.

Trish Tweedley, vice president of the Katrina relief program, says AmeriCares has built its own internal database with contact information for groups in nine states, like United Way chapters, health clinics, and emergency-response organizations. “I feel secure that I’ve got something in-house to work with,” she says.

While coordination is a priority for most charities, some also worry about money. Mr. Augsburger, noting that VOAD members perform specific roles during disasters — the Red Cross provides shelter, the Salvation Army and Southern Baptist Convention provide food, his group provides goods such as hygiene kits, for example — also says the federal government should consider reimbursing charities that perform their assigned functions during emergencies.

“When you add up the volunteer labor and financial resources provided by voluntary agencies, it’s significant,” he says.

FEMA now reimburses groups that have formal agreements with local or state governments to provide disaster services, but that system generally excludes groups that respond spontaneously to a disaster.

Mr. McIntyre of FEMA said the agency has no plans to change its reimbursement policy, but noted that it gave $66-million in donations from foreign governments to charities for work with Katrina victims.

Tony Pipa, author of a new report on the Katrina response for the Aspen Institute, a think tank in Washington, calls on the Red Cross — which raises most of the money for disasters, including more than $2.1-billion for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — to give 5 percent of the money it raises for “exceptional” events to local grant makers who can pass it on to local charities.

But Red Cross officials say that would be out of character for the organization and could confuse donors. “We raise money to provide services,” Mr. Mascelli says. “We’re not really a fund-raising organization like the United Way.”

Meanwhile, the fate of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is still up in the air. A Senate bill has proposed that it be replaced by a new organization, remaining within the Department of Homeland Security. But critics argue that it should revert to an independent agency with cabinet-level status, as it was when it won plaudits during the Clinton administration.

One charity watchdog hopes that the organizations that responded to Katrina will agree to some kind of evaluation of their work as a whole, along the lines of assessments being conducted by groups that responded to the South Asian tsunamis. “We need a better [evaluation] system for dealing with large-scale disasters involving a large number of groups,” says Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, in Chicago.