In High Demand

Charities around the country pitch in to help Katrina’s victims

The workload for charities in many parts of the country, including those nowhere near the Gulf Coast, has

suddenly become greater thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

Hundreds of thousands of people from New Orleans and other areas ravaged by the storm have had to leave the places they called home and take up residence elsewhere. Nonprofit officials of all kinds are now scrambling to provide services on short notice to the traumatized people, who need both basic necessities and long-term help.

While most people did not go far from the cities and towns the hurricane destroyed — decamping to Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas — states as far away as Minnesota and Colorado have agreed to shelter storm victims. Some charities and community foundations say they cannot remember responding to a similar emergency.

“I think this is unprecedented,” said Christelle Langer, spokeswoman for the Minneapolis Foundation, which has created a Minnesota Helps fund with two other local foundations to raise money for hurricane victims. “We are talking about the relocation of thousands and thousands of people nationwide. Everyone now is trying to determine how best to direct that support.”

In cities like Atlanta that are closer to the disaster area, charities are under enormous strain. “Our nonprofit community is running absolutely ragged,” says Erin Steele, a spokeswoman for United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta. “Many evacuees have families here, which is why they came. We have people here who have 20 or 30 people staying in their two- or three-bedroom home. That’s fine for the weekend, but they’re not going to be able to stay there. They’re going to need jobs, they’re going to need places to live.”

The United Way has created Operation Helping Hand, a committee made up of officials from nonprofit groups, government agencies, and religious organizations, to coordinate efforts to help the newcomers. Ms. Steele says the United Way hopes to raise at least $10-million to assist the hurricane victims in the Atlanta region during its fall fund-raising campaign.

Charities in Atlanta and nationwide say they have no shortage of offers from people who want to volunteer to help the Katrina victims. The challenge has been finding ways to use them most effectively, in some cases because charities face a dearth of information about how many people will be coming to their area and what specific help they will need.

Kate Nielsen, president of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, in Alabama, says local nonprofit groups and government agencies have been meeting to coordinate a wide range of services for storm victims, including help with schools, Medicaid, housing, vaccinations, and physical- and mental-health care — and have opened a central “intake” area in a local auditorium. But she says it’s not clear yet how many evacuees need help.

“So many people have found shelter through Red Cross assistance; they’re also finding shelter through family, friends, churches, or synagogues,” she says. Some of the people have come and gone but might return. “We’re dealing with trying to understand who’s coming back. It’s a very unusual situation,” she says. “It’s hard to get your arms around.”

Planning on the Fly

Some nonprofit groups say they were caught off guard by the enormity of the disaster.

“I can’t tell you we had a plan,” says Clark Baker, chief executive officer of the YMCA of Greater Houston. “We formulated our plan in the hallway. I’m not sure anyone understood the scope of this.”

State officials estimated that Texas had taken in more than 200,000 people from hurricane-affected areas, including those in shelters as well as those in hotels and apartments.

Houston’s YMCA decided to offer free temporary memberships at its 30 facilities for hurricane victims and to shelter more than 125 people at a YMCA camp in Spring, Tex., 30 miles north of Houston. In partnership with a local radio station and a local charity, Somebody Cares, it also agreed to accept gift cards for hurricane survivors to use at businesses such as Target, Wal-Mart, and gas stations.

“We’re up to $100,000 already in gift cards,” Mr. Baker says. “One lady dropped off $10,000 in gift cards, saying they’re for survivors. She didn’t even tell us her name.” The group’s communications director, Trazanna Moreno, quickly developed an 11-page guide instructing YMCA’s in the region how to help hurricane victims.

Other charities are adjusting daily to shifting needs. In St. Louis, for example, the first wave of people who left the Gulf Coast had the means to escape by car, heading up Interstate 55 to the city, says Elizabeth Westhoff, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of St. Louis. But the city then began preparing for the arrival of people who had been trapped in New Orleans, whose physical and emotional needs were likely to be greater, she says.

About 200 people contacted Catholic Charities offering to take in the Katrina survivors, but the organization decided that was not a good approach because of concerns over the safety of both the homeowners and those seeking shelter, Ms. Westhoff says. Instead, it has launched an “adopt-a-family” program, urging donors to give furniture, toiletries, bed linens, and other necessities to specific families.

In Memphis, Associated Catholic Charities is housing about 70 people in a residential complex that had previously served girls who were victims of sexual abuse but had closed. It has also provided services to at least 2,000 people who have had to leave their homes because of Katrina, including hot meals with the help of a local restaurant association, says Chandra Tuggle, a charity spokeswoman.

“We’re specifically focusing on the large families,” she adds. “We have [an extended] family, as a matter of fact, with 21 members. We’re giving them shelter, food, clothing, providing counseling for them when the time comes, finding jobs, getting the kids registered for school.”

The group got help from about 500 volunteers who worked through the Labor Day weekend. At the residential complex, she says, “we had so many [volunteers], we couldn’t even get into our parking lot. They were double-parked.”

The Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma was also overwhelmed by offers of assistance. At the governor’s request, it opened its 360-acre Falls Creek youth summer camp near Davis, about 90 miles south of Oklahoma City, to shelter up to 3,000 refugees.

“We’ve canceled all other off-season activities at Falls Creek to accommodate the need,” says Ray E. Sanders, a spokesman for the convention. “It’s possible we could be utilizing Falls Creek up until the next [summer] season.”

The group, which also turned a 6,000-seat amphitheater at the camp into a clothing depot, put out a call for volunteers. On Labor Day, when people were expected to arrive, it registered 1,005 volunteers at the camp by noon. But it had to turn away about 2,000 others.

“The Oklahoma Highway Patrol was concerned that we had a congestion problem,” Mr. Sanders says. In the end, the refugees’ arrival was delayed, but between 100 and 200 volunteers, staff members, and law-enforcement personnel remained at the camp to welcome the hurricane victims, he adds.

Back in School

Some groups are working on a national level to try to relieve the pressure on areas that are receiving hurricane victims. Communities In Schools, in Alexandria, Va., which offers services such as tutoring, counseling, and health care to schoolchildren and their parents, has started a National Katrina Fund, with money that includes $250,000 from Capital One Financial Corporation.

Daniel J. Cardinali, the group’s president, says the money will help its affiliates in areas where schools are taking in displaced students.

“As the evacuees arrive, we’re often one of the first organizations they go to,” he says, adding that the group wants to get students into schools as soon as possible so they don’t miss a year.

Mr. Cardinali says help went first to the affiliate in Texas, which has added 12,500 children from disaster areas to its caseload. Programs in states including Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have also reported a significant influx of children to the school systems, he says.

Goodwill Industries around the country are working to find jobs for displaced hurricane victims, or hiring them to work in their own stores and production areas, says Christine Nyirjesy Bragale, a spokeswoman at the group’s national headquarters in Rockville, Md.

Goodwill Industries of North Louisiana, in Shreveport, helped organize a job fair the first week of September that was attended by about 94 employers and 1,000 people who survived Hurricane Katrina. “We know that at least 60 people were hired on the spot,” Ms. Bragale says, adding that the Goodwill in Austin, Tex., is planning a similar event.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has announced it will provide disaster aid to counties that are helping hurricane victims in states including Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wants to go further. In a letter to President Bush, he proposed that a federal program that provides grants to charities and religious organizations to help resettle refugees from foreign countries be expanded to include people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Foundations are also starting to make grants to help charities provide aid to Katrina’s refugees. The board of the Meadows Foundation, in Dallas, has authorized up to $1-million in emergency grants to Texas groups that are helping refugees, a figure that will undoubtedly grow, says Linda Evans, the foundation’s president. The foundation has provided a $50,000 grant to Goodwill Industries of Dallas to pay for clothing vouchers and jobs for hurricane victims and $100,000 to the Salvation Army of Dallas to provide meals.

While gratified by the generous financial response to the hurricane disaster so far, some charities and foundations are worried about how they will help refugees who settle in their communities — and will need services, including mental-health counseling, for many years.

“This is a major concern for us and probably for every agency and church,” says Ms. Tuggle of Catholic Charities in Memphis. “Oftentimes people are anxious to do something when a disaster first hits,” she adds. But “as soon as the media stop covering it, people move on to the next thing.”

Heather Joslyn and Elizabeth Schwinn contributed to this article.