Social-Services Director: Charities Should Stick to Strengths

One of the best things charities can do at a time of crisis is stick to their strengths and do what they know best,

says Julia Reed, director of social services at Associated Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

“You’re tempted, especially when there’s a lot of money involved, to create something new so that you can fill a need that’s come up,” Ms. Reed says.

Following the Oklahoma City bombing, Ms. Reed worked to keep her charity focused on reaching out to neighborhoods with large numbers of non-English-speaking people, areas where the Catholic social-service group had been working before the disaster. For its efforts, the charity received a grant from the state to provide mental-health counseling to residents in parts of the city with high percentages of Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern people. “We knew there were populations we already had a relationship with, so we tried to do what we were already good at,” says Ms. Reed.

Just after the September 11 attacks, Ms. Reed talked to more than a dozen Catholic groups in the New York City area and urged them to keep the following in mind as they went about their relief work: “I have a job to do and yet this is still going to impact me.”

After the bombing, Ms. Reed’s organization instituted a new policy establishing two waves of relief workers to handle large disasters. Ms. Reed, who arrived within an hour of the explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, says she found that she couldn’t switch roles from providing immediate emergency aid to long-term assistance. “At the end of about two-and-a-half weeks, it became apparent to me I was really just wasted. I couldn’t do another thing,” she says. “It’s real hard to do the initial impact stuff and then stay objective so that you can be focused on helping people long term.”

With a disaster such as a terrorist attack, Ms. Reed says, having informal “debriefing” sessions with charity and rescue workers on a regular basis becomes crucial to helping those workers relieve stress. “People who had done really difficult work before had never been in a building where there was blood dripping on them,” Ms. Reed says, and many of those who were on the scene first paid an emotional toll for their work. The meetings provide “a time when people get to talk about what they’ve experienced in a way they might not do with a spouse or a friend.”

Even with such sessions, she says, some of the firefighters and police-force members who helped at the start ended up needing more formal help and received mental-health counseling as many as five years after the bombing.

Ms. Reed says that while people in New York and Washington talk about copying Oklahoma City’s Resource Coordination Committee, where top officials from charities and government agencies gathered to discuss unmet needs, allocate funds, and prevent fraud and abuse of charitable programs, she hopes New York will also hold meetings of people who work directly with affected families.

Caseworkers in Oklahoma City met regularly as a subcommittee of the larger committee to sort through aid applications and share information. The meetings helped case managers steer those in need to the proper aid agency, Ms. Reed says. She encouraged all charities to be involved in meetings at some level. “If ever there’s a time for working together, this is it,” she says. “You can’t be playing alone.”

One challenge the case managers in Oklahoma City found was that people often needed help not only for the trauma they experienced from the terrorist attack, but for problems that were boiling beneath the surface before the tragic incident occurred.

“Everybody gets so caught up with the tragedy, that you forget that the individual people’s lives may have been difficult before it ever even happened,” she says.

“We’d get so focused on fixing [their situations] that we would forget that maybe there were some long-term problems that we needed to focus on,” she says. “Maybe they already weren’t good budgeters. Maybe they were already in debt. Maybe they were already on the road to divorce.”