A Daily Grind

Lafayette, La., charities cope with sudden rise in city residents

FoodNet is the sole food bank in this city of roughly 112,000 and it serves about 800 families in a typical month through a handful of pantries. But the one-two punch that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita delivered on both sides of Lafayette led an estimated 40,000 displaced people to seek shelter in this area, and sparked a need for food that the charity had not contemplated even under its most dire planning scenarios.

Days after Rita ripped through small towns just 20 to 30 miles south of here, FoodNet was providing food to 700 people per day — nearly as many as it served in an entire month before Katrina.

“We had worked with the United Way on a disaster plan for our area,” says Mary Ellen Citron, FoodNet’s executive director. “But this was a whole different animal.”

Even now, FoodNet is serving 130 hurricane survivors on some days. It moved temporarily into a new building that quadrupled its space immediately after Katrina to meet the increased demand, but that lease ends December 31. FoodNet officials say they won’t be able to maintain their current workload in their old, smaller building.

“We’re desperately trying to find a new space,” says Jeffrey Benton, president of FoodNet’s board.

Money Concerns

The influx of people needing aid has also meant changes for other charities here in the heart of Cajun country, two hours northwest of New Orleans. New partnerships have emerged between local nonprofit leaders as a result of the storms, but many charities are worried about how they will pay for the extra services they are providing. Another issue has been how to help the city’s newest arrivals while also caring for those who were homeless or struggling long before the storms.

One major concern is that Louisiana’s revenue projections have dropped by $959-million, and the budgets of state agencies could be cut by 10 percent. That would mean less money for charities that rely on state grants and contracts. And little relief is in sight, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency said recently it expects Louisiana to repay $3.7-billion, about 9 percent of the $41-billion that the agency anticipates spending on hurricane relief in the state.

While the number of evacuees in Lafayette shelters has dwindled to a few hundred, many thousands of displaced people remain in the area, living in hotels and trailers paid for by the federal government, or with friends and family. The program that covers hotel bills for evacuees is scheduled to end December 1, and federal law requires the trailers and mobile homes provided by the government to be reclaimed a year and a half after the president declares a disaster area.

How many evacuees will stick around for the long term, and what that means for needed services over the next year or two, are big questions for charities, not just here, but in other areas bursting with evacuees — including Houston, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge, La.

“No one can tell me exactly what the long-term recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will look like,” says Margaret H. Trahan, president of the United Way of Acadiana (a term that refers to Lafayette and surrounding parishes, or counties, that make up the Cajun homeland). “And when no one can tell you what it will look like, how do you craft a plan of action?”

A day after the levees in New Orleans broke on August 30, more than 200 people, mostly charity officials, gathered in Lafayette for the first of many weekly VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters) meetings. By that time, thousands of people were flowing into Lafayette from New Orleans.

That first meeting gave charity leaders “something to wrap their arms around,” says Jeremy Broussard, communications director of the local United Way. FoodNet would handle food distribution. Goodwill and the Salvation Army would hand out clothes. The United Way, which just months earlier had moved into a much larger building — formerly used by a beer distributorship — agreed to accept donations pouring in from local citizens and around the country in its warehouse, before moving them to charities providing direct relief.

The United Way also established a special call center to link volunteers with charities, and it registered more than 400 volunteers on some days. The shelter at the Cajundome — the city’s sports arena, which, at its peak, housed more than 7,000 people — benefited from 5,500 “spontaneous” volunteers, in addition to 335 trained volunteers who are formally a part of its network. Dozens of churches also operated shelters of varying sizes.

“I’ve never seen such a community response as I’ve seen here,” says Paul DiPrato, a Red Cross volunteer from Norwalk, Conn., who came to Lafayette last month to work at the Red Cross shelters. “It has been a huge outpouring of compassion.”

Acadiana Cares, an AIDS organization in Lafayette, quickly linked up with more than 50 HIV-infected people who had fled New Orleans, but the charity faced a vexing problem: Who would pay for the expensive medications these people needed to control the HIV virus? Should Acadiana Cares spend money intended to serve its 375 local clients, or wait to hear from New Orleans, which, according to Claude Martin, Acadiana Cares’s executive director, is sitting on $3-million intended to help people with HIV, most of whom have left the city?

“We just went ahead and took care of people and decided that we’d figure out the money business later,” Mr. Martin says.

Mr. Martin and his counterparts in other cities sheltering evacuees continue to seek a prorated portion of New Orleans’ AIDS funds.

In the meantime, donors from outside the state have helped keep Acadiana Cares afloat financially. Broadway Cares, an AIDS organization in Manhattan, sent an unrestricted check for $15,000. God’s Love We Deliver, a New York organization that specializes in meals that meet the nutritional requirements of people living with AIDS, promised to fly 200 freshly prepared, flash-frozen meals to the region every day for a month. The Altria Corporation then agreed to underwrite the program, adding an extra 15 weeks.

Local and national contributions have kept the broader relief effort in Lafayette on track. Two people drove a truck all the way from Canada with refrigerated food for FoodNet. The local Healthy Start organization was deluged with diapers and formula after the National Healthy Start Association put out a call for goods to help new mothers affected by the storms.

The United Way of Acadiana had raised $400,000 for a special hurricane fund by early November, and has already distributed $300,000 to local organizations.

Following the hurricanes, 20 new funds — from donors both inside and outside the state — were set up at the Community Foundation of Acadiana, which has assets of about $10-million. One man donated a few hundred thousand dollars to establish the Louisiana Family Humanitarian Fund, which is designed to help low-income people who are sheltering evacuees. A special committee of volunteers has been set up to assess the needs of families and provide cash grants to those who earn less than $25,000 per year and are housing evacuees.

“The evacuees aren’t in a position to pay rent, buy food, or help with the utilities,” says Raymond Hebert, the community foundation’s executive director. “They become yours.”

The evacuees are in some ways in a better position than people in Lafayette who lacked permanent housing before the storm. Homeless people who are not receiving payments from the federal government for hotel rooms or trailers are now unable to find affordable housing.

The rental market, especially on the low end, is near 100 percent occupancy, according to William J. Bacqué, chief executive officer of Van Eaton & Romero, a local real-estate brokerage. Some evacuee families are so desperate for suitable housing that they have bought houses even though they would prefer to rent, pushing total home sales in Lafayette and four surrounding parishes above 400 in both September and October, up from an average of 265 sales per month in the first eight months of the year.

Susana Landry, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia, has been living with her 12-year-old son at Bishop O’Donnell Transitional Housing, a shelter operated by the Lafayette Catholic Service Center, for three years — one year longer than the shelter officially allows. She found a job working for an optometrist in late summer, and was saving up money for a deposit when Katrina hit. Now she can’t find a place that she can afford on her $1,400 monthly income. “If there is something, it’s too expensive,” Ms. Landry says.

“Everything is a priority for the evacuees,” says Colleen Fournier, the shelter’s director. “It has put us in a dilemma.”

The focus on evacuees is exacting a toll on some local charities as well. The local YMCA had hired a fund-raising consulting company in Dallas this summer to help with a $2-million to $3-million capital campaign for a new building. But after the hurricanes hit, two companies that the YMCA had been counting on for major gifts to help kick off the campaign indicated that their hurricane-related giving — coupled with a slowdown in their business — made such gifts impossible.

The YMCA also worried about how its campaign might be perceived, so it has postponed it until at least early 2006. “The timing wasn’t right,” says Micah Vidrine, president of the YMCA’s board. “We didn’t want the community to feel that we were putting ourselves ahead of the victims of the hurricane.”

Hiring Evacuees

Many charities directly involved in hurricane relief, however, have seen their staffs grow — at least for the short term. Lafayette Catholic Service Center is one of many area charities that have added new workers, thanks to federal emergency grants that are paying salaries of evacuees working at nonprofit groups or government agencies. The program, which lasts 12 weeks and pays $9 per hour, is covering 470 positions throughout the city. The Catholic center, which operates permanent shelters with 150 beds, has hired nine evacuees to help take care of new clients and provide other services.

The Homeless Children and Youth Education Program, which serves 10 parishes and helps children get registered for and adapt to school, has hired four workers using the emergency funds to cope with its escalating workload. The program has already worked with 5,200 children displaced by the hurricanes — three times the number of students that it typically assists in an entire year.

The emergency grant funds have allowed charities to put skilled workers from New Orleans back to work helping their fellow evacuees.

Mr. Martin has hired social workers familiar with AIDS work at Acadiana Cares. The local affiliate of Volunteers of America, which has a contract with the state to provide crisis counseling to hurricane victims, has hired 170 people since Katrina struck, more than half of whom are themselves evacuees.

Germaine Derouen, a social worker from New Orleans who lost her house and car to the floods, moved in with her mother, a longtime Lafayette resident, after fleeing New Orleans.

Ms. Derouen was a “team leader” for Volunteers of America in the Cajundome, and she continues to work with the 50 people who remain at the shelter in its new location, the Domingue Recreation Center. (The Red Cross decided to move the shelter there when the population dropped below 200.)

On a recent afternoon, cots with bedding are lined up on the basketball floor of the center, separated from one another by only two feet, and 10 shelter residents are gathered around a big-screen television in the corner. It has been more than two months since Katrina struck, and many of the people remaining at the shelter have a history of mental illness or substance abuse, according to Ms. Derouen.

She says her work has been intense; that morning, one of the residents needed medical assistance after apparently overdosing on Xanax. Even so, Ms. Derouen is happy to have the job to take her mind off her own losses.

“Volunteers of America has been a blessing for me,” she says. “It has provided an opportunity to work, which has kept me stable.”

While the vast majority of those remaining at the Domingue Center are black and evacuees from New Orleans, much of Volunteers of America’s local work has focused on those displaced by Hurricane Rita, who are predominantly white.

Rita, which struck on September 24, was the worst hurricane to hit Vermilion Parish, just south of Lafayette, in at least 30 years. Six thousand homes flooded, and another 6,500 suffered wind damage. Parishes to the west were slammed even harder. Many Rita evacuees are staying with friends or family, or living in tents near their houses.

Beth Desonier, a full-time employee at Volunteers of America, is focusing on Erath, a town of about 2,000 that suffered significant damage from Rita.

On a recent morning, she drives to the Sunbelt Lodge Motel, where Eloise Caldwell has been living for the past month with her husband, David, and 13-year-old daughter, Angela.

The Caldwells’ home was filled with five feet of water for a week; the floors will need to be ripped out, and a portion of the walls replaced.

A local official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency called Ms. Desonier and asked her to do whatever she could to help the family. Their home had apparently been flagged by federal officials as needing flood insurance, but the family didn’t purchase it. As a result, the government agency has provided no funds for rebuilding, although it has been paying for the family’s hotel room.

“When FEMA calls and says somebody is screwed,” Ms. Desonier says, “they’re really screwed.”

The story becomes even worse inside the hotel room, which is barely big enough for two beds and the several boxes of food stacked against a wall.

Ms. Caldwell’s husband is a shrimper, and he is out of work because the boat he works on is being used to shelter the family of the man who owns it. The company where Ms. Caldwell worked as a secretary remains closed, and she was paid in cash, so she cannot benefit from unemployment insurance. The family’s two cars, which both flooded, were uninsured.

Ms. Desonier is hoping to piece together some volunteer labor to help the family fix the house, and during the chat, she homed in on David Caldwell’s carpentry skills. “Is your husband at a place now that he could get the house back up if he had some strong backs?” she asks.

Ms. Caldwell indicates that she thinks he could. She shows Ms. Desonier some family photos that she rescued from the house, and the social worker promises to return in a few days to check in.

“It’s encouraging to me that your husband knows his way around construction,” Ms. Desonier says before leaving.

Uncertainty Ahead

Over the long term, decisions made by Hurricane Katrina evacuees and Louisiana’s Legislature are likely to have the biggest effect on Lafayette nonprofit organizations.

The most likely scenario: greater demand for services, thanks to the evacuees who stick around, and smaller budgets, thanks to Louisiana’s financial woes.

Ms. Trahan of the United Way of Acadiana estimates that half the evacuee population may stay in Lafayette, which would mean a permanent population increase of 20,000.

The United Way’s annual campaign, scheduled to start just two days after Katrina hit, was pushed back more than a month.

It is now under way and is progressing nicely, but the sums raised won’t be enough, Ms. Trahan says.

“The good news is that we’re likely to meet our campaign goal of $3.2-million,” she says. “The bad news is that that money won’t be enough to handle the new population of our area.”

Eric Gammons, who oversees the men’s shelters for the Lafayette Catholic Service Center, worries about what happens when the federal government stops paying for hotel rooms and trailers for the hurricane survivors. The need for new housing will be enormous, Mr. Gammons says.

“I don’t even want to think about what happens 18 months down the road,” he says.