A Record Fund-Raising Feat

The $3.3-billion collected for Katrina victims will not be enough to meet all their needs, charities say

In the year since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas of the Gulf Coast,

the nation’s largest charities have raised nearly $3.3-billion in donations, and have committed or already spent $2.7-billion on relief and recovery efforts.

A Chronicle survey of 45 charities that have been providing aid to residents of the Gulf Coast found that in addition to the $3.3-billion raised in cash contributions, the groups also have received another $172-million worth of products and services, such as medical supplies and building materials.

That sum far exceeds any amount American charities have ever raised for a single crisis. More than $2.2-billion was raised in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks, which had previously been the largest philanthropic response to a disaster in the nation’s history.

And charities are not yet done fund raising: At least 20 organizations are still in the process of raising money, anticipating that the recovery effort on the Gulf Coast will take another decade.

Yet even when combined with the $110.6-billion the federal government has spent on the Gulf Coast recovery, the outpouring of charitable spending has still left the region’s needs largely unmet.

“You just don’t see that the money has accomplished anything,” says Wade Rathke, chief organizer at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a community-organizing group that is based in New Orleans and has 850 chapters in 75 cities nationwide. “If a couple of billion dollars from the Red Cross went to make sure people had meals to eat and places to sleep and kept people alive, that’s good. But you go through the neighborhoods in New Orleans and see how little has been done, how many homes are not there, how many schools aren’t open.”

One reason for that, charities say, is that they had to spend at least two-thirds of the money raised helping residents survive the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

The number of people who sought help was also unprecedented, says Bob Howard, communications manager at the American Red Cross’s hurricane-recovery program, in Washington. Before last year, he says, the largest number of families the Red Cross had ever taken care of during any hurricane season was 100,000. The Red Cross says that last year it offered direct assistance to 3.7 million people during hurricane season.

By the end of January, the Red Cross had spent nearly $1.5-billion on emergency financial aid to hurricane survivors, and another $224-million on food and shelter. As of June, the Salvation Army had spent $142-million on emergency relief.

Though it has stopped raising money for its Gulf Coast recovery program, the Red Cross has $197-million remaining in its Katrina fund, Mr. Howard says. The organization raised $2.1-billion for Katrina, more than any other charity.

The charity plans to use the money primarily to pay for case managers, who will help storm survivors meet their needs, such as finding a low-cost apartment and obtaining health care, and will finance mental-health services for victims of the storm. In addition, it will help create long-term-needs committees, made up of local officials and residents, to develop recovery plans specific to the needs of their communities.

85% of Donations

The Red Cross is one of five charities that raised the bulk of the Katrina funds. The Red Cross, the Salvation Army (which raised $363-million), Catholic Charities USA ($146-million), the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund ($129-million), and Habitat for Humanity International ($122-million) account for more than 85 percent of the money raised by the large organizations in the Chronicle survey.

In May, the Salvation Army allocated $155-million to longer-term projects, ranging from continuing to house volunteers in the Gulf Coast to providing grants to help people make down payments on Habitat for Humanity homes. (Because groups like the Salvation Army channeled money to other nonprofit groups, some of the figures in The Chronicle’s tally may reflect double counting, but it is unlikely that represents a big part of the total.)

The remaining $68-million in its relief fund is being spent to provide services to hurricane survivors who have relocated to cities outside the Gulf Coast region.

International Charities

While much of that emergency spending went directly to victims in need of food and shelter, other groups focused on trying to rebuild the region’s network of health-care and social services.

Several of the organizations that stepped in to provide supplies for clinics and other health-care facilities are international aid groups, more accustomed to doing similar work in developing countries.

“We ended up buying a $300,000 blood separator for the Blood Center,” the primary blood bank in New Orleans, says Thomas Tighe, president of Direct Relief International, in Santa Barbara, Calif. “We sent plasma-freezing equipment, cell-processing equipment.”

Over all, Direct Relief International has spent $4.2-million on hurricane relief, while also contributing $12.5-million worth of medical supplies and equipment. AmeriCares, in Stamford, Conn., has allocated $13.5-million to help providers of mental-health and primary health care, on top of $10-million in products it provided to area shelters in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

America’s Second Harvest, in Chicago, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, has spent $22-million, much of it to re-establish the region’s system of food banks and pantries that serve the poor.

“We began providing transportation of products and purchasing products nationally because the local donation base is gone,” says Craig A. Nemitz, disaster-services manager at Second Harvest. “Many of the local supermarkets that would donate food are gone. The local growers are gone. And those that are there don’t have any surplus anymore.”

The charity also had to help its member food banks find new ways to deliver food. “The trucks were gone,” he says. “The truck drivers were gone.”

In addition to providing for the needs of the storm survivors and local institutions, many of the charities also spent millions housing and feeding thousands of volunteers who have gone to the Gulf Coast region.

For example, the Salvation Army established a camp in Biloxi, Miss., for volunteers who are serving an array of charities.

“One of the things we recognized immediately is there are a lot of needs that we don’t innately serve, like debris removal and building construction,” says Melissa Temme, a spokeswoman for the charity’s national headquarters, in Alexandria, Va.

The charity decided to collaborate with other groups, building group housing and providing meals for thousands of volunteers so that people with those skills would have a place to live while they offered their services. “It’s on an old football field. We had bought the land to build a community center, five days before Katrina hit,” she says.

Some organizations have halted additional fund-raising activities and expect to exhaust their available funds within the next few months.

For example, the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, in Washington, the charity headed up by the former presidents, plans to finish distributing its $129- million by the end of the year.

But many nonprofit organizations expect to be providing services for years to come.

“We expect we will be present in response to Hurricane Katrina for the next 10 to 12 years,” says Michael Nevergall, an official who helps manage the domestic disaster-response program of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, in Chicago, which has budgeted $19-million of the $25-million it has raised to be spent by next spring. “We continue to appeal to our Lutheran congregations that we’re going to need volunteers and contributions for years and years.”

Unexpected needs are nearly certain to arise, says John Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, which has raised $41-million.

“The scary thing is that during meetings we just had with folks from the 9/11 charities in New York, they said they’re seeing a surprising number of respiratory problems that are just showing up now, because of all the chemicals people were exposed to from the dust storm when the World Trade Center collapsed,” he says. “We should be prepared for similar physical maladies, respiratory ailments from exposure to mold, those kinds of things.”

But Mr. Davies says that the needs today are so great that the community foundation plans to spend the remaining $17-million in its relief fund by next spring.

“I don’t think it’s responsible to raise money or set money aside for something we can’t anticipate,” he says. “If we see a spike in specific physical ailments, we’ll try to raise some more money. By next June we shouldn’t have any money left in the coffers.”