Foundation Director: Be Flexible With Aid

During the rush of the first few months after the Oklahoma City bombing, Nancy B. Anthony says she had no idea

what might come next. “It was very frustrating for us because we didn’t know exactly what to expect every day,” says the head of the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, which played a lead role in coordinating the charity response. “It was like being in a tunnel or going down a really rapidly moving river and not knowing what the next bump or turn was going to be.”

Now, more than six years later, Ms. Anthony hopes the hard lessons she and others learned from the experience will save charity leaders in New York and Washington some time and heartache as they cope with the September 11 attacks.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1995 bombing, which killed 168 people and injured more than 670 others, Oklahoma City Community Foundation officials did not expect to take a large part in disaster-relief efforts.

But in the following weeks and months, the organization, among other steps, established more than a dozen disaster-relief funds to pay for a variety of services and provide financial aid to people affected; hired a counseling service to have caseworkers help victims; distributed to local charities detailed guidelines that explain federal laws and Internal Revenue Service rules on disaster-relief efforts; and helped start a special committee of charities that met regularly to discuss the continuing needs of victims.

“Just like in Oklahoma City, there are so many charities involved in the aftermath of September 11 that aren’t used to dealing with this kind of emergency assistance, whether it’s deaths, or the incredible emotional devastation that follows, or the sheer numbers of people involved,” says Ms. Anthony.

“Even if you spend day-in and day-out helping people who are homeless, or have substance-abuse problems, or chronic poverty, a tragedy of this scale is just outside the parameters of most charities’ normal business,” she continues. “Many of these organizations don’t have that experience, and we’ve tried to work with them and tell them what we did.”

One lesson learned in Oklahoma City, says Ms. Anthony, was that it can take months and a lot of effort for charities to figure out just who needs which kinds of help — and how much of it. “Say an organization is cutting checks, and you’ve got a man who died who had been married two times and had children by two different marriages,” says Ms. Anthony. “Who gets the check?”

She adds: “If you set up arbitrary, bureaucratic rules, then you really make people angry. You really have to be very flexible and adaptable to whatever the situation is in providing assistance, it’s got to be one-on-one.”

Ms. Anthony says that charities should realize that the reaction they get from people they are trying to help — and from donors who are offering assistance — usually follows stages in the “grieving process” of anyone who has suffered the shock of a tragic loss.

“Think about it as if a farm family lost a member, and all the neighbors would bring in food. That’s kind of what’s going on here,” says Ms. Anthony. “People all over the country are trying to respond in the best way they know how, and there’s kind of a frenzy, or a chaos, of all that.”

After this immediate response, pressure on charities often grows as the news media raise questions about the way donations are spent and clients express frustrations. Oklahoma charity employees suffered the same kind of criticism their colleagues are trying to weather on the East Coast: that they did not get aid to victims as fast as possible. Moreover, words of appreciation from grief-stricken victims were sometimes few or were overshadowed by comments of anger and frustration.

But Ms. Anthony says that charities and their employees must accept such a fate because the story of a major tragedy will never have a fairy-tale ending. “The standard by which our performance as charities will be judged is not simply that we handed out money, or that we wound up with happy people at the end of the process, because people are not going to be happy in this context. That’s never going to be the criteria by which we judge the situation, because what has happened to them is awful.”

“The standard we must use is simple,” she says. “It’s not, ‘Did we make people happy?’ It’s, ‘A year from now, will most of them be able to continue to live their lives in some fashion, largely independent of charity services, other than maybe some counseling or other help?’”

Ms. Anthony adds: “It’s really this: Are people able to go forward in their lives?”