Saviors and Survivors

Gulf Coast charities face double challenge of helping displaced victims while assessing their own losses

When Diane Easley fled Ocean Springs, Miss., to escape Hurricane Katrina, she grabbed pictures of her children

and the most important financial records of the all-volunteer group that she runs, the Community Care Network. The charity provides job training, housing, and other services to women who are in prison or have just been released.

A week later, having lost their own house in the storm, Ms. Easley and her husband were living, along with three of her clients, in the home the charity has set up for newly released prisoners. Even so, she continued to try to run the charity, shuttling three hours between Ocean Springs — which she says isn’t expected to have power for a month — and Jackson, where she uses the phones and computers at the Mississippi Center for Non-Profits, an association of charities in the state.

“You can’t stop what you’re doing for the others,” says Ms. Easley. “Their needs aren’t going to be met. We were already working with a displaced group of people. After the storm, it’s going to be worse.”

Relief charities have a monumental task in front of them: helping hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi rebuild their lives and their cities and towns. It’s an undertaking made all the more difficult by the damages suffered by local nonprofit groups and the tough economic conditions that existed in the region even before the storm.

For Ms. Easley, one of the chief worries is money. As a small organization, the Community Care Network depended on financial support from civic clubs, churches, and other local institutions, which are now gone or struggling themselves.

Ms. Easley says that most of the nonprofit groups in Ocean Springs and the surrounding communities are small. Very few, she says, have more than six or eight employees.

“A lot of those small organizations aren’t going to make it,” says Ms. Easley. “That’s what scares me. A lot of them just aren’t going to make it if there isn’t some creative help out there for them.”

‘Sector Is Thin’

Adding to the challenge of the recovery effort will be the scarcity of charities and foundations in the region, particularly outside of New Orleans and a few other cities.

“The nonprofit sector is thin here,” says George D. Penick, president of the Foundation for the Mid South, in Jackson, Miss. “It is going to take a long time for help to come, especially in the rural areas.”

He adds: “When the bad times come, we don’t have a safety net.”

The areas devastated by the hurricane have long been economically distressed, and the little wealth that was there was distributed very unequally, says Bill Bynum, chief executive officer of the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, a community-development organizaton in Jackson, Miss. The charity works in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Memphis metropolitan area of Tennessee.

He says that people who didn’t have the financial wherewithal to leave before the hurricane struck had to fend for themselves and wait for aid to arrive, and he worries that the disparities could be “played out even more” as the region moves into the rebuilding phase of the emergency.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, nonprofit organizations and government agencies will have to tackle the region’s enormous need for low-cost housing.

“Investing in housing and homes is going to be a very important component of the rebuilding,” says Mr. Bynum. “It helps create construction jobs. It brings people back into the communities, and it gives communities an anchor to go forward from.”

He cautions, however, that down-payment assistance programs, zero-interest loans, and creative mortgage programs will be necessary to make sure that the people who most need the housing will be able to qualify. “One of the challenges is that you will have no-income people who need to qualify for those homes,” says Mr. Bynum, “because there are no jobs.”

Local Expertise

As charities from across the country come to the region to help with long-term rebuilding projects, they will need to involve churches and nonprofit organizations in the region if they want to be effective, say local nonprofit leaders.

“We have been here long enough to know what’s been going on, and who are real players and who are players that are looking for an opportunity to benefit themselves,” says David L. Jackson, senior program officer at the Mid South Delta program of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, in Greenville, Miss.

To show the power of working at the grass-roots level, Mr. Jackson points to his niece’s church in Virginia. Members of the congregation wanted to help hurricane survivors directly, so they asked members’ relatives who live in or near the affected areas for help directing their giving. The church Mr. Jackson attends has adopted several families who suffered losses during the storm, and the congregation in Virginia has said it will keep raising money until those families are back on their feet.

But, like the Community Care Network, in Ocean Springs, many local charities in the areas devastated by the storm are victims as well.

More than 3,000 groups, with annual budgets totaling more than $5-billion, operated in New Orleans alone, according to tax records maintained by the Guidestar Web site. Among the many groups that have lost facilities are the Archdiocese of New Orleans, with its network of schools, a hospice, and other facilities for the sick. The archdiocese has relocated to Baton Rouge for now, and as of last week was still trying to contact many of its 1,000 priests, staff members, and educators. Catholic Charities of New Orleans is also working from Baton Rouge.

The Dryades YMCA in New Orleans was planning to celebrate its 100th anniversary later this month in a brand-new, $6-million building, after a fire in 2000 destroyed its facility. The charity’s staff members, scattered throughout a few states, don’t yet know how badly it was damaged. “I can’t see how any agency in New Orleans that had a building did not suffer some damage,” says Douglas M. Evans, the chief executive of Dryades YMCA. Total Community Action, a human-services group with seven New Orleans facilities, also faces the prospect of severe damage.

Officials at the Audubon Nature Institute’s Aquarium of the Americas report that many of its 4,000 fish have died because there was no power to pump oxygen into the tanks. At the Audubon Zoo, 12 people struggled to feed 1,400 hungry and thirsty animals with limited emergency provisions.

And the damage extends beyond New Orleans: Affected groups include three affiliates of the Communities In Schools program that have had to close shop due to the storm, one in New Orleans, two in Mississippi.

‘A Hard Question’

Even as nonprofit leaders in the Gulf states assess their losses, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina’s wrath and the disproportionate suffering of poor blacks, particularly in New Orleans, are very much on their minds.

“Everyone is questioning whether we are treating people in our country the way they need to be treated, or have we treated these people as disposable?” says Mr. Bynum, of the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta. “That’s a hard question we’ve all got to ask ourselves, and the answers, judging from what we’re seeing so far, aren’t going to be answers that we’re very happy with.

“But I don’t want to leave it at that,” Mr. Bynum continues. “There are a lot of people who recognize there’s a need to do things differently, and I hope that we take this opportunity to step up and live up to the promise that America holds.”

Harvy Lipman, Elizabeth Schwinn, and Ian Wilhelm contributed to this article.