The Kindness of Strangers

Thousands of people who lost everything depend on donors and charities as a long recovery begins

As the flood waters from Hurricane Katrina continued to recede last week, nonprofit officials from around

the country were grappling with the enormous problems left in the storm’s wake.

Chief among them is dealing with the largest displacement of Americans since the Civil War. Charities and foundations are scrambling to figure out how to aid the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the Gulf Coast, and help them get new homes, jobs, transportation, medical care, education for their children, post-trauma counseling, and other services.

The question of how charities will pay for such services is daunting, but could become even more challenging if the economy falters because of Katrina’s knock-out punch.

But it’s not just money that charities need. Many of them say this disaster recovery will be different from previous efforts because of the clash of cultures created as people relocate to areas so different from their native cities — predominantly black, often poor people from New Orleans are now relocating in places that are largely white, such as Houston and Salt Lake City.

Charities of all kinds have pitched in to offer their services. The American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, and American Heart Association have provided $1-million for health care and medicines; the NAACP is providing services to those who lost their homes, and is working to make sure the recovery efforts don’t discriminate against minorities; and the International Rescue Committee has sent in relief workers who have experience aiding refugees in developing countries.

In the next few months, the focus will be on rebuilding all that Katrina wrecked, but some people in the nonprofit world are also focusing on the long-term questions, such as whether philanthropy can do more to prevent natural disasters from producing such catastrophic results. For example, nonprofit groups might play a role in helping cities figure out how environmental changes could increase the possibility of disaster. Or they might help localities learn how to improve their transportation systems so they can become better equipped to move residents to safety during a crisis.

Americans — overwhelmed by images of death, destruction, and widespread despair in the days following the hurricane — have responded rapidly with offers of money, volunteer help, rooms in their homes, and transportation. By the middle of last week, cash donations had exceeded $587-million, far more than the sums donated in the initial days following the September 11, 2001, terrorism attacks.

Yet as charities review the work ahead, they realize that much more money will be needed.

“It’s really been remarkable what individuals and the private sector have done,” says Bill Bynum, chief executive officer of the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, a community-development group in Jackson, Miss. “But that’s sort of akin to the sand bags that were being dropped in the river. As soon as you drop a 3,000-pound sandbag, it disappears — and you’ve got to have a lot of them to plug the gap.”

By far the largest chunk of the donations has gone to the American Red Cross: nearly four of every five dollars given.

Churches and small local charities, in particular, worry about whether the current rush of gifts will find their way to organizations like theirs, which they believe are often in the best position to deliver long-term aid.

“The donating public, it’s like they have a lobotomy every time,” says Peggy A. Casé, executive director of Terrebonne Readiness and Assistance Coalition, a disaster-planning group in Houma, La., in the southwest corner of the state. “The Red Cross collects hundreds of millions of dollars. But the bottom line is that when FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and the Red Cross leave, your most vulnerable folks are left with not very much to work with to recover.”

Issues of race and poverty are much on the mind of many in the nonprofit world as they seek to help Katrina’s victims. Blacks made up 67 percent of New Orleans’s population. Nearly 30 percent of New Orleans’s residents had incomes below the poverty line, a higher percentage than most other U.S. cities. Louisiana is second among states in the percentage of its children living in poverty, at 26.6 percent, behind only Mississippi. Many of the people who suffered losses in the storm probably had little or no insurance for the houses, cars, and other things they owned.

Helping survivors recover is made harder by the lack of major philanthropies in the Gulf states. While donations are now pouring in from around the world, some nonprofit executives in the hardest-hit areas fear support could wane long before the job of reconstruction is complete. Nationwide, charity leaders say the storm also presents a new set of challenges, especially as high fuel prices caused by the hurricane make it tougher for nonprofit groups to pay their bills and harder to persuade people to make donations to causes unconnected to hurricane relief.

The fund-raising environment for charities across the country could be much worse than the brief falloff in gifts that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks, says Linda Evans, president of the Meadows Foundation, in Dallas. “The collective loss and the cost to rebuild all these lives is so tremendous that it’s going to have a real negative impact on the other nonprofit agencies that don’t provide those services.”

And nonprofit officials in the Gulf states whose offices were damaged or destroyed are struggling to return to their role of helping others. Some 3,000 charities had their headquarters in New Orleans — nearly a third of all nonprofit groups in Louisiana — and as of last week most officials had not been able to even assess the extent of their losses.

With so many charities responding to this disaster, many of whom have little experience working together, battles over turf have already started to emerge. Yet many nonprofit officials believe this crisis provides an opportunity for showing the public what makes the nonprofit world so valuable.

“I’d like folks to say, damn, there’s some pretty spectacular work and it’s done with charitable dollars,” says John G. Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.