The Rocky Road Ahead

Huge challenges face charities working along the Gulf Coast

As charities wrap up the work

on what has been one of the longest and most-expensive disaster-relief efforts undertaken by nonprofit organizations, they are about to start an even more challenging task: helping people battered by Hurricane Katrina rebuild their cities and their lives.

Construction of enough permanent housing for the thousands of people who lost their homes, for example, will spill into the next decade and beyond, not simply another year or two.

“There’s never been as many housing units wiped out in a single storm, not even close,” says Peter Werwath, who calls the housing situation on the Gulf Coast “desperate.”

Mr. Werwath, a vice president at Enterprise Community Partners, a national housing organization in Columbia, Md., notes that the 300,000 homes destroyed or substantially damaged during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita dwarfs the 25,000 homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Another reality is also becoming clear: Much of the billions of dollars raised so far has already been spent. Of the $3.3-billion donated to the nation’s largest charities, $2.7-billion has been committed or spent on relief and recovery efforts, a Chronicle review has found.

The largest portion of those funds has gone toward meeting immediate needs, such as providing food and temporary shelter — needs that in this crisis have lasted far longer than in other disasters.

“Typically, we will serve people for four weeks in a truly emergency-response mode,” says Melissa Temme, a spokeswoman at the Salvation Army’s national headquarters, in Alexandria, Va. “This went on for four months. The people who run our canteens, where we provide emergency meals, didn’t go home until January or February.”

Even today, charities are still pulling up moldy carpeting and clearing debris. A nonprofit worker in Biloxi, Miss., just recently took possession of the remains of a homeless man killed in the hurricane so that he could receive a proper burial. And organizations in Houston — which took in some 150,000 New Orleans residents after the storm — are bracing for a surge in demand when federal aid for rent and utilities ends in February.

While Katrina raised major challenges for the Gulf Coast, the storm also pointed to gaps in the nation’s disaster-preparedness system and prompted charities to look for ways not to repeat their mistakes.

Some of the changes stem from the recognition that organizations simply need to think bigger when preparing for the worst.

Since Katrina, the American Red Cross, for example, has raised its goal for how many meals it should be prepared to serve in the first 72 hours of a major disaster from 300,000 to one million. And organizations such as New Orleans’s Audubon Institute have retooled their disaster plans after realizing that unexpected events could mean months shut out of their offices or even the loss of everything left behind.

Advocacy Role

Along the Gulf Coast, big questions preoccupy many charity leaders. Among the most vexing: After the initial outpouring of charity, nonprofit leaders now wonder, will the country have the will to see the rebuilding effort through?

Billions more dollars will be needed to construct housing, train workers for new jobs, provide mental-health counseling, and meet other needs, including some that have yet to emerge. For example, some nonprofit leaders wonder whether illnesses will appear years from now linked to exposure to the standing water that covered much of New Orleans after the levees broke.

Even with the biggest volunteer deployment in recent memory — hundreds of thousands of college students, vacationers, members of religious congregations, and other people motivated by religious or charitable impulses have lent a hand — the pace of reconstruction remains slow, hampered in many cases by disputes over permits and what rules should govern the new structures.

A key challenge in the rebuilding is that the people with the least political and financial clout — in this case, mainly black Americans with low incomes — have borne the brunt of the disaster. Ensuring that the needs of these people are met in a way that is fair and complete will require churches, relief groups, social-service charities, and others to beome outspoken advocates as well as service providers, some nonprofit leaders now say.

The region also needs grant makers to put money into strengthening nonprofit groups of all kinds in the affected areas, says George D. Penick, director of the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute, in Jackson, Miss.

He says the long-term grants that foundations have made are almost all for charities to run programs: building a certain number of houses or providing a specific service, such as vocational counseling and training.

If additional money is not forthcoming, says Mr. Penick, “I’m afraid we’re going to end up with some houses. but we’re not going to end up with a neighborhood, because there’s not going to be a strong base of nonprofits to serve that community.”

Many charity leaders remain hopeful that foundations, in particular, will step up with additional funds. A new study by the Foundation Center, in New York, found that grant makers have spent at least $577-million tied to Katrina, a sum far short of the $1-billion foundations pledged after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001.

“I think there’s still a lot of money on the sidelines,” says Melissa Flournoy, the chief executive of the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations.

“But folks aren’t sure what to do,” she says. “They don’t want to make an unwise investment.”

Adds Sherece Y. West, chief executive officer of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, in New Orleans: “All it takes is one visit to see and experience the level of devastation and the level of need, and you’ll get over whatever donor fatigue and hesitation you have in supporting the work down here.”