August 17, 2006 | Read Time: 5 minutes
It has been only a year since Hurricane Katrina unleashed her deadly force, but already we are forgetting one of the most important lessons of that harrowing experience: Where governments and national charities failed, local churches and community organizations stepped in.
Soup kitchens, community centers, and congregations of all denominations plugged the holes and spelled the difference for many whose lives hung in the balance. We forget this reality at our peril, because local organizations hold the key to survival when the next big disaster hits.
It was unsung heroes like the Rev. Bruce Davenport, who runs a youth center and HIV/AIDS house in New Orleans, and members of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP who quietly made a difference.
After riding out the storm on the second floor of his house, Mr. Davenport waded repeatedly through waist-high water to bring food to people stranded at the St. Bernard housing project and caught two bodies floating in the water, lashing them to telephone poles so they could be identified later.
The NAACP, hardly a disaster-relief organization, helped residents in East Biloxi, Miss., as they scavenged food from the wreckage and set up a makeshift soup kitchen in their neighborhood. Aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived six weeks later.
While official reviews would suggest that relief efforts faltered mostly in rural or inaccessible areas, the reality is that local churches and small, community-based nonprofit groups and civic organizations were sometimes sheltering as many people as the Red Cross throughout all of Louisiana.
The capacity of state emergency operations, the federal government, the Red Cross, and other regular national responders was completely outstripped. Katrina proved that no matter how big the organization, an exceptional catastrophe will always be bigger.
Disaster response is inherently local. The best response enhances the strengths of different types of organizations by pulling them together into one coordinated effort. Yet far too little attention has been paid to connecting small community organizations, which often can get to the most vulnerable people quickly and figure out their immediate needs, to the national organizations that arrive on the scene.
A paltry 1 percent of the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is dedicated to collaborating with nonprofit groups. The federal agency and the Red Cross still disagree over who has responsibility for coordinating the multiple organizations that respond to a major disaster.
During Katrina, lack of direction from FEMA or the Red Cross meant that local congregations and organizations had trouble gaining access to supplies and important data, and it hampered their effectiveness.
To avoid such problems, the public should insist that policy makers waste no time in creating a coordinating body that would bring America’s system for responding to domestic emergencies up to par with international systems, which rely on the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to ensure everyone providing relief can obtain the information they need to be effective.
While that United Nations office may not be perfect, dispatching a crack team to an emergency that includes experts in information technology and geographic- information systems mapping, as well as people who understand nonprofit operations and the differences in their capacity and services, would be a vast improvement. Too often during Katrina, groups of local charities and national relief organizations held interminable meetings and conference calls.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency may not be the best candidate to house such a body, but it should lead the charge in developing and financing it — and it should move fast. And now that the agency’s emergency-services staff has doubled in size, far more FEMA employees should be trained and dedicated to working with local nonprofit groups in the communities affected by a natural disaster or other crisis.
The American Red Cross pulled off the largest relief operation in its history, but by its own admission fell short. Yet the local organizations that filled those gaps were mostly shut out of benefiting from the public’s generosity, even when they did much of the work.
The $2.1-billion raised for Katrina relief by the Red Cross proves that an effective, centralized fund-raising mechanism is already in place — it’s just that those funds are typically not distributed to the many organizations that respond to a major emergency in a very decentralized manner.
The Red Cross has pledged to certify local organizations in places where disasters are likely to occur, so that if a crisis emerges, the organization will know which groups seem to be reliable and could be eligible to receive the charity’s funds. That seems like a step in the right direction, but the labor-intensive nature of the process is destined to ensure that its scope remains small — much too small for a catastrophe on the scale of last year’s storms. What’s more, it requires the organization to predict where future tragedies will occur, which is impossible to do with precision.
A much better approach would be for the Red Cross to designate 5 percent of its disaster revenue to community foundations and other collaborative funds that gather and distribute money locally on a regular basis. During Katrina, such funds proved to be a critical lifeline to local congregations and organizations on the front lines. Local charities should not put their organizational health at risk while spontaneously attending to others, and it is important they get the resources they need to maintain their operations.
Charitable organizations cannot do it all, and we must be careful not to think so. But the actions of local churches and nonprofit groups during Hurricane Katrina constitute one of the few bright spots during a wholly inadequate official response.
One year later, in all the talk about improvement, little focus has been paid to integrating such groups into official emergency plans and relief efforts. Only when the strength of local, community-based organizations is recognized as a key part of the nation’s disaster-response system will the United States be truly prepared when the next big disaster or attack arrives.
Tony Pipa is the former executive director of the Warner Foundation and helped start the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation. He is the author of Weathering the Storm: The Role of Local Nonprofits in the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort, available from the Aspen Institute.
