Crisis and Contributions, Part II: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
Regarding mechanisms to raise and distribute funds in the wake of emergencies, it might be productive to revisit lessons from my experience with hurricane Katrina. I arrived in Louisiana 10 days after the storm and helped found the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation.
As documented in reports like my Weathering the Storm: the Role of Local Nonprofits in the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort (Aspen Institute) and the Urban Institute’s Open & Operating? An Assessment of Louisiana Nonprofit Health and Human Services after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, local nonprofits and faith-based groups filled large gaps during the relief phase, yet had great difficulty accessing funds to pay for their efforts. This despite what was by most measures the largest philanthropic response in U.S. history, ultimately over $3.5 billion, as tracked by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
One reason is that many of the responding organizations were never before involved in disaster relief – they were trusted local groups that recognized the need and jumped in. They had little capacity to make themselves known to a national audience, especially while providing additional services in a fast-evolving and compromised environment.
International relief NGOs were among the most successful in distributing their resources quickly to groups on the ground, even though many of these NGOs were responding to a U.S. emergency for the first time. They deployed staff to the area and used their experience, earned in international settings, to infiltrate local networks. Some remained beyond the relief phase: Mercy Corps’s program operated past a couple of years, for example, and Oxfam America has made a long-term commitment, with a robust staff still in the region (disclaimer: I authored a report for Oxfam at the one-year anniversary regarding the recovery status of low-income communities).
It should be noted that the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, which raised the bulk of its almost $130 million in the early days of the disaster, did not distribute its first grants until December 7, 2005, more than three months after Katrina hit. I would venture that it’s not exactly what many small donors had in mind when they contributed, hoping to relieve the immediate suffering they were witnessing on TV.
A large block of those first grants were channeled to state funds created specifically for Katrina relief, and Mississippi’s state fund had still not used any of its $17 million ($12.4 million from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund) by September 2006, fully one year after Katrina.
Rather than act as a pass-through to organizations already at work, similar to what they did with funds raised for the 2004 tsunami, the former presidents created a new organization - with its own staff - to handle the distribution of the money, much like a traditional foundation. Part of the motivation stemmed from concerns about accountability and the desire to track the use of the funds more closely. But even a determined and well-resourced start-up could not get up to speed to be relevant during the relief phase, though it lasted 10 times longer than the norm for a big catastrophe.
The positive side is that those funds were available as relief moved to recovery and reconstruction. While the bulk of donations by the public invariably occurs immediately after an emergency, a significant portion of resources are needed over a long period of time as communities slowly rebuild. This is another aspect that recommends the joint appeal model discussed in the previous post. Such an appeal has the potential not only to collect and deploy donations quickly, but may also have more leeway from the public to meter their uses throughout the different phases of recovery.
Tags: Aspen Institute, Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, Hurricane Katrina, joint appeals, Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, Mercy Corps, Oxfam America, Urban Institute
May 15th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
What drove the Bush-Clinton Fund to wait so long to distribute funds?
May 20th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
The Fund decided to act as grantgiving foundation, which means they had to hire staff and develop their grants strategy and process, as well as their financial structures. By the time they decided to go that route and then hire/put all the structure in place, the majority of survivors were out of the relief shelters and recovery planning processes were underway.