September 9, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
With several hurricanes threatening the United States, questions are being raised about what relief groups politicians should promote in times of disaster.
Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain directed supporters to give to the American Red Cross when Hurricane Gustav made landfall, a move Tony Pipa, author of the Humanitarian and International Development NGOs blog, opposes.
“Instead of telling me where to make my charitable contributions, I would have hoped to hear more about what we can expect from the government’s response,” writes Mr. Pipa, who works at the the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.
What’s more, he writes, “I expect a charitable adviser to have done some vetting. I’m making an assumption here, but my guess is that there was not a great deal of analysis or comparison of the ARC and other responding organizations done by the administration or either campaign.”
Mr. Pipa, who is founder of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, which competed for contributions with the Red Cross after Katrina, writes that state and local organizations deserve the national attention, too.
(Read The Chronicle’s article about the nonprofit response to Gustav and the fund-raising challenges presented by the storm.)
What do you think? Where should politicians direct donors in times of crisis?
