When the Helpers Need Help

Charity leaders strive to adapt to post-Katrina New Orleans

Since Sharon Alexis returned here in November, her life has been an almost daily struggle. She spends her time scrubbing the floors of her flood-damaged house, searching for contractors who won’t overcharge her, and calling her insurance company, which has lost her claim three times. She lives in a government-issued trailer that is parked in her driveway, its cramped interior barely large enough for herself and two relatives.

But when Ms. Alexis arrives to work at the Catholic Charities affiliate here to help other Katrina survivors, she tries to forget all the frustrations.

“All I can say is that it’s grace, goodness, and mercy that keeps me from not resorting to an improper way of dealing with this situation, because it would be easy enough for me to lose my cool and do something that’s outlandish,” she says. “But it wouldn’t benefit the people God has asked me to serve.”

Since Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, about one-third of the city’s 440,000 residents have returned. Yet they have come back to a crippled city, where sewer systems fail, traffic lights don’t work, and about 11 percent of the businesses are open.

While many New Orleanians have started new lives in other parts of the United States, nonprofit executives expect a sizable portion of the 24,000 charity employees who worked here before Katrina hit to come back. Their passion to help the city they love will compel them, the executives say.

But like Ms. Alexis, charity workers face a difficult balancing act of having to restore their own shattered lives while also aiding others.

“It’s kind of like wounded people trying to help wounded people,” says Ben Johnson, president of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

What’s more, Crescent City nonprofit organizations are facing unprecedented operational hurdles. They complain of limited money available from insurance companies, government sources, and donors to rebuild their facilities and pay for administrative costs. While many groups have cut their budgets and trimmed their staff size to remain open, others will shut down because of storm-damaged offices or loss of funds, or because the residents they traditionally help no longer live in the city.

‘A Lot of Passion’

To be sure, the situation isn’t entirely doom and gloom. Nonprofit leaders say they have developed a new sense of camaraderie after surviving the calamity together. For example, in October, officials from six charities met over coffee and tea to discuss ways to help each other. Since then, the meeting has become a weekly, must-attend event with 89 organizations involved.

Says Mr. Johnson of the New Orleans foundation: “You can look at this and you can say, ‘There’s no hope,’ or you can look at this and start to put the pieces back together. There’s a lot of passion and commitment to rebuild the community.”

No one here knows exactly how many of the 3,000 or so New Orleans charities are back at work. The Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, estimates 54 percent of health and human-service groups in the metropolitan area are not operating, based on a survey of 177 such organizations.

Charity officials here say charities facing the toughest challenges are those that assist children and youths and ones that can’t rely on national affiliates or other supporters located outside the city.

Julie Condy, the founder of Stage to Stage, a theater program that recruits prominent local artists to help train youths ages 9 to 18, says she worries she will be forced to shutter her organization, which operated on a shoestring budget of $90,000.

Katrina wrecked part of the 150-year-old church in the Lower Garden District where Stage to Stage rehearsed and performed. “The storm came and knocked the roof off,” Ms. Condy says.

But perhaps more distressing is the lack of young people available to participate in the theater program. With the city’s education system barely functioning — just 14 percent of the 122 public schools have reopened — students have yet to return en masse to the area.

“All of the kids are gone,” she says. So far only four of the 30 participants in last year’s summer program are back.

According to the Urban Institute, 40 percent of the charities it surveyed say that with hundreds of thousands of evacuees still living in Baton Rouge, Houston, and other cities, the population they traditionally serve no longer calls New Orleans home.

Local philanthropies and civic activists are encouraging small groups such as Ms. Condy’s to merge or change their missions to survive. “Everybody has to sharpen their mission,” says Anne Milling, a former nonprofit executive who founded the Women of the Storm, a new advocacy group. “It might not be the same old, same old.”

A few charities have taken that message to heart. For instance, Advocates for Science & Math Education, which for 12 years operated a half-day education program for high-school students, received permission from city officials to start a charter school after the storm hit. The New Orleans Charter Science & Math High School, which opened last month at an abandoned public elementary school, has enrolled 162 teenagers, about half the number it expects to serve.

“Katrina gave us the opportunity for education reform,” says Barbara C. MacPhee, the school’s director.

Navigating the System

At Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Ms. Alexis has shifted her focus too. Before the storm, Ms. Alexis managed a Catholic Charities community center in Gert Town, one of the poorest parts of the city. While she waits to return to the center, which is closed because Gert Town remains without electricity, she counsels hurricane survivors who eke out a difficult existence living in 19 trailer parks created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Ms. Alexis, whose 4-foot, 9-inch stature seems at odds with her formidable presence, helps those who lose their homes to Katrina navigate the Kafkaesque system of government and private aid that is available to them.

It’s a system she knows all too well. For months she has pleaded with the federal government and insurance agents to help her repair her two-bedroom house near Tulane University and make her trailer livable. “I had a FEMA trailer delivered in November. Just had my lights turned on two weeks ago,” she says.

To voice her frustration with the federal bureaucracy, Ms. Alexis joined Women of the Storm and went to Washington last month to urge Congress to demand better treatment of Katrina survivors.

“It’s easy for our officials to stand up and talk about what we’re doing around the world to bring peace,” she says. “For people who are distraught here in Louisiana, they need some peace.”

During a recent afternoon at her house, Ms. Alexis seems almost at her breaking point. She walks slowly through the empty rooms, which have been reduced to skeletons with sheet rock removed and wooden beams exposed. The floor in one room has been cleaned, but the rest are still covered in dirt left behind by the brackish floodwaters.

“I feel sometimes I just have to take some time off to deal with what I have to deal with,” she says, shaking her head.

To help Ms. Alexis and the local Catholic Charities’ other 725 employees, James R. Kelly, chief executive of the New Orleans Catholic Charities, brought in five trauma counselors to meet with them. Ms. Alexis says she’s attended one group session to talk through her anxiety and anger.

Mr. Kelly says one of his hardest post-Katrina tasks has been asking Ms. Alexis and other employees, “Darling, I know you just lost your house, but would you counsel this person who just lost their house?”

Difficult Demands

Other charity leaders say they have had to make tough requests of their staff members as well.

After the hurricane hit, G. Gary Ostroske, president of the United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area, asked his 44 staff members to come back by September 30 or risk losing their jobs. The decision was difficult, he says, but contributors expected the charity to be operating during a crisis.

“If a person was in another state or another city and I needed them to do things here, as much as I personally wanted to fund them and continue their pay, basically I was unable to do that,” he says.

About half of the United Way employees returned.

Other nonprofit groups have experienced similar declines. The Arts Council of New Orleans let 20 people go after cutting its budget by $500,000 and moving into smaller offices. Hurricane winds had smashed windows at its former headquarters. “There’s just seven of us doing the work of 27,” says Scott Hutcheson, the council’s chief operating officer.

The remaining employees spend much of their time these days searching for musicians and other artists who are enrolled in the group’s charitable health-insurance program and sending emergency grants to arts groups. Mr. Hutcheson complains that the postal system has delayed mail for weeks here, and officials at the arts groups the charity assists have asked to pick up their checks in person.

Feeding a Hunger

While all nonprofit groups in the city are facing tough times, Mr. Hutcheson hopes that more Katrina giving, the bulk of which has supported emergency services, will help museums, nonprofit jazz venues, and other organizations that were part of New Orleans’s unique culture.

“People are hungry for something besides the destruction network,” he says, referring to a local cable news channel that broadcasts nothing but photos of hurricane scenes.

At least one national foundation has heeded this concern. The J. Paul Getty Trust, in Los Angeles, announced this month a $2-million fund to support visual arts organizations in the city.

While the Getty Trust and several other large funds, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Open Society Institute, have supported projects here, some New Orleans officials want more national philanthropies to help ailing nonprofit groups before more are forced to shut their doors.

Too many wealthy grant makers are waiting for the city, state, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a viable reconstruction blueprint before allocating funds, says Una Anderson, executive director of the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative. “National foundations have a reluctance to connect in the absence of a plan,” she says.

Future Fund Raising

Thanks to the generous outpouring from Americans, some groups are relatively flush with cash. For example, during its 2006 fiscal year, which ends June 30, Catholic Charities expects to double the amount of money from private donations that it raised last year. Thanks to contributions from churches and Catholic donors across the nation, the group estimates it will garner $10-million by this summer.

But despite the rosy outlook, Mr. Kelly, the group’s chief executive, says fund raising will suffer in the future. “Our greater concern is what about next year, and the year after, and the year after, and the year after,” he says. “If the donor base is not here, how does that affect our private donations? If the tax base is not here, how does that affect our government contracts?”

Touring the Devastation

Eric Stillman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, has similar concerns. He is attempting to raise $20-million from other parts of the country with the help of the United Jewish Communities to rebuild six synagogues hit hard by the hurricane.

On a recent Monday morning, Mr. Stillman gave a tour of New Orleans to Jewish leaders from Houston to emphasize the need.

Driving the group around in a rented Toyota minivan, Mr. Stillman plays the role of disaster tour guide. “You can see to your right lots of fences blown over,” he says in a loud voice, as the group drives through Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. “By now you’re getting a sense of the enormous destruction involved.”

Metairie survived relatively unscathed from the storm. When the tour crosses the 17th Street Canal into Lakeview, the scene becomes one of total devastation.

“Holy smokes. It’s like a war zone,” says one member of the Houston group.

“These poor people,” whispers another.

After the levees broke last August, 80 percent of the city flooded, and Lakeview’s upper-middle-class homes received some of the worst damage.

“This is no man’s land,” Mr. Stillman says.

The group stops at Congregation Beth Israel, the most badly hurt Jewish temple in the New Orleans area. A sickly yellow-brown line about eight feet off the ground rings the brick building, indicating the high-water mark left by the flood.

Inside, Mr. Stillman hands out breathing masks to cover the smell of mold and decay.

Stepping on broken glass and twigs, Jackie Gothard, the congregation’s president, shows the visitors the temple’s ark, from which its Torahs were rescued by boat a few days after Katrina came ashore. The floodwaters so badly damaged the sacred books, which were made from calf skin, that Ms. Gothard was forced to bury them as required by Jewish tradition.

She says that about half of the 150 families who attended the Orthodox synagogue have come back, but they must hold worship services at another temple as they wait for Beth Israel’s building to be demolished.

While surveying the main sanctuary, with sunlight streaming through stained glass windows onto water-swollen floors, Ms. Gothard expresses a sentiment that reflects the Crescent City’s dire straits, and its resolve as well.

“We’ll be smaller and I don’t know where we’ll be, ” she says, “but we still want to be Beth Israel.”