Criticism of Disaster-Relief Efforts Naive and Arrogant

To the Editor

In a breathtaking example of Monday-morning quarterbacking, Robert Berning’s letter in the December 13 issue (“Charities Failed to Halt a Runaway Fund-Raising Train”) faults charities — in particular the Red Cross and the September 11th Fund, which was established by my organization, the New York Community Trust, and the United Way of New York City — for their response to September 11. He claims charities should have been better coordinated and chastises them for not telling the American people that “much more money was raised than was needed;” indeed, Mr. Berning believes we should have called a halt by the end of September.

Perhaps Mr. Berning’s three months and thousand miles of distance from ground zero gives him objectivity, but we think he’s just plain wrong. September 11 was an unprecedented disaster. Dozens of charities and government agencies pitched in, any way they could, to help the tens of thousands who were affected.

Using a crystal ball that somehow we lack, Mr. Berning claims that by the end of September we had received enough to fulfill all the needs of those affected by the attacks and should have stopped accepting contributions.

Perhaps Mr. Berning may not remember that the enormity of the disaster meant that city officials did not then (nor do they still) have a complete and final list of all the people who died. Perhaps he hasn’t thought about people who don’t meet the criteria for many government and private benefits — elderly parents of victims who may not have been legal dependents but depended on their adult children nonetheless, for example, or the first families of divorced and remarried breadwinners.

Maybe he doesn’t know that 50,000 people worked in the Twin Towers and that thousands of small businesses have either closed up or are struggling to survive in a neighborhood no longer teeming with potential customers. Or of the workers who lost jobs, the residents who were displaced, the nonprofits that fed victims, counseled them, and gave them legal help, all without benefit of contracts or grants. Mr. Berning may also be unaware that the largest source of money for the families of victims who died and the injured — the federal government — did not announce its criteria until December 21, and is still working out the details.

Clearly, Mr. Berning does not know the purpose of the September 11th Fund. The fund was set up on the day of the disaster, when we were still looking at the skyline, simply unable to understand that the trade center was not there. We also knew that we did not yet understand the range of needs that would arise. For that single compelling reason, we decided that the purpose of the fund would be to help meet the immediate and longer-term needs of victims, their families, and communities affected — a purpose we conveyed on all material we released and on the fund’s Web site.

The September 11th Fund has made grants of more than $143-million in the last three months, and the money that has been allocated for cash assistance to victims has indeed included many families who were ineligible for other sources of funds. It has gone for a range of services for people affected, including job training and placement, and help for small businesses and nonprofits. The fund’s board is developing guidelines to meet longer-term needs and ensure that there is money to fill the many gaps that remain. As we learned in Oklahoma City, many will not even recognize they need help for months; we need to make sure that resources are available to help them when they do — and the needs will be substantial.

Mr. Berning also seems to expect that a comprehensive disaster plan can somehow ensure that “needs and commensurate services [can be] determined, communicated, coordinated, and alleviated” — presumably in a perfectly seamless manner — after an unimaginable horror. The sheer naiveté and arrogance of this prescription is astonishing. In fact, the city’s Office of Emergency Management, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, disaster-relief agencies, and hundreds of nonprofits moved quickly to respond. They immediately set up a single location to provide help and informal coordination among the major providers. As a result, tens of thousands of people were helped in the first weeks after the disaster. That’s what we think was and is the right priority: getting help to people who need it.

As New York City’s community foundation, the New York Community Trust knew on September 11 that we had an obligation to bring our experience and skills to the philanthropic response to a tragedy of unprecedented and incomprehensible proportions. We’re proud of the help that dozens of charities — many with our funds — have been able to provide. To expect government and charities to have planned for the unthinkable is absurd. The fact is that both sectors have moved quickly yet deliberately to get New York and New Yorkers back on their feet. Mistakes have certainly been made. But Mr. Berning’s screed wrongly denigrates the efforts and accomplishments of thousands of people who are working to help our city and our nation with the long, painful process of recovery.

Lorie A. Slutsky
President
New York Community Trust
New York