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August 28
Top donors call Katrina recovery slow

Top donors call Katrina recovery slow; Second anniversary of Katrina tomorrow
By Laurence Arnold
The Boston Globe - Bloomberg News
August 28, 2007

Four of the largest US foundations, which have given a combined $131.8 million to rebuild Gulf Coast communities destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, say the effort is proving to be a slow and difficult slog, a new survey says.

While corporations focused most of their giving on immediate relief programs, foundations are supporting longer-range efforts to restore schools, libraries, healthcare facilities, and economic development.

“Those engaged in longer-term recovery and rebuilding activities felt that those efforts would require a lot more time — generally much longer than they had initially expected,” the New York City-based Foundation Center said in its report yesterday.

Still, some top foundations are digging in for the long haul and adapting to the evolving needs of New Orleans and other shattered communities, said Steven Lawrence, senior director of research at the Foundation Center.

He cited the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which as of June had given $37.2 million to Gulf Coast causes.

Initially the Gates Foundation, which has made the development of libraries one of its global priorities, focused on reopening storm-damaged libraries in Louisiana and Mississippi. This year it gave $7.1 million to Oxfam America, an antipoverty group promoting affordable housing and workers’ rights in the region.

“One of my hopes for this report is that it encourages foundations to remain active in the region, and perhaps encourages some foundations to come back,” Lawrence said in an interview. “There’s tremendous opportunity to build a civil society that didn’t exist before in this region. That really is an amazing impact that foundations can have.”

Major foundations struggled early on because they lacked preexisting relationships with nonprofit organizations in the Gulf Coast region and also had to navigate “often divisive governmental and community politics, primarily in Louisiana,” the report says.

Linetta Gilbert, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, told the report’s authors that in retrospect, “more of us who were going to be responsible for making grants should have gone to the affected areas to just try on the clothing of the region, instead of having people calling us to tell us what was happening.”

Gilbert was among officials at 10 foundations who described their experiences in the Gulf Coast region in interviews with the Foundation Center.

“I think that we’ve made some progress, but the recovery in this region is going to take dramatically longer than many of us would have thought or had hoped two years ago,” said John Lumpkin, senior vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The group, based in Princeton, N.J., had given $18 million to Gulf Coast rebuilding as of June, mostly to healthcare efforts. The Gates Foundation, based in Seattle and founded by Microsoft Corp. chairman William Gates III and his wife, Melinda, was the top giver to the Gulf Coast as of June, according to the report.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich., was next at $36.3 million, much of which was for healthcare for school-age children and their families.

The Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis, run by the family of the founder of Eli Lilly & Co., gave a total of $30 million to the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the United Way of America. The New York-based Ford Foundation made 89 donations, totaling $28.4 million, to various relief and recovery programs.

Overall, US foundations and corporations have donated $906.4 million, or 14 percent of the total $6.5 billion in private giving to Gulf Coast relief and rebuilding, the report said.

The top corporate donors are Chevron Corp., which gave $26 million; Starkey Laboratories, $25 million; and Exxon Mobil Corp., $24 million. The American Red Cross was the top recipient of foundation and corporate money, with almost $200 million.

It got 31 percent of the donations given by companies, and 10 percent of donations given by foundations.