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Katrina’s Harsh Winds of Change
Youth agencies focus on
stabilizing staff, finding funds to rebuild.
By John Kelly and Patrick Boyle
The Children’s Coalition for Northeast Louisiana (CCNL) is
based in Monroe,
safely tucked away from the winds of Hurricane Katrina and the flood
waters of Lake
Ponchartrain.
But Katrina’s aftermath took the agency’s finances by storm.
“It’s stretched our resources to the breaking
point,” says Executive Director Lynda Gavioli, whose nonprofit has
provided case management and out-of-school activities for thousands of
displaced youth at a Red Cross center.
As the weeks since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita grow into months,
the sights and sounds of recovery are changing. The whirr of rescue
choppers fades into the din of construction; throngs of emergency workers
are joined by locals coming home.
For youth-serving organizations, the move from short-term survival
to long-term recovery brings both relief and apprehension – about
staff, facilities and programming.
In Biloxi,
Miss.,
the local administrative offices for the Boys & Girls Club and Big
Brothers Big Sisters of America have already been replaced – by a
three-story dockside casino that was swept inland and now sits on the
club’s foundation.
In Camp Springs,
Miss.,
the Blossman YMCA is in fine shape – but about 15 employees are
homeless, including CEO David Harris. He was preparing late last month to
move into a recreational vehicle (RV), one of more than a dozen that are
housing YMCA staff around the Gulf
Coast.
In Corpus Christi,
Texas,
the strain of blending two residential centers for emotionally disturbed
youth into one facility – after one of the centers was destroyed by
Katrina – has contributed to the loss of about 20 staffers since
Katrina struck.
“Now that reality is starting to set in, I’m starting
to see a lot more people say, ‘I’m going to leave, I
can’t do this anymore,’ ” says Scott Lundy, a vice
president at Lutheran Social Services of the South (LSS), which runs the two
centers.
On the one hand, Lundy and other agency executives say
they’ve seen staff and administrators pull together as never
before. “I have really been impressed and touched by the level of
camaraderie from our other local organizations,” says Clyde McGuire,
regional service director for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in
the Gulf
Coast.
“Boys and Girls Clubs throughout the country said, ‘I can
send money. I can send food. I can send staff. We will hire your
displaced staff.’ ”
But the task over the coming months and years will be enormous.
“Seventy percent of nonprofits are pretty much out of
business” for now, says George Penick, president of the Jackson,
Miss.-based Foundation for the Mid-South. “Everyone had problems
with buildings, meeting October payroll and finding clients.”
For now, much of the recovery work focuses on three areas:
stabilizing staff, rebuilding a base of youth to serve, and finding funds
to recreate everything from buildings to programs.
Stabilizing
Staff
Days after Katrina hit, youth agencies realized that one of their
biggest recovery challenges would be rebuilding their staffs when so many
homes had been wiped out. In cases where an agency’s building can
be repaired and occupied, “having enough staff to start up is the
No. 1 challenge,” says Dan Daly, associate executive director of
youth care at Girls and Boys
Town.
“Many of them had no place to live in anymore.”
The YMCA of the USA
had a great idea: Buy or rent RVs and trailers for staff to live in. But
when the organization began looking, every unit in the Gulf
Coast
seemed to have been taken by government agencies such as the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, says Chuck East, the YMCA of the USA’s
national director for Gulf
Coast
relief.
So the national office included RVs on a list of needs that was
provided to its affiliates around the country. “People would call
in and say, ‘Here’s what we can do. Tell us where you want us
to go and we can get it there,’ ” East says.
At least 12 to 15 RVs were donated, he says – most of them
the property of YMCA staff who loaned them to other YMCAs, usually
driving the vehicles themselves to Louisiana
and Mississippi.
Girls and Boys
Town,
however, had no trailers as it prepared last month to reopen a short-term
shelter in New Orleans
for homeless and runaway youth. “Our problem was finding enough
staff who had personal housing so that we could get back,” Daly
says.
The solution: House some of the staff in one of several Girls and Boys
Town
buildings that weren’t ready to reopen.
At times like these, it’s nice to have a family member with
a spare bed – or a few dozen. That’s what the Bethlehem
Children’s Center found when it evacuated New
Orleans for another residential
program run by an LSS agency in Corpus
Christi, Texas.
But while the Bokenkamp
Center
had room for Bethlehem’s
40-plus emotionally disturbed youth, the employees had to find places to
stay – and they couldn’t afford apartments, furniture and
clothes, especially not while they were still paying mortgages on their
uninhabitable homes in Louisiana.
So LSS provided housing vouchers for Bethlehem
employees at Bokenkamp and later put several of them in nearby
apartments.
“I did own a home” in New
Orleans, Ora Cutno, executive
director of Bethlehem,
says with a laugh. It’s still standing, but “my insurance
company said, ‘We’re going to have to total your
house.’ ” With her agency’s New Orleans campus wiped
out as well, she expects her program to be in Corpus Christie for at
least the rest of the year, and maybe through next summer.
Finding
the Kids
Not only are staff spread out around the South and beyond, so are
countless thousands of volunteers, youth and their families.
Perhaps no one is harder hit by the dispersal of kids and volunteer youth
workers than Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA). For many of the
BBBSA agencies in the Gulf
Coast
area, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew away years of work to build
thousands of matches between adult mentors and kids. BBBSA estimates that
more than 3,400 of its adult/youth matches were “directly
impacted” by Hurricane Katrina.
Many of those volunteers and youth are spread throughout the
country, and BBBSA has trouble even tracking them down, let alone knowing
who will return.
“A lot of our ‘littles’ and some
‘bigs’ were right from New
Orleans,” says Joseph
Radelet, BBBSA’s vice president of mentoring programs.
“There’s a whole section of the city that they’re
tearing down.”
For agencies that work under contract with Louisiana’s
child welfare and juvenile justice agencies, the scattering of children
and families means finding other kids who need help – or stop
getting paid. That need has turned the Youth Empowerment Project (YEP)
into a mobile juvenile justice agency, with employees at several
locations across Texas
and Louisiana.
Executive Director Melissa Sawyer now runs her New Orleans-based
agency from Austin, Texas – after having evacuated to Houston
before Katrina hit, then evacuating from Houston as Hurricane Rita
approached, then living with relatives in Michigan, then settling in an
Austin hotel. Late last month, she says, she got an apartment on a
three-month lease.
YEP helps detained youth integrate back into the community. While
Katrina spread YEP’s clients throughout several states,
Louisiana’s Office of Youth Development moved all the kids from its
juvenile detention facility in New Orleans up to Baton Rouge. That left
YEP with just about no one to serve in New
Orleans.
The agency is now working with kids who are about to be released
from the juvenile facility in Baton
Rouge, under a new arrangement
with the state, Sawyer says. Two YEP staffers live near the Baton
Rouge facility. A YEP social
worker is moving back to New
Orleans and will use that as a
home base. Meanwhile, Sawyer and another staffer will remain in Texas,
working in several cities with pre-existing or new YEP clients who fled
there.
In places where schools have not reopened, or have only half of
their pre-hurricane populations, youth programs that are linked to the
schools can do little or nothing to serve kids. “The school systems
in New Orleans
are sporadically opening,” says Daly at Girls and Boys
Town.
Many families won’t move back home until the schools are open,
leaving the communities – and the local youth programs – with
no youth.
The
Cash Problem
For long-term recovery, the nonprofit network will need lots of
help from the outside, because the financial backbone of its work has
been decimated, says Penick of the Foundation for the Mid-South.
Nonprofit work “springs from volunteers,” he says, but most
of those volunteers are “trying to get their houses back. A lot [of
nonprofits] depend on local contributions, and whole groups are bankrupt.
They are operated in communities, and they [the communities] have been
dispersed.
“All things nonprofits get strength and meaning from, at
least for the coming months, are not present.”
Making matters worse, some of the agencies’ funding streams
have run dry. “If they’re relying on fees for service,”
such as from government agencies, “it will be a long time” until
clients return to their towns, Penick says. “If they rely on
corporate support, it’s gone.”
Money is flowing to the region from the federal government,
foundations and businesses, but relatively little has been earmarked for
nonprofits and non-educational youth programs.
The major national youth-serving organizations have set up funds
to help their agencies rebuild their buildings, staff and programs, with
funding from headquarters, affiliates and the public. BBBSA, for example,
contributed $500,000 to its fund and had raised another $60,000 as of
late October, Radelet says.
Penick’s foundation is putting some money where his mouth
is: He says it will contribute at least $3 million, mostly to help
nonprofits recover.
Other funders have also started to move on youth and nonprofit
initiatives. The Kellogg Foundation has given a total of $2.9 million to
three of its Mississippi
grantees for Katrina-related purposes: the Southern regional office of
the Children’s Defense Fund, the Mississippi State University Early
Childhood Development Institute and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care
Initiative.
The Freddie Mac Foundation used part of its $5 million Katrina
commitment to establish the Katrina Fund for Foster Children. The foundation
gave $300,000 to the National Foster Parent Association and $700,000 to
the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA).
The foster parent association will provide immediate assistance to
the organization’s network of parents in the area. “Foster parents
are doubled up, scattered throughout the country,” says Renette
Oklewicz, manager of foster care and adoption for Freddie Mac.
“Housing is way up there” as a priority for foster
families, says Diane Kocer, project manager at the foster parent association.
“We’re going to try to put together Habitat [for
Humanity]-style volunteer teams from around the country and the local
area.”
CWLA will serve as an intermediary, redirecting money to child welfare
agencies. Many of the agencies have lost offices, and many of their
employees have been displaced, Oklewicz says. “The staff are
exhausted, working overtime.”
Once children return to their communities, she says, many agencies
will have to ramp up mental health services to deal with post-traumatic
stress.
Penick hopes the national foundations “try to find community
foundations and other intermediaries that are closer to the ground. It
will help them deal both with accountability and finding those groups
which would not otherwise have access to national funding.”
When it comes to federal money, one concern is whether funds for
hurricane relief will cut into other funding for youth.
“We cannot underscore enough how strongly the entire
charitable sector opposes paying for this relief by reducing support for
poor people,” Diana Aviv, CEO of Independent Sector, said in
testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in late September.
“Across-the-board cuts only add to the suffering of those least
able to bear them.”
Patrick Boyle can be reached at pboyle@youthtoday.org.
A
Dilemma Both Big and Little
The Gulf
Coast
hurricanes blew big brothers, big sisters and their “littles”
all over the country, leaving Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA)
with a recovery task that might loom larger than fixing buildings.
Before the storms, the BBBSA says, its affiliates were serving
20,900 youth in Alabama,
Texas,
Louisiana
and Mississippi.
Now, BBBSA doesn’t know how many of those youth or their adult
mentors are still in their communities, much less how many of those who
evacuated will return.
As of late last month, for example, the director of the New
Orleans program still couldn’t get into her office to retrieve
computer tapes that hold names and contact information for the
agency’s “bigs” and “littles,” says Joseph
Radelet, vice president of mentoring programs.
While some BBBSA agencies appear to be in relatively good shape,
others face the prospect of rebuilding essentially their entire stable of
adult volunteers and kids to serve.
The national office set up two toll-free numbers and two Web
search sites to help mentors, kids and their families re-establish
contact, but recognizes that many never will.
BBBSA will use school-based mentoring – an increasing part
of its approach in recent years – to help rebuild programs decimated
by the hurricanes and to expand programs in areas that have taken in
evacuees.
One challenge is to decide how aggressive to be in introducing
students to BBBSA. Radelet says the agencies are striving not to
“get in the way” as schools struggle to get themselves up and
running again or to accommodate scores of new students.
On the other hand, the affiliates don’t want to sit back and do
nothing. Radelet says some are providing kids with “bigs for a
day” and holding events in schools and community centers to
introduce youths and their parents to BBBSA.
YouthBuild
Sets Out To Rebuild a Community
Hundreds of youth would descend on North
Gulfport, Miss.,
with hammers, saws and lumber to build up to 300 homes, under a plan
announced by YouthBuild USA.
About 500 young people in the federally funded program would
rotate in and out of the Gulf
Coast
community, which was devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said
YouthBuild USA
President Dorothy Stoneman.
YouthBuild USA
provides training, coordination and advocacy for Youthbuild programs,
which run job training and other services for 16- to 24-year-olds youth
as they work toward high school diplomas or GEDs.
The northern section of the town of Gulfport
was chosen because of the need, the reception from local officials and
the availability of short-term housing for the youth and staff, Stoneman
said. She said the North Carolina Baptist Men will house the youths in a
local armory.
YouthBuild USA
will seek government and other funding for the project, which has no
start date, Stoneman said. She envisions up to 50 Youthbuild members in
the town at any given time.
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