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Now
Foundations, Nonprofits and the Second
Looting of New Orleans
A
Catastrophic Failure
By JORDAN FLAHERTY
Fifteen months after New Orleans became
an international symbol of governmental neglect and racism, the
city remains in crisis. Students are still without books, healthcare
is less available to poor people than ever, public housing is
still closed, and infrastructure is still in desperate need of
repair. In an open letter to funders and national nonprofits
released yesterday, a diverse array of New Orleanians declared,
"From the perspective of the poorest and least powerful,
it appears that the work of national allies on our behalf has
either not happened, or if it has happened it has been a failure."
In conversations this week
with scores of New Orleans residents, including organizers, advocates,
health care providers, educators, artists and media makers, I
heard countless stories of diverted funding and unmet needs.
While many stressed that they have had important positive experiences
with national allies, few have received anything close to the
funding, resources, or staff they need for their work, and in
fact most are working unsustainable hours while living in a still-devastated
city.
Research backs up the anecdotal
reports. A January 2006 article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy
argued that the amount given to post-Katrina New Orleans was
"small-potato giving for America's foundations, which collectively
have $500-billion in assets." The article also asserted,
"just as deplorable as the small sums poured into the region
are the choices foundations have made about where the money should
go." In other words, very little of the money had gone
to organizations directed by or accountable to New Orleanians.
In discussions this week, one prominent New Orleans-born advocate
and lobbyist called this phenomenon the "Halliburtization
of the nonprofit sector."
A February report from New
York City's Foundation Center points out that the Red Cross,
which raised perhaps two billion dollars for Katrina relief despite
widespread accusations of racism and mismanagement, "ranked
as by far the largest named recipient of contributions from foundation
and corporate donors in response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita,"
receiving almost 35% of all aid. At the time of the report,
another 35% of the money the foundations designated had not been
spent. The Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, Salvation Army and United
Way together made up another 13%. The rest was generally spread
between other national relief organizations.
COMMUNITY
RESPONSES
After nearly fifteen months
of shuttered storefronts, a block of Black-owned businesses in
New Orleans celebrated a rebirth this week. The street, on Bayou
Road in the seventh ward neighborhood of New Orleans, is a hopeful
sign in a city where 60% of the population remains displaced
and many businesses are shutting down or moving. As recently
as August, most of the area remained shuttered and empty. Now,
almost every shop is open. The Community Book Center, a vital
neighborhood gathering spot in the middle of the block, reopened
this week, despite still having no front windows and a floor
in major need of work. "Step carefully," Vera Warren-Williams,
the owner, warned guests as they entered the store during the
reopening celebration.
Neighborhood spaces like the
Community Book Center have long been a vital part of New Orleans
organizing, serving as a gathering place for people and ideas.
The revitalization of Bayou Road is just one example community
pulling together -- friends and strangers coming by to help gut
houses, clear debris, cook food. Anything to help, as the people
of New Orleans struggle together against incredible odds in a
city that was already devastated by poverty and privatization
and neglect pre-Katrina.
Although Community Book Center
is a crucial resource, spaces like these have received little
outside support.
Foundations, according to the
Chronicle article, "seem to have been preoccupied with the
issue of accountability. Many foundations wondered how they could
be certain that grants to local groups would be well spent and,
therefore, publicly accountable."
While those are reasonable
concerns, many in New Orleans see a double standard in this view.
The Chronicle writer goes on to state, "the question of
accountability didn't seem to bother the large foundations that
gave so generously to the Red Cross, which had a questionable
record of competence to begin with and attracted even more criticism
in the aftermath of Katrina over its unwise use of funds, high
administrative costs, and lack of outreach to minorities."
Many feel that the message
from major funders has been that New Orleanians cannot handle
the money appropriately. "Twenty seven years running a business,
and they don't trust us with money," Jennifer Turner of
the Community Book Center, comments, when asked about her feeling
towards national funders. "They think we're all stupid
or corrupt."
In the aftermath of Katrina,
the people of New Orleans were depicted in the media as "looters"
and violent criminals, or as helplessly poor and ignorant. In
other words, as anything but a trustable partner in the rebuilding
of their city. Even today, many news stories about New Orleans
post-Katrina focus on FEMA payments that were misused or obtained
through fraud, rather than the bigger story of corporate fraud.
Many feel this media depiction,
and the bias and racism that it in many cases reflected, is in
part to blame for the reluctance of major funders to give money
directly to the people most affected.
"They figure if they give
poor people money they'll buy crack and cigarettes," People's
Organizing Committee and People's Hurricane Relief Fund co-founder
Curtis Muhammad summarized.
MONEY AND RESOURCES
At a small corner bar in New
Orleans' Central City neighborhood, community activists and organizers
from grassroots base-building organizations such as Critical
Resistance, the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition and Safe
Streets/Strong Communities gathered to celebrate a victory.
After a year of organizing, protesting and lobbying, Safe Streets
won city funding for an independent monitor over the city's notoriously
corrupt and violent police department.
The Safe Streets victory is
the result of several years of struggle by many organizations
and individuals. More importantly, it is a part of an overall
effort grounded in, and led by, those most affected. While there
has been some funding for base building organizations such as
those listed above, it has been pennies compared to the hundreds
of millions directed elsewhere.
For a region of the country
that has been historically underfunded, these issues are nothing
new. "I'm very much afraid of this ëfoundation complex,'"
civil rights organizer Ella Baker said in 1963, referring to
the changes happening then in the structure of grassroots movements.
In an article in an upcoming
South End Press anthology about New Orleans post-Katrina, members
of INCITE Women of Color Against Violence write, "Though
hundreds of nonprofits, NGOs, university urban planning departments,
and foundations have come through the city, they have paid little
attention to the organizing led by people of color that existed
before Katrina and that is struggling now more than ever."
Echoing this analysis, the
Chronicle of Philanthropy article complains of a "long-term
lack of concern and neglect that foundations that operate nationally
and in the Gulf Coast region have shown for poor and minority
Gulf Coast residents, even as some grant makers proudly strutted
their awards to national antipoverty and antiracism programs."
The INCITE authors posit that
successful organizing is rooted in the community and takes long
time to bear fruit. Mainstream funders don't appreciate this,
and, "a look at who and what gets funding in New Orleans,
from foundations to support work, reveals the priorities of these
foundations and the entire nonprofit system. Organizations that
represent their work through quick and quantifiable accomplishments
are rewarded by the system. Foundations are not only drawn to
them but are pressured by their own donors to fund them."
For many in the nonprofit field
nationally, post-Katrina New Orleans has been an opportunity
for career advancement. While local residents have been too
overwhelmed by tragedy to apply for grants, a few well-placed
national individuals and organizations have not hesitated to
take their place in line. Although some have no relation to
New Orleans, they often have previous relationships with the
foundations, as well as resources that translate into easier
access to funding, such as development staff, website designers,
and professional promotional materials.
SYSTEMIC FAILURE
Foundations are not to blame
for the continuing crisis in New Orleans, nor do they possess
a special responsibility to help the city. However, many foundations
have expressed a desire to support New Orleans' recovery, and
funding is desperately needed on the ground. Because of this,
their actions have taken on added scrutiny from people in New
Orleans.
Foundations are an integral
part of the current structure of US nonprofits, a system that
INCITE has called the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, to emphasize
the intersecting, dependent and corporatized ways in which the
system is constructed. It is a system in which organizations
are frequently pitted against each other for funding, where organizers
are discouraged from being active in their own community, and
where accountability to and leadership from those most affected
has become increasingly rare, and in many cases, the priorities
of the "movement" are guided by those with money rather
than being led by those most affected.
Perhaps the biggest lesson
of Katrina for people concerned about social justice is that
the structures of US movements are in serious crisis. As the
director of one base-building organization posed the question,
"what's wrong with the 501c3 structure that everyone could
come down for a 5 day tour but no one could come to actually
do the work for a month? What's wrong with a 501c3 structure
where everyone is already so under resourced and then tied to
projects and promised outcomes that the biggest disaster this
nation has seen in decades occurs and no one can stop what they
are working on to come down and help? What's wrong with the foundation
world that they have to produce 207 fancy glossy interview reports
to their board in order to shuffle a few thousand dollars our
way?"
One thing that is clear is
that the current paradigm simply doesn't work. Without community
accountability, projects aimed to bring justice to that community
are weaker and sometimes counterproductive.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Writing in the South End Press
book, INCITE members argue that the structure of a non-accountable
movement stopped organizations from responding more capably to
the disaster when it happened, and that a movement more responsive
to local community would have been more effective. "
Community organizing and
community --based accountability are the things we have left
when the systems have collapsed," they argue.
Many organizers told me that,
in dealing with foundations, they were expected to be responsive
to the foundations instead of to any concrete needs on the ground.
"Its not just that you have to jump when they tell you to
jump," the manager of one organization told me, "you
also have to act like you wanted to jump anyway."
Again, these issues are not
new - more than forty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights
leader and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
complained. "I can't see a leader leading me nowhere if
he's in New York and I'm down here catching hell."
"What's wrong with our
movement and our organizations," the director of another
grassroots organization asked me, "that they couldn't collaborate
and coordinate and offer us some organized plan of assistance
instead of asking us to do more and more to help them help us?
What's wrong with funders that they couldn't coordinate, the
way they ask us to, so that they could come down once, together,
and not on 15 separate trips?"
MOVING FORWARD
When asked for solutions, many
in New Orleans called for allies to bring a deeper respect for
the experiences of the people on the ground. Others expressed
an overall need for movements to move away from reliance on foundations
and large donors.
Several organizers highlighted
the examples of positive experiences. "National Immigration
Law Center (NILC) came here in a principled way, looking to hire
someone local, and to support already existing local projects,"
Rosana Cruz, who works with NILC and the New Orleans Worker Justice
Coalition, explained. "Advancement Project does litigation
led by and in support of grassroots organizing campaigns. OXFAM
is a major international organization, but they came in and worked
responsibly with small organizations on they ground they had
previous relationships with. And they made multi-year commitments.
They didn't just come and dump money -- or worse, come and promise
money then disappear, as some did."
"Ironically, many of the
folks who have come through for us are Southern groups, who are
themselves under resourced," the managing director of one
organization told me. "Organizations like Project South
and Southerners On New Ground (SONG) have been stronger allies
than many larger national groups."
The Chronicle article asks
foundations to play a role in "strengthening nonprofit organizations
that serve low-income people and African-Americans, as well as
other minoritiesÖAmerica's foundations need to move from
a policy of neglect of the nation's most vulnerable organizations
to one of affirmative action, an approach that will mean changing
the way many foundations do business."
"I would ask national
organizing groups to send a staff person down for 6-12 months,"
begins the executive director of another organization, "I
would also recommend all progressive and liberal foundations
with Katrina money to do an analysis of funding and jointly release
the results along with the plan for funding in 2007 and 2008."
Others listed specific needs
they felt were unmet. "We need seed money, technical training
and leadership development," explained Mayaba Liebenthal,
an organizer active with the New Orleans chapters of Critical
Resistance and INCITE."
The stakes are far beyond New
Orleans. This is a struggle with national and international
implications. If the people of New Orleans are supported in their
struggle, it will be a victory against profiteering and privatization.
Questions of race, class, gender, education, health care, food
access, policing, housing, privatization, mental health and much
more are on vivid display. "Everyone is here right now,
or has come through," Curtis Mohammed comments, referring
to the vast array of organizations and individuals who have visited
the city. "If the movement continues to grow, New Orleans
will be seen as a turning point." But, despite all of the
resilience on display here, the people of New Orleans can't do
it alone.
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