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Unlike the Oklahoma City effort, a system that depends on collaboration by individual relief groups is emerging.
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 12, 2001
NEW YORK -- A month after the terror attacks in New York City, a system for distributing some $850-million in charitable donations is fast emerging. It is a system that largely rejects centralized decisionmaking, depending instead on individual relief groups to collaborate informally on how best to help victims with a wide range of needs. It is also one that is rapidly expanding the notion of who deserves aid to include recipients well beyond the families of those killed or injured.
But if a decentralized system promises speed and flexibility, it does little to assure that all donations will be distributed equitably, relief officials acknowledge. It also offers no clear way to avoid fraud or wasteful duplication, and some relief workers are worried that a decentralized network will prove confusing for traumatized families to navigate.
Rather than constructing a unified mechanism of philanthropic relief -- as happened after the Oklahoma City bombing -- organizations are coalescing around specific categories of victims and types of aid.
Those raising money for scholarships -- including Citigroup, former President Bill Clinton and the Silver Shield Foundation -- are banding together, as are the major funds for the families of firefighters and other rescuers who died. Similar clusters are forming for mental health, the unemployed, the orphans, even displaced artists.
But there is no central body to provide overall coordination -- nothing at all like the large committee of relief agencies in Oklahoma City that met each Friday to decide, victim by victim, how to distribute benefits.
"They are going to need that," warned Gwen Allen, an Oklahoma City mental health worker who attended the weekly sessions there.
"There are going to be people who use the system, and without some kind of central point of reference you have no way to defend against abuse."
In New York City, however, a consensus has formed among charity and relief groups that such a model is inappropriate for a disaster of this magnitude. When there are so many victims and so many relief groups, many of them brand new, pursuit of a centralized system of distributing charitable donations is viewed as foolhardy, even dangerous.
"You would get gridlock if you get everyone in one big room," said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a senior vice president and chief executive for human services at the United Way of New York City.
Only a week ago, Eliot L. Spitzer, the New York attorney general, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani were each vying for a central role in stitching together the diverse and overlapping relief efforts. So far their efforts to assert control have been of little consequence.
Often with surprising speed, charity groups are organizing and making decisions on their own. Spitzer, for example, made public this week a Web site, wtcrelief.info, that describes what various charities are doing to provide relief. Three private organizations had already done the same thing.
The Ford Foundation revealed how it intended to spend $11.2-million that it has pledged to the disaster -- including $3-million for financial assistance to nonprofit organizations and small businesses in Lower Manhattan -- without checking first with Giuliani's office.
"It needs to be coordinated; it does not need a czar," said Susan V. Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation.
The charity effort, immense in scale and complexity, is the biggest outpouring of giving in American history.
"We are definitely in new territory," said Ken Curtin, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency who is helping to organize local charity and volunteer efforts.
Very little of the money pledged to date -- less than 10 percent by some estimates -- has actually been distributed. This is partly by design. There is wide agreement among relief officials that it would be unwise to spend too fast, particularly since the landscape of victims is still evolving.