Despite huge Katrina relief, Red Cross criticized

Community groups getting involved
Across the Gulf Coast, a coalition of black-led community groups called Saving Our Selves is urging the Red Cross to consult with their leaders as attention shifts to recovery.

“This work is so immense — it’s dangerous anytime you have a single organization monopolizing relief services,” said coalition leader LaTosha Brown. “The Red Cross needs to recognize its limitations and reach out by partnering with local agencies who have people on the ground.”

Yet the executive director of the watchdog group Charity Navigator said such pleas to the Red Cross are unrealistic, and many reflect envy of its fund-raising prowess.

“The Red Cross raised the money fair and square by making a compelling case to the American public that they were the best organization to get these dollars,” Trent Stamp said. “To come in after the fact and ask them to share the money — I can’t think of anything more pie-in-the-sky and naive.”

Several other complaints have arisen. Among them:

• Some black activists have contended that the Red Cross response, notably in the first few days after Katrina, provided better services in mostly white areas than mostly black areas. “For the first 72 hours, they did not do an equitable job of responding to all communities,” said Joe Leonard of the Washington-based Black Leadership Forum.
  Red Cross chief diversity officer Rick Pogue said this perception arose because the organization, though committed to serving all in need, had more trouble getting teams into some impoverished black areas early in the crisis than into more affluent areas. “The need was so great, we’d go first to the areas we could get to the easiest,” Pogue said.
• In DeKalb County, Ga., the Red Cross was asked to vacate a relief center still filled with hundreds of Katrina evacuees after a dispute with the county’s chief executive. Goldburg said the dispute involved financing; DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones said victims were “treated like cattle” by overwhelmed volunteers unprepared to handle the demand for services.
• Many people seeking help complained of trying futilely for hours to get through to Red Cross telephone hot lines. The Red Cross acknowledged this problem and appealed for patience.
• Richard Walden, president of the relief agency Operation USA, urged donors to consider alternatives to the Red Cross in a scathing column Sunday in the Los Angeles Times titled “The Red Cross Money Pit.” Among other charges, Walden said the Red Cross had not made clear to donors that some of its spending on emergency housing for evacuees would be reimbursed by the federal government.
  Goldburg said such reimbursements — for evacuees placed in motels when Red Cross shelters became overcrowded — would amount to a little less than $100 million, or 5 percent of the organization’s projected total costs.

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