^{Posted on October 28, 2001}

Red Tape at Red Cross: Groups Now in a Tangle

An article referred to us by Dr. Reinhardt:

Don:

This article so clearly demonstrates the high social cost of pluralism relative to collective action. It is Le Vice Americain, as the French would put it.

I think your group may find this useful.

Best

Uwe

The New York Times
by David Barstow and Diana B. Henriques
October 28, 2001

Across metropolitan New York, bereaved spouses armed with spreadsheets, fax machines and stacks of application forms are pursuing what some call their new full- time jobs and what others resentfully refer to as a form of professional begging: asking charitable organizations for help.

Families that have lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attack say they have often been utterly overwhelmed by the multiplicity of charitable funds, aid organizations and government agencies. In dozens of interviews, widows and widowers described days spent bouncing from one bureaucracy to the next, struggling to navigate a maze of confusing rules, deadlines and requirements.

"We have to make five and six calls to each of these agencies to get someone who knows what they're doing," said Liz McLaughlin, 34, a mother of an infant son who lost her husband, Robert, a Cantor Fitzgerald trader.

Another woman, who did not want to be identified for fear of offending charity groups, said she had dealt with at least nine different United Way representatives who conducted three separate interviews involving the same basic set of questions.

"I was turned into a widow on Sept. 11 and a single mother, and now they're turning me into a beggar," she said.

Almost seven weeks after the attacks, there is no shortage of charity - at least $1.2 billion has been raised - and many people are working long hours trying to give it away.

In a former furniture store in Falls Church, Va., dozens of American Red Cross volunteers sit at desks decorated with tiny American flags, approving hundreds of relief checks to cover $4,500 mortgage checks, $500 car payments, funeral costs, school tuition, nannies, dental bills - often with no questions asked. Working 12- hour days, these volunteers have signed off on $35 million in relief checks for about 2,300 families. Tens of millions of dollars have been given to grass-roots agencies providing everything from grief counseling to small-business loans.

But what has not been provided is a simple, comprehensive way for families to apply for the full range of help. For families not blessed with legions of helpful friends and relatives, the experience of dealing with the hundreds of charitable agencies and funds can be maddening.

"I'm applying so many places and the paperwork is getting a little overwhelming," said Jennifer Damaskinos, whose husband, Thomas, another Cantor Fitzgerald executive, was killed.

The Red Cross, the nation's largest disaster relief organization, has been trying to distribute more than $530 million. But it has not yet had even the first contact with hundreds of families, and its ability to distribute aid promptly has also been undercut by internal turmoil and confusion.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, president of the Red Cross, clashed with New York officials over questions of coordination. On Friday, she announced that she would resign at year's end, telling reporters that she had been forced out. In recent weeks, she had come under increasing criticism, in part because of her handling of charitable fund-raising.

Two weeks after the attack, the Red Cross seemed to offer the promise of sweeping, trouble-free relief. It announced a $100 million program to provide three months of living expenses to each victim's family. Its officials confidently promised that checks would be mailed within 48 hours of a family's filling out a simple one-page application.

In practice, though, many applications have been held up for several weeks or more, Red Cross officials concede. The delays have been caused by a variety of problems, which include the agency's inability to verify quickly that applicants are in fact related to victims; disorganized records; ever-changing management directives; and the cyclical turnover among volunteers, with veterans often leaving unfinished files to untrained rookies.

What is more, the Red Cross has not even contacted scores of families because it has failed to coordinate its own efforts to identify victims with the work of other charities trying to do the same thing. Part of the problem, though, is the refusal of New York City officials to give the Red Cross access to the list of missing and dead, which city officials said is not complete.

In Falls Church, volunteers are not even certain which families on the Red Cross list of victims have been overlooked because their record- keeping systems - assembled from scratch under intense deadline pressure - are woefully incomplete. In hundreds of cases, all the Red Cross has to work with is a victim's name, and the agency's volunteers are not trained or equipped to track down relatives on such scant information.

"That's one of our downfalls - we're not real sophisticated in how to do those things," said Nancy Smith, a senior Red Cross administrator.

But the obstacles encountered by the Red Cross only begin to hint at the range of difficulties plaguing the broader philanthropic response - a vast and largely decentralized effort involving a tangle of established and new charities, many of them straining to manage the unprecedented volume of generosity from individual and corporate donors.

Jane S. Sibley, a Red Cross disaster aid researcher, was recently asked to compile a guide to available charity programs for a Red Cross information line. After only a few days of work, she recalled, her guide was nearly three inches thick.

Veronica Juliano has made more telephone calls than she can count to get help for her sister, her sister's best friend and her husband's secretary, all of whom were widowed in the disaster. The response, she said, was "frustrating and humiliating." Calls to several charities met only with confusion, misinformation or a referral to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which did not provide any meaningful guidance, she said.

To keep track of all the relief groups, Mrs. McLaughlin, of Pelham, N.Y., has compiled an 18-page spreadsheet. She has three binders full of applications and forms.

"You have to chase it," Mrs. McLaughlin said of the relief money. "That's my full-time job."

Many families, having read about the hundreds of millions being raised, and having watched benefit concerts and telethons, now have inflated expectations. On a recent morning, for example, Paula Zahn, the CNN anchorwoman, inadvertently implied that the Red Cross was doling out six-figure relief checks as she discussed the plight of a widow who lost her 31-year-old husband. "The Red Cross hooked up with her, and now she has some $200,000 that she desperately needs to take care of her family," Ms. Zahn said.

For the next few days, volunteers answered calls in Falls Church from victims' families who wanted to know how they, too, could collect their $200,000 checks.

One bright spot is the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94, on the Hudson River at 55th Street. Many victims' relatives expressed amazement at the sensitive and efficient treatment they received from a wide range of agencies, including the Red Cross, represented at the center.

"Very impressive," said Suzanne Gabriel, whose husband was an executive chef at the World Trade Center.

As many of the widows have, Mrs. Gabriel said she felt strange applying for help. "But the Red Cross people told me, `This is a gift from the American people. They want you to have it,' " she said. "I got a check in the mail about 10 days later."

But for those who lack formal documentation - marriage licenses, pay stubs, birth certificates - the process is "essentially useless," fumed Stanley Hamilton, who runs a street ministry called Hands of Hope in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and who has been trying to guide victims through the bureaucracy.

The rewards and the burdens of the current system are apparent to Lauren S. Davitz, a human resources professional who went to Pier 94 with a Russian-born friend, a laborer who lost his wife in the disaster. "He was down there from 10 a.m. until 12 at night, and the paperwork was overwhelming, although people really reached out to do what they could," she said. "But he walked out with the equivalent of $6,000."

Eliot L. Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, has tried to use the example of Oklahoma City as a model of how relief could be coordinated. After the bombing there, a large committee of public and private relief agencies met each week to decide, victim by victim, how best to distribute benefits. The agencies shared access to a single database.

Mr. Spitzer has proposed creating a similar database for the Sept. 11 victims. Last Wednesday, the Red Cross agreed to take part, and other groups have since followed suit.

Mr. Spitzer also wants to let those seeking help register with this central database over the Internet, submitting applications that could list an entire menu of needs, from mental health counseling to scholarship money. "That way the charities could reach out to people as opposed to people having to reach out to all these charities," said Mr. Spitzer's spokesman, Scott Brown. But the database is still far from reality. Also unresolved is the question of who will operate it.

In the meantime, resentment is accumulating.

Last week, in Princeton, N.J., at a meeting of about 35 relatives of victims, there was an eruption of anger when local Red Cross representatives tried to address the support group. "Oh, they were yelled at," Kathy Tedeschi, said a leader the group.

According to another participant, one family member called out, "When the hell are we going to get some money?"

The Red Cross representatives admitted that they were confused, but promised that they were "going to do their best," said Bob Monetti, who attended as a representative of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103.

"Then they got out of there."

Comment: Just to remind you of Dr. Reinhardt's introductory phrase, "the high social cost of pluralism relative to collective action," a cost that is exceedingly familiar to those of us who have been working on behalf of health care equity.