Conscious of this, the philanthropic community has begun reassessing the ways in which it responds to emergencies. "It’s not a criticism of philanthropy, but for the most part, we tended to react to Katrina; we didn’t act, we didn’t lead," says Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of the Council on Foundations, a Washington, D.C.-based membership association of more than 2,000 grant-making foundations and corporations. Gunderson will be leading talks in the philanthropic community this spring with hopes of drafting an emergency response plan in the event of another national crisis. A possible avian flu epidemic, for example, is one potential calamity on his radar screen.

Some initial relief efforts in the Gulf Coast also exposed problems in how nonprofits collaborate, even at a very basic level of grant making. Determining how to best use funds to address the most pressing needs has proven difficult for many foundations. The New York-based Twenty-First Century Foundation, a national organization that facilitates black philanthropy, recognized this problem in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and gave money to roughly 50 nonprofit organizations to conduct meetings and make conference calls. The foundation had an established network of organizations that provide services to the black community on the Gulf Coast and, according to Erica Hunt, the foundation’s president, it was crucial in those first days that these organizations bring guidance to where the relief was going to be delivered. The success of this effort during the first days of the crisis has inspired Hunt’s organization to establish a more permanent mechanism for communication among foundations. "Our long-term plan is to be there–to be not only making grants, but also to collect information and share it with other nonprofits," she says.

Challenges Abound
Hurricane Katrina exposed yet another challenge to numerous grant-making organizations: Many family foundations focus most of their funding on local or regional projects and are therefore hamstrung when disasters strike in other areas. For example, the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments, with $1.4 billion from the combined foundations of the Heinz family, principally funds projects in Pennsylvania. But following Katrina, the board wanted to respond financially. To do so required a special ballot-by-mail vote to earmark $750,000 for Katrina-related projects, according to its president, Maxwell King.

TOP VIEW: The federal government’s haphazard response to Hurricane Katrina has prompted calls for the private sector to play a larger role in future disaster relief. Today charities and foundations are striving to rise to this challenge. Yet even with a coordinated effort and sustained generosity from donors, the enormity of national disaster relief places limits on what the private sector can accomplish.

"This is not an area where we typically would fund. If a hurricane hits Florida, we don’t do any funding; if there’s a tornado in Kansas, we don’t do any funding; if there’s a mudslide in California, we don’t do any funding," King notes. "So it was simply the magnitude of this tragedy–the vastness of the destruction and the economic disadvantage of the group that was hit hardest down there–that caused us to want to do something."

In City Park, Liebaert and Fitzmorris are working diligently to restore the badly damaged urban space to its former beauty. "What we don’t want to have happen is for certain things in the city to die on the vine," says Fitzmorris, who lost his home in the nearby Lakeview neighborhood. This park has a curious relationship to the city. Although located in New Orleans, it is owned by the state and relies almost completely on private funding and enterprises, ranging from tourism to wedding fees, to meet its $10.8 million operating budget. Most years, the park brings in roughly $10 million, supplementing that with private grants such as those from the Azby Fund and Shell Oil. It receives only about $200,000 a year in state aid.

Katrina devastated these revenue streams. The storm not only destroyed the park’s garden beds, but also its golf courses, which will need costly repairs. Fees from some 300 canceled weddings have vanished, and over a million dollars in golf course income is gone. Now revenue flows from an ad hoc source–permits for construction workers living in a makeshift tent village while they work in the area–and from the park’s tennis courts, which were repaired in November and for which the rare players pay $5 a match. Park employees posted a notice that players need a mere 2.16 million matches to cover the park’s budget.

The cost of restoring City Park is estimated at $43 million, an amount far larger than the existing private sector alone can provide. FEMA is expected to cover nearly 90 percent of these costs, with the rest coming from sources such as the Azby Fund. "We’re putting in just a fraction of what it will take to bring it back," Liebaert says.