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On a Saturday afternoon last December, he paused near a greenhouse filled with rare plants and pointed to a plaque from 1935 on the brick-and-glass structure explaining it was built as one of the New Deal’s hundreds of projects in the area. Unlike many people in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, Liebaert resists the notion that unlimited federal disaster relief–a "New New Deal" as some have come to call it–is the appropriate response to Katrina. "The United States government cannot bail everyone out every time something happens," he says. "It should be there for emergency response so people don’t starve to death and have at least a tent to live in, or maybe a trailer. But to come back and say, ‘We’re sorry you decided to build your house below sea level and we are obliged to put it back’–I don’t think so."

Liebaert prefers a different recovery strategy, one that relies upon tax incentives, private philanthropy, for-profit enterprise and limited government assistance. Shortly after Katrina hit New Orleans, he and Patrick Fitzmorris, assistant director of the Azby Fund, which was established by his third cousin Herbert Harvey Jr. in 1969 to assist regional causes, put this idea to work by cutting foundation checks on the hoods of their cars to several Katrina-related efforts beyond City Park. They gave $20,000 each to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department and the Louisiana State Police, and $50,000 to the River Road Historical Society to save nearby Destrehan Plantation, built in 1787 by a distant relative of Fitzmorris’. One of the largest grants was $125,000 to the New Orleans Museum of Art, located in City Park, to pay for a generator to maintain the building’s climate and protect its collection, which is valued at more than $200 million.

Reinventing the Response
The federal government’s haphazard response to Katrina, coupled with the enormity of reconstruction costs, have led to calls for greater input from the private sector during times of crisis. While charities are still struggling with the human and economic catastrophe of Katrina, they must also somehow find a way to step back and reinvent their approaches to disaster response, experts suggest, before the next calamity hits. "We think this is a good time, as economists, to try and stress the role that the private sector should be playing here, and how the government has been such a failure; maybe it’s time to rethink how much we let the private sector do," says Russell S. Sobel, an economics professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown who studies FEMA and disaster relief efforts. He points out that businesses and other private-sector organizations made water available to Katrina refugees days before FEMA did.

Traditionally, charities parachute in during initial relief efforts, alongside government first-responders, while philanthropic projects take on longer-term roles. Some nonprofit executives have urged their peers to adhere to these roles following Katrina. "The primary role of foundations can be in helping with the long-term recovery, in part because public attention is going to wane and there are going to be other disasters," says Martin C. Lehfeldt, president of the Southeastern Council of Foundations in Atlanta. "So from the beginning, we have urged foundations to keep their powder dry and respond to the long-term needs."

U.S. Individual, Foundation and Corporate Donations to Disaster Relief, 2005 (as of December 13)

Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma: $3,123,451,588 Tsunami: $1,781,686,912 Pakistan Earthquake: $127,957,436

Source: Center on Philanthropy

Yet, even if foundations reserve their funds for well-planned, long-term goals, Katrina has shown that the gap between the private sector’s available resources and the affected region’s needs is more like a chasm. Total reconstruction costs in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast are estimated to run as high as $250 billion. Yet, as of December, individuals, foundations and companies have given and pledged to give only $3.1 billion to relief efforts for hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University in Indianapolis. In times of cataclysmic natural disaster or national emergencies, private philanthropies may be hard-pressed to respond financially to victims looking for more and more aid from the private sector.

Endurance Tests
The fear of donor fatigue–the anticipated unwillingness of contributors to continue giving over an extended period of time–is a constant for many organizations as they commit to longer-term disaster relief projects. Given the events of the last year, this threat looms large: Within a nine-month period beginning in December 2004, the world witnessed a devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, a cataclysmic earthquake in Pakistan and the worst hurricane season the United States has ever suffered–along with worsening humanitarian crises in regions such as Darfur in Sudan and the devastating famine in Niger. This sheer number of events has tested the generosity of Americans; for the most part, however, they have responded with record-breaking donations.

In the short term, fear of donor fatigue has proven unfounded. A recent survey by the Center on Philanthropy revealed that 58 percent of the nonprofits that responded agreed generally that disaster-related giving came at the expense of other charities in the short-term, but only about one-third agreed or strongly agreed that hurricane relief giving came at the expense of giving to their own organization. "They believe that there’s donor fatigue out there, but when you ask them about their own organization, they’re not experiencing it," says Gene Tempel, executive director of the center.

However, it remains to be seen if disaster-related causes will suffer over the long haul. Philanthropy experts are already reporting that donors are returning to their normal giving patterns, which may leave private sector organizations that are committed to long-term reconstruction projects in the hurricane-ravaged areas scrambling for funding as the immediacy of the catastrophe fades or is replaced by that of the next disaster.

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.