In the Gulf region there are three stages of this disaster: relief, recovery and reform. There is a place for philanthropy in each of these. The private donor responds almost immediately at the relief stage. When there are dramatic, visual images of people suffering, there is a tendency for the human being to act with compassion and to respond. At the recovery stage, the government responds with billions of dollars aimed at rebuilding the infrastructure. Then there is the reform stage—and that’s where there is no money. The reform stage is likely to be more controversial because people are going to bring pressure on the government to make sure that public funds are used wisely and equitably.

The community groups that want to ensure that there is appropriate participation by the traditionally underrepresented—that plans are well developed to use this money—these are the groups that we have chosen to fund because we can have far more impact with our dollars at that stage. At the first stage, you fund the large international organizations like the Red Cross and United Way. Now is the time to identify the local groups that people respect and that have legitimacy.

And identify what their needs are.

Exactly. That’s the advantage of working through a group like the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation. First of all, it’s made up of people from throughout the state. Its board is an impressive group of people who come not only from the Katrina-affected areas, but also the Rita-affected areas. They are people who have had significant experience in the public life of the state, as well as in the nonprofit sector. This small and extraordinary staff knows how community organizations work, and they understand how nonprofit organizations work.

When I became involved with the group, there was an appointed board in place, and then that board selected its chair. When they asked me to chair the board, I told the group that I would commit myself to making sure that every dollar that was intended for the people of Louisiana would actually go to the people of Louisiana. I told them, ‘I will go to foundations to raise whatever money we have to spend on overhead.’ And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying to raise the overhead so that the general contributions—whether they’re in the amount of $10 or $1,000—go directly to the people.

Donations pass through your organization.

That’s right. The foundation identifies the most credible and most effective groups, and we transfer money to them according to standards we’ve set and guidelines we’ve developed. Our largest grants have gone to the Family Recovery Corps [$3.7 million total], which is working with displaced people and trying to connect displaced families with service providers.

So the local mutual aid societies and those types of organizations are active but very small?

A study found that before the disaster there were more than 3,000 nonprofit organizations in Louisiana—almost half of them in New Orleans—and that they had total assets in excess of $8 billion. But after the disaster, we found that a lot of those organizations were destroyed, their facilities damaged and their leaders and a lot of their donors displaced. I would hope that one of the legacies of our work will be a strengthened nonprofit sector in Louisiana. It’s a state where politicians dominate public life. Unlike states where nonprofit organizations and community organizations have a strong voice, that has not been the case in Louisiana.

No one has ever had to re-create an entire philanthropic infrastructure before. Some of the projects may well fail.

But the third sector in the United States is a continuing grand experiment. People come together to do things themselves, and that’s always an experiment. And we are saying to people that it’s a risk worth taking. When I was a foundation executive, I found that even some of the things I thought of as failures were providing leaders for the public life of the nation. So you never know until sometime later that there are many ways in which you may have succeeded. That’s what philanthropy is.

Photograph by Thomas Hart Shelby.