How were you personally affected by Katrina?

My hometown, Opelousas, is on one of the higher spots in Louisiana, of which there aren’t many. It was not affected directly by the storm, but it was affected by the large number of displaced people. I can remember talking to my brother, and he told me that the parking lots were full, and he couldn’t move on the streets because of all the people who were fleeing Hurricane Katrina, and then, later, Rita.

You have stated that the true driver of philanthropy is never losing a sense of outrage. How does that apply in Louisiana?

A lot of people were outraged by what they saw—and so they gave money and moved on to other things. We want them to sustain some sense of that outrage, and to recognize that this wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime event that occurred and has passed; it’s a process that continues into the future in terms of responding to the need. All around the country, we do press interviews, editorial board briefings, everything we can to try to keep this on the minds of the American people, to remind them that the business of the Gulf is not finished.

The public sector promised New Orleans tens of billions of dollars in assistance. The city has only received a small fraction of that.

I was in New Orleans in August, and we had a town hall meeting with the police chief, the mayor and a number of other folks affected by the storm that was broadcast on public television. They were wondering where this money is, because they haven’t seen it appropriated.

Yet, although the levee system has been plugged, the Army Corps of Engineers recently admitted that the infrastructure for flood control is a system “in name only,” and more work needs to be done.

Nothing is really sufficient until we secure those levees. It was a man-made disaster because almost 80 percent of the damage came about because of breaks in the levee. Those breaches would never have occurred if they had been engineered soundly.

That’s where the billions of dollars come in. To get the displaced people coming home to invest in New Orleans and make workers available for its economic growth, we need to make them feel that they’re secure and that the levees have been built to their appropriate standards. We would certainly like to see the levees improved.

But there will be life in New Orleans. There may not be a Lower Ninth Ward of the same capacity as before Katrina, but life has resumed in the city. You’re beginning to see a reassertion of the cultural vitality of the place, though a lot of the low-wealth people were the ones who fueled that culture.

How do you respond to donors worried about supporting projects that could bring residents back to a dangerous flood plain?

It’s not simple. I can sit back and be an armchair critic, but I face people who say, “We’ve lived on this block for several generations,” and see the comfort they get from a sense of place in this time of posttraumatic stress. They are uplifted by their sense of place. So it’s very difficult to say to them, “While we respect your rights as an American citizen to own property, we are now going to say you can’t live there.” There are two goods in conflict: How do you resolve the moral dilemma, as well as the political dilemma? Do you play God and say you can’t live there?

Your foundation has raised between $40 million and $50 million; you want to double that.

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.