posted on: Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Photo by Becky Gillette / The Sierra Club, original post here (added on 3/25/10)
By Melissa Hanson

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of listening in on Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy’s (EPIP) member briefing, Investing in the Community: Renewal of The Gulf Coast Region after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which was part of their Social Justice Philanthropy: Engaging the Grantee series. The teleconference focused on the Gulf Coast Fund’s insightful response to the aftermath of the devastating storms in 2005.


Here is a little re-cap of the devastation that came with the storms:

• At least 1,836 people lost their lives
• 80% of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes were underwater, some areas remaining so for weeks
• Hundreds of thousands were left unemployed
• Sparked the largest diaspora in the history of the U.S.
• The government provided no transportation out of the city despite imposing mandatory evacuation

While FEMA, the Red Cross and Blackwater were busy attempting to cover up their inadequacies, the Gulf Coast Fund, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation, was busy creating a truly grassroots approach to grantmaking in order to help communities rebuild and heal. Their mission was to make grants for effective movement building, and their approach would focus on the entire region affected by the storms, from Texas to Alabama. Their goal was to challenge the institutional racism and oppression that had greatly exacerbated the devastation of the storm and which was currently shaping how the affected areas were being rebuilt.

The fund started from one simple principle: Those who would be affected by the fund’s dollars should be in charge of them (unfortunately quite a radical idea). The fund set out to build an advisory committee of residents and movement leaders to make the major decisions about where the money would go. To date they have given a total of $2.7 million since May 2006. The fund has been quite successful, and most speakers on the panel attributed its success to the advisory committee, which is geographically as well as racially diverse.

The advisory committee meets regularly with its grantees and has created multiple new coalitions across the sector. They designed the application process to be efficient and accessible, with flexible deadlines and a simple procedure. The committee is involved in every step of the grantmaking process, and decisions are made as quickly as possible, with ample consideration and discussion.

Derrick Evans, a current member of the Advisory Committee from Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, commented that the Gulf Coast Fund was the “first initiative of any kind after Katrina that embraced the core principles of community driven, community informed, community-led” action. It is amazing that more funders do not accept this model of engagement with communities, and instead make decisions from far and away, inevitably maintaining the systems of power and racism that continually threaten our communities. If funders are interested in making real, sustainable changes in communities, it is absolutely essential to involve those communities in decision making processes and form a solid working relationship with them. Any attempt at change must directly confront the systemic and structural barriers to that change, or risk perpetuating them.

Today is the last day of the Katrina @ 5 conference in New Orleans, and I would like to urge any readers who are there to comment on what they are learning from the event and their thoughts on how to move forward.

Melissa Hanson is an intern at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).