Nonprofits in flood-ravaged South Texas are attracting millions of dollars in donations for relief efforts, much of it from corporate sources but also from tens of thousands of individual donors.
Hurricane Harvey’s damage will cost the region tens of billions of dollars, but private aid is helping many nonprofits deal with the initial relief efforts.
Steve Maislin, chief executive of the Greater Houston Community Foundation, said he expects the philanthropic response to the historic flooding “will be of a magnitude we have never seen before, and will be needed.” Already, his organization’s fund has raised $2.7 million, he said.
A fundraising effort by Facebook brought in at least $2 million while also overwhelming and shutting down the website of the intended recipient nonprofit, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, for several hours on Tuesday. Donors were still able to make transactions through Facebook’s payment system, said Bob Ottenhoff, CEO of the organization.
The Center for Disaster Philanthropy started a relief fund for victims of the storm over the weekend, Mr. Ottenhoff said, raising about $500,000 from individuals and grant makers like the Patterson Foundation. On Monday, he fielded a call from Facebook offering to match donations up to $1 million. The match went live on the social-media site Tuesday at 7 a.m. Pacific Time, and it reached the total in less than four hours. He doesn’t yet know the total amount raised but said it is in excess of $2 million.
“It is the largest we have ever raised in one day, for sure,” he said, noting that the funds will be used for midterm and long-term recovery efforts.
United Way Tops $5 Million
The United Way of Greater Houston began soliciting donations Monday. By Tuesday morning, it had taken in a total of $5.3 million, said CEO Anna Babin. The sum included four $1 million gifts from energy company Anadarko Petroleum, the Houston Texans football team, the NFL Foundation, and the Kinder Foundation. The United Way had also received $230,000 in online donations and $13,000 more in contributions made by text message.
United Way has many partnerships with big companies, and that is where her team is investing energy first, she said.
“But we know people of all shapes and sizes and all means want to give,” said Ms. Babin.
The nonprofit raised $5.8 million to help recovery work after Hurricane Ike in 2008. It raised about $1 million following Hurricane Katrina.
Houston’s United Way operates a human-service helpline that in 2016 fielded nearly 1 million calls from people seeking food, shelter, and assistance. The nonprofit, whose workers are based in downtown Houston, was able to keep the helpline staffed into the early morning hours of Monday, Ms. Babin said, before employees had to leave the building. Those calls are now being routed to other 211 helplines around Texas and around the country.
Ms. Babin expects to be able to get back into the office sometime Wednesday.
Experience in Using Donations
At the Greater Houston Community Foundation, Mr. Maislin said the organization had received $1.5 million from USA Waste Management Resources and $1.2 in smaller donations.
“This money will get to the people who really don’t have the financial resource to address their current needs as a result of the storm,” he said, “and those needs which are not being addressed through some of the national or other local organizations.”
The foundation has many years’ experience in shaping the philanthropic response to disasters. In 2005, it helped administer a local Houston fund and a national relief fund to collect donations in response to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans. The foundation also worked with the mayor’s office to raise $2.1 million for relief efforts after severe flooding in Houston in April 2016, a weather event called the Tax Day Floods, Mr. Maislin said.
A Facebook fundraising effort overwhelmed the website of the recipient nonprofit, which crashed.
There was a little bit of money left in that fund, which the foundation was able to shift over into a new fund to respond to Hurricane Harvey. The foundation’s offices closed early on Friday and remained closed Monday and Tuesday. Members of its 31 full-time staff who are able to are working remotely, he said.
“We will also do a good deal of work with companies who do employee disaster-relief funds,” Mr. Maislin said, adding that the foundation has about 10 such funds at the moment.
Grant makers “should know there is a lot of good communication going and their dollars will be put to good use. It is something we have had to do before, and we know how to do it,” Mr. Maislin said.
A slew of corporations had announced donations by Tuesday afternoon. Pledges to Red Cross relief efforts included $2 million from Apple, $1 million from Cheniere Energy, $1 million from Chevron, $500,000 from ExxonMobil, and $300,000 from Caterpillar. Google said it would match donations to the Red Cross up to $1 million. Oil company BP and its foundation donated $750,000, split equally among the Red Cross, the Greater Houston Community Foundation, and United Way of Greater Houston.
Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander said Tuesday he would contribute $10 million, among other donations announced by business leaders and other prominent figures.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the Greater New Orleans Foundation announced Monday their own appeal to help victims of the flooding. By midafternoon Tuesday, they had raised $30,000, said Andy Kopplin, CEO of the foundation.
He noted that Tuesday was the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and said the flooding in Houston invoked a lot of memories. The foundation’s effort to help Houston was just one of several around New Orleans, he noted.
“If you think back to 2005, we got help from all over the country and all over the world,” he said, but added that New Orleans was particularly indebted to Houston and its mayor at the time, Bill White, who took in tens of thousands of flood victims after Hurricane Katrina.
One New Orleans nonprofit born in the wake of the deadly flooding in that city said it will be working with partners in Houston to help citizens navigate complicated bureaucratic hurdles such as applying for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It is the largest we have ever raised in one day, for sure.
SBP, formerly known as the St. Bernard Project, has published free downloadable guides and checklists for those trying to recover from disaster.
In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the flooding of New Orleans generated more than $6 billion in charitable giving, the bulk of it in the first 16 months after the disaster. Some of the gifts came from unusual sources, including $60 million from the government of Qatar for recipients including Tulane University, Children’s Hospital New Orleans, and Habitat for Humanity.
That, coupled with $100 billion in government dollars directed at the Gulf Coast post-disaster, meant strong growth for the region’s nonprofits. Still, many nonprofit leaders were critical of where the money ended up: Too much went to big national organizations and not enough to local groups with a more intimate understanding of long-term community needs, they said. Some of that debate bubbled up again this week, with some people calling on donors not to give to the Red Cross, the subject of a number of investigative news reports into its use of funds in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2012 Superstorm Sandy.
The discussion about where and how charitable dollars might be best used spurred work by groups such as the Center for Disaster Philanthropy to get foundations to be more thoughtful when giving money to mitigate and respond to disasters.
When Facebook called him on Monday, Mr. Ottenhoff said, they were looking for a way to get involved that didn’t single out one single organization responding to the disaster and to ensure that any money raised would go to a trusted source.
“One of the things that comes out during times of disaster, you begin to get pop-up groups and scams,” he said. “There is some level of skepticism, so they wanted to make sure they could dampen that skepticism down.”
