Nonprofits at Ground Zero Struggling To Survive, Their Missions Point The Way by Michael deCourcy Hinds Just blocks from the World Trade Center, four nonprofit organizations find renewed meaning in their missions as they recover from disaster.

This is the story of how four nonprofit organizations responded to the September 11th terrorist attack. As much as any handful of organizations can represent the vast nonprofit sector, these four can serve as a microcosm. Their names alone suggest their diversity: Four Way Books, Futures and Options, Safe Horizon and Robin Hood Foundation. Their bottom lines reflect the number of books of poetry published, public school students placed in internships, services provided to victims of violence and support given to poverty-fighting programs. Apart from their public-spirited missions, what brings the four together is their coincidental proximity to Ground Zero. (See sidebars for profiles of the organizations.) In their own words, culled from interviews and woven together chronologically, leaders of the organizations describe how the disaster shook up their lives and organizations.

Martha Rhodes,
Director, Four Way Books

When the first plane hit, I was at my desk. I thought it was a sonic boom, but opened my blinds to see the plane dissolve-how else to describe it?-into the building. I saw the wing disappear.

I got dressed quickly, to go tell my husband, Jean. He's a graphic artist, with a business on Warren Street, a couple of blocks from the Trade Center. I figured he might not have heard the crash since it wasn't very loud. If he were unaware of the accident, he might go outside and be hurt by falling glass. An accident is what I thought it was.

I left the apartment and got about three blocks, to Reade Street and West Broadway. There weren't a lot of fire engines or police cars, I thought. I heard a few sirens but they were slow to respond, to my mind. I remember thinking, what's taking them so long? But then I saw them on foot and in trucks. (My husband remembers thinking "Oh my God, they are going to die.") These are our firemen, big guys, the guys who shop at our market, filling their carts up with TONS of food, yelling across the aisles to each other: "Hey ya want steak tonight? Sirloin? Or filet mignon?"

The second plane hit the towers. All of us screamed. A woman and I held onto each other. We didn't know it was a plane since we were north of the tower. We didn't see the plane hit. We saw the huge explosion. I thought it was a collateral explosion-that somehow part of the first plane had also struck the second tower. This explosion was much bigger than the first.

I shoved through the crowd and went to get Jean. I walked one block too far, got disoriented, then headed south. I got to his building. He wasn't there. On the way back to our apartment, I looked at the tower. People were jumping and we were yelling, "They're jumping. Oh my God! They're jumping." I saw a woman, I was sure she was a woman, I saw her leaning out a window and waving a large white cloth. I wondered where she got such a cloth. A helicopter hovered near the window where she was and I felt so sorry for the pilot, knowing he couldn't help. The woman was waving the cloth slowly. I remember calling her "Darling," thinking, "Oh darling," and talking to her. I fantasized that she would jump into my arms and be safe. She must have worked at Windows on the World and the cloth must have been a tablecloth.

A lot of workers were on the street trying to use their cell phones but couldn't. At that point, we heard about the Pentagon and bin Laden's name was shouted around. Then a fighter plane flew over. We started screaming and crying, thinking we were under attack. I think that's the first panic I really felt. Being in that open space and seeing that fighter plane overhead. Someone yelled, "It's ours, it's ours! It's our plane!"

I walked north, stopping every few feet to look back, and then I saw the first tower fall, vertically, "pancaking" down. It was such a sunny day. I remember the sparkle of paper and glass in the air. The building, with its floors, walls, computers, sofas, desks, paintings, carpets, shoes, briefcases...and people, exploding before our eyes into fire, smoke and ash. I was breathing everything in. I was breathing people in, and would be for weeks.

I walked north so slowly. Then the second building collapsed and the force of smoke went east like a river flooding down a street. Suddenly, everyone started running and yelling, "Gas explosion, gas explosion." I was thinking, maybe I should jump into the Hudson and swim to Jersey. Are the currents too strong? Should I do it? But there were no gas explosions.

Next page: So there we were: having just escaped the hell of the Trade Center disaster, we were going through the hell of the anthrax scare. It was a crazy time.

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