Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 4 | Nonprofits its at Ground Zero Struggling To Survive, Their Missions Point The Way, page 2 (low bandwidth)

On Tuesday morning I was at 48th Street and Park Avenue, meeting with an executive at a brokerage firm. He was interested in becoming a partner in our program and employing our students as interns. As you know, brokers and bond people always have a television on. His assistant all of a sudden leaped from his seat, literally, and said, "My God, a plane has just gone into the World Trade Center." I will never forget the look on that fellow's face. The first thing I did was to call our office on the 21st floor of 1 World Trade Center. It was our field office, staffed with one or two people, plus, after-school, between six and eight part-time teachers. They work with the interns to prepare resumes, practice interviews and learn general job skills.

When I called, the phone rang and rang and the answering machine picked up, so I felt fairly certain that no one was there. As it turned out, one staff person had stopped to vote in the primary election being held that day and had arrived in time to see the whole thing happen, safely, from a distance. The other young woman had planned to come in later, thankfully.

Gordon Campbell,
Chief Executive Officer, Safe Horizon

I knew a plane had hit the World Trade Center, but I had no sense of the magnitude when I took the subway downtown to our headquarters. It's at 2 Lafayette Street, just about six blocks from the towers. I went up to the third floor to meet with some senior staff and, almost immediately, over the loud speaker an announcement came blaring: "You've got to leave the building."

We looked out the window-this must have been just after the first tower collapsed-and saw people literally running down the street. We made sure that everyone had left the floor and then we ran downstairs. On Greenwich Street, we stood watching the second tower collapse. On Eighth Avenue, cars were parked right in the middle of the street, with their doors open and radios turned up, and people gathered around to listen to the news. In front of the Red Cross building at 67th and Amsterdam, people were already lined up to give blood. It didn't feel like a city, it was a small community. Just an outpouring of affection and camaraderie.

David Saltzman, Executive
Director, Robin Hood Foundation

At 8:48 a. m. on September 11th, when the first plane hit, a whole bunch of our people were in the office at 111 Broadway, just across the street from the World Trade Center. All of a sudden, I heard a terrible explosion and the building shook. The only time I ever heard an explosion like that was in the very same building-in 1993, when terrorists tried to blow up the Trade Center.

Not long after that, a staff member came stumbling into the office. She said she was just getting out of the PATH train station when the first plane hit, and was nearly trampled to death in the stampede. She said a person right in front of her and one right next to her were both hit with flying, flaming debris and were probably killed. All of a sudden, there was a second explosion.

I gathered everyone and said we don't know what's going on, but we're going to buddy up, just like we would in grade school or summer camp, and we're going to head east, away from the World Trade Center, the Wall Street area, and City Hall. Let's get away from all the places that might be targeted because we don't know what's happening. We walked down 19 flights of stairs and headed toward the South Street Seaport. Thankfully for me, I was following up the rear, trying to make sure everyone was okay, so I never looked back at the Trade Center. The people who did saw things that people should never see. They saw men and women, on fire, jumping out of that building to their deaths. They saw people on the ground dying.

While we were running east, some other staff members were still coming to work-just as the first tower collapsed. A Good Samaritan saved the life of our director of development, by pushing him to safety, inside the doorway of a coffee shop. To this day, we don't know if the Good Samaritan survived. He was still outside when the flaming debris engulfed the street.

Martha Rhodes,
Four Way Books

Our apartment building was in the restricted zone, and we didn't move back for a week. Looking south, from my office window, I could see the smoke, the towerless and empty sky, the workers, the trucks, the dumpsters. Our dear, beloved street was lined with Secret Service trucks, FBI, CIA, bomb squads, National Guard, Red Cross, police, command posts, boxes of food, socks, water and Gatorade. The Red Cross kept ringing our door bell and offering cans of waxed beans and sweet potatoes. And creamed corn, too. This made me laugh and cry.

Four Way Books was pretty much out of business for three weeks and frankly, I had no idea if I could continue. I remember telling my very closest friend, "You know, I don't care if I never publish another book of poetry again." I was just so down and so devastated. And we were still going to bed with our shoes on, just in case.

But we were safe. We could go on with our lives. In the early weeks, I repeated this, as a mantra. And I feel we owe it to those who died on September 11th to go on with our lives.

Barbara Christen,
Futures and Options

In the next few days, we made sure that students who had worked last summer as interns downtown were taken care of in their schools. We called their guidance counselors or assistant principals, alerting them that these particular students might well need some extra attention, psychologically, in dealing with the trauma. Last summer, for example, there were at least 21 young people working at the Port Authority in the Trade Center. We heard back from one intern who was happy to tell me that the five people he had worked with were all safe. He said he had been going through agonies. Sadly, two other supervisors from the Port Authority who worked with our interns did die as did the buildings' Fire and Safety Director, who was well known to us. It was a heartbreaker. They were terrific people.

Losing our field office at the Trade Center meant we lost not only all our furniture and equipment, but also all our records related to the students, their mentors, the sites, everything to do with the operation of the program. Luckily, I had the financial information at my office at the Downtown Alliance at 120 Broadway. Then our office assistant remembered that, months earlier, she had mislaid a disk that had the names and addresses of most of the students who had been part of the program since it began in 1995. Luckily, she found the disk in an old pocketbook in her garage. We are now surveying people on that list to get the information we need to reconstruct the database. We really need that information, if we are going to be successful in two of our goals: to evaluate the success of the program and to replicate the program in other business improvement districts across the city.

Downtown was in dreadful shape and the authorities encouraged people to stay away. I returned to work on September 24th in my office at the Downtown Alliance. Two of our five feeder schools downtown-the High School of Economics and Finance and the High School for Leadership and Public Service-were closed and their students were sent to schools uptown. Our teachers, who work part-time with us, were unavailable to work on the program because they were so busy in their own schools.

Gordon Campbell,
Safe Horizon

Just being back here was a real challenge. There were problems with transportation and security-lines of people had to go through a metal detector in the lobby. You always smelled the fire, constantly. The first day we got back into this office, I think there were six fire drills. People were so on edge, and worried.

Our telephones were not working from September 11th until the week before Christmas. No phones, no e-mail, no faxes for more than three months! Just cell phones. So at the same time we were doing our regular work-providing assistance to some of the quarter-million New Yorkers we serve each year and mounting this disaster relief effort to assist tens of thousands of people-we were communicationally, even though that's not a word, challenged. I mean, to put it mildly. I have to tell you, the best holiday present for everyone was getting phones that worked.

Our first communications priority was getting our Domestic Violence Hotline and our Crime Victims Hotline back up, as they are literally lifelines to about 200,000 callers a year. These people need information about getting an order of protection, a new lock on their front door or even police assistance-we have a link with 911. We worked with senior officials at Verizon and within 24 hours we had our hotlines up. We also created a September 11 Hotline, and we are still receiving about 800 calls a day on that line.

Next page: On Tuesday the 11th, our people had already started making calls to reach all our grantees, to make sure they were okay.

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