Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 4 | Nonprofits its at Ground Zero Struggling To Survive, Their Missions Point The Way, page 3

On Tuesday the 11th, our people had already started making calls to reach all our grantees, to make sure they were okay. Part of our engaged grantmaking model encourages us to develop real partnerships with the organizations we support so it was just understood that we were going to reach out and make sure everyone was alright.

At the same time, we kept receiving requests for Robin Hood to do something special to help, so by the end of that first week we had set up the Robin Hood Relief Fund. We were very fortunate that, through a little bit of thinking and a lot of luck, we came up with a broad mission statement. We wanted to focus on the immediate needs of the victims, but we did not want to limit our ability to reach a large variety of people in a wide variety of ways. So, rather than locking ourselves into a narrow focus-only on the families of the dead-we also said we would address the needs of people who were in the area and victimized in one way or another, including low-income people who had lost their livelihoods or homes.

On September 17th, Lachlan Murdock, whose company owns the New York Post and who is one of our board members, secured some temporary office space for us in the Post's building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. But soon we found ourselves in the same building with, ultimately, three cases of anthrax. It started, as you may recall, on September 22nd, when an editorial assistant at the Post noticed a blister on her finger that was later diagnosed as anthrax. 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.

On September 24th we brought together all of the organizations we support with our staff and our board of directors at the Plaza Hotel, which donated the space. These are some of the organizations that keep New York going, and that day they talked about their experiences and what they were doing to help people. Of course, what they were doing after September 11th was completely different from the work they usually did, but it fit in well with their missions. The Association to Benefit Children, for example, is used to working with families in crisis, those who suddenly become homeless or suddenly lose someone. Right after the attacks, the association's staff was downtown, counseling families. The difference was that, before September 11th, they had never swabbed the inside of a child's mouth to get DNA to identify missing parents.

From Robin Hood's perspective, we wanted to know what the organizations' needs were and how we could help. We also wanted to reassure them that the foundation would continue to support their core missions going forward. That was important for them to hear, just as it was important for our board members to hear what our grant recipients were up against. That meeting at the Plaza was so powerful that not too long afterwards we invited all of our donors to a similar meeting, moderated by Diane Sawyer, one of our board members. We wanted to keep people informed about what we were doing with the relief fund.

Martha Rhodes,
Four Way Books

Life, along with the phones, slowly returned to something like normal in early October. As soon as we plugged in the fax machine, it rang! The first call in a month! A reviewer wanting a copy of Noelle Kocot's poetry collection, 4. I was so excited to receive this call, I told her I would tape her fax request to our wall.

But Jean wasn't able to return to work because his commercial loft building-two blocks from Ground Zero-is in the deepest part of the frozen zone. He lost all of his tenants, and it's unclear what the future holds for restarting his graphics business or finding tenants, what with all the cleanup and renovation going on.

Before September 11th, the plan for Four Way Books was to grow. We were negotiating with a national distributor and that meant greatly expanding our reach into stores and libraries. We had also improved our web site and are now able to sell our books online. And we had planned to move the press from our apartment into a beautiful, modern-and rent-free-space in my husband's downtown loft building. We would have more access to his company's graphics equipment and expertise. We would have access to printing equipment in the basement. We would finally have space for a bigger inventory of books and for staff to work and hold conferences with authors. There were going to be readings, book signings, panels and writing workshops. It was my dream: Four Way Books was going to become more public, a center for fine literature.

Of course, plans have changed since September 11th. My husband's livelihood is very threatened, so his office space downtown is no longer available to Four Way Books-definitely not for free, if at all. So, instead of growing the press, we're trying to hold onto what we've already built.

Barbara Christen,
Futures and Options

In addition to being short-staffed, we also lost about 40 of our 85 internship sites. Many companies had been in the Trade Center. Other office buildings were closed and companies could not accommodate interns in their temporary quarters. Some companies were laying off workers and didn't feel right about hiring interns. Many restaurants and retailers closed temporarily, or even permanently.

You have to remember the atmosphere of tremendous upset in those first weeks. The air was absolutely awful and we had many questions about whether we should be encouraging anybody, especially students, to come down here to the offices. So we did it case by case. One student at Stuyvesant High School said his school was as close to the wreckage as you could get and that doing an internship on Pine Street would actually be a getaway for him. We also focused on placing interns in midtown sites.

As a result of all the confusion, we did not have our usual five-day workshop to orient the students to the internship program-teaching them how to prepare a resume, handle an interview, dress for work and learn job skills. Instead, we worked with a limited number of students on an individual basis. All told, in the fall of 2001 we had about 55 students in internships. We should have placed more than 80 interns that semester, but given the circumstances we were lucky to get up to 55.

Gordon Campbell,
Safe Horizon

Our regular work was impacted because the September 11th disaster traumatized virtually everyone. It was really a re-traumatization for many of our clients, who thought they had worked through certain issues-such as fears about an abusive parent or issues in a battering situation-only to have their problems start bubbling up again. In our shelters people were really on edge. And, of course, new cases came in unrelated to the Trade Center disaster. In September and October we reached out to 156 people who had lost a loved one to violence-it just shows you that people were still being murdered.

On September 12th, the governor's staff asked us to help the Trade Center victims. Talk about building on our experience! One of our responsibilities is to provide compensation to crime victims for the state, and we've been doing that since the agency began. But we said, instead of following the usual state procedures-having the victim or family complete an application, having it notarized and sending it to Albany for processing and mailing a check-wouldn't it be great if Safe Horizon could make the determination on the spot and the family could walk away with a check in hand? We agreed, over a handshake, that we were going to do that. So when the mayor opened the Family Assistance Center, we were there from Day One to provide immediate financial assistance to people who had lost a loved one and/or were physically injured.

But that was not enough. Because of laws and regulations we were not allowed to provide assistance to victims who were displaced, in terms of losing jobs or homes, by the disaster. To meet those needs, I reached out to the United Way and the New York Community Trust, which had started the September 11th Fund, to ask for additional funding for the victims. Within 24 hours, they got back to me and said, "You can proceed."

So the next day, that was September 24th, we were able to start helping many more people: A dishwasher at Windows on the World, who wasn't working on the 11th, needed help paying his rent until he received state unemployment benefits. A gay man who needed financial help after losing his partner in the tragedy. An elderly couple, who shared an apartment with their daughter who was lost at the towers-they needed help with mortgage payments. One woman came from Ecuador with Western Union receipts showing that her deceased son had provided support for her. We defined "victim" in the broadest sense. As we all know, there has almost become a hierarchy of victims, and our feeling is that, and I mean this in the most positive sense, a victim is a victim is a victim.

With the support of the September 11th Fund we have been able to provide more than $47 million to over 27,000 people.

David Saltzman,
Robin Hood Foundation

One of our board members-Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax Films-was flying across the Atlantic with Paul McCartney, on the way to a wedding. They got to talking about what they could do to help with the relief effort, and they decided to put on a concert. That was how the Concert for the City of New York was born, less than a month before showtime on October 20.

We thought it was great that we got Paul McCartney-but if got Paul McCartney, why not get Mick Jagger? If we can get Mick Jagger, why not get Eric Clapton? Why not get the Who? Why not get Billy Joel and Elton John?

About two weeks before the concert, we realized we would have to occasionally make some time-consuming changes in the stage setup. Oky, we thought, maybe we'll show some videos about New York City. Well, you know what Harvey Weinstein said: Hell, if you're going to show videos, I'll call Martin Scorsese, I'll call Spike Lee, I'll call Woody Allen, I'll call every important New York-based filmmaker and ask them to make a movie about New York. There wasn't a single person we asked to do something who said no. Jim Dolan of Cablevision donated Madison Square Garden. The unions were incredible. This was a time when the more outlandish your dream was the more likely it was to be accomplished.

Other board members jumped into the action: John Sykes, president of VH1, said he would broadcast the concert; Bob Pittman, the co-chief operating officer at AOL Time Warner, said he'd put it on the Internet and take online donations; and Doug Morris, the chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, said he would help get the artists. The rest of our board said they would underwrite the whole thing, covering the cost of anything we couldn't get donated, so that all the money from the concert could go to help the people in need. By the end of January, the Concert for New York City, including sales of CDs and DVDs and rebroadcasts, had raised $33 million for the Robin Hood Relief Fund; another $19.59 million was donated to the fund by long-time foundation supporters, corporations, Boy Scout troops, school groups and hundreds of individuals from around the country and abroad.

Next page: One of our board members was flying across the Atlantic with Paul McCartney. They got to talking and decided to put on a concert. That’s how the Concert for New York was born.

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