PND: What did you do after you finally managed to get in touch with staff at the foundation?

GP: Well, the first week was pretty chaotic. We were closed, of course. We had no power, no phone service, and no Internet at our offices that first week, and much of our staff was without power at home and had headed off to friends or relatives' homes in Alabama, Florida, and elsewhere. We were trying to make things happen, but as the week went on what at first had seemed like a hill that could be climbed with a little extra effort just kept growing larger and larger. Fortunately, I was able to keep abreast of the situation in the region through a lot of different contacts, some of them our own board members, although it wasn't easy.

But after a week, we got ourselves up and running again, and once we did it became clear that nobody else — national funders, regional leaders, people at the community level — really knew what was going on. And that's the point at which we decided to invite as many stakeholders as we could get hold of to come to Memphis to have a conversation about how they were responding to this truly unprecedented disaster; that was the genesis of the September 15 meeting. Remember, with the power out and phones down, much of the news about what was happening on the ground in that first week or ten days was provided by the national news media, and their reporting, for obvious reasons, was focused on events in New Orleans. The ripple effects of that were enormous. The media did not show what was going on in Baton Rouge, in terms of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to temporarily relocate to that community. They sort of forgot about the Mississippi coast. Nobody was showing what was going on farther inland with evacuees that had ended up in rural areas. There was a much bigger story unfolding in the region, and it wasn't until the Memphis meeting that many of us understood the true dimensions of the picture.

PND: What were some of the issues that surfaced in that meeting?

GP: Several emerged from that meeting. The first was simply the enormity of the storm's impact, both in rural and urban Louisiana, along the Mississippi coast, and for hundreds of miles inland. The environmental damage was massive, and it was something one could really only appreciate from a helicopter. There were examples of oil storage facilities that were flooded and had left a sheen of oil across miles and miles. Second was the devastation to infrastructure — roads, bridges, electricity, fire stations, municipal records, downtowns — all gone. We heard firsthand from folks at the Gulf Coast Community Foundation that half their board members had lost their homes. People were working from cell phones a hundred miles from their office because they didn't have places to live or work, and it was almost as bad in rural communities farther inland — places where the Red Cross and FEMA still had not shown up by the time of the Memphis meeting, two weeks later.

The third theme had to do with the massive numbers of evacuees, both in urban centers like Jackson and Baton Rouge as well as in small rural communities. Communities in the Delta region, for example — communities that are as poor or poorer than New Orleans — all of a sudden were called on to take care of displaced people who had lost everything. You had families taking in ten, twenty people without giving it a second thought. Churches and nonprofits, none of them with surplus resources, had to step forward in the absence of an adequate state or federal response. By the time of the Memphis meeting, only two weeks had gone by since the storm hit but the gap between what most people in the country thought was happening and the reality on the ground was vast; there simply was very little understanding, whether at the White House, in Congress, or among federal agencies and large national nonprofits about the real situation in the region. Sure, we all heard the talk about billions and billions of dollars that were going to be made available for recovery and rebuilding, and yet those numbers — and, more importantly, the plans that were being formulated around them — were arrived at with very little input from the people who were actually affected by the storm. All of which contributed to an incredible sense of urgency at the meeting in Memphis about trying to educate people at the national level about the real situation down here.

PND: One of things that came out of the Memphis meeting was a memorandum identifying five areas in which the philanthropic sector, post-Katrina, could play a role. The five areas were rebuilding the physical community in the region; rebuilding nonprofit and civic capacity in the region; resettling dislocated people; restoring human and environmental health; and shaping a community and civic culture that benefits everyone regardless of race, class or gender. On paper that looks like a pretty tall order — especially given the limited resources of the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors in the region. What role or roles do you see the philanthropic sector playing with regard to those five areas?

GP: Well, first off, I will say that, yes, it's a tall order. But in hindsight, I don't think it's ambitious enough. The story was so much more complicated than anybody, even two weeks after the storm hit, really understood. The long-term issues facing the region — not only in terms of needs, but how those needs are going to be addressed — are monumental. Let me give you an example. The three states most affected by Katrina — Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama — have all formed their own recovery funds. The Foundation for the Mid South is raising money for recovery; the Greater New Orleans Foundation is raising money for recovery in New Orleans; the Baton Rouge Area Foundation is raising money for displaced people; the Gulf Coast Community Foundation is raising money to rebuild the Mississippi Gulf Coast; the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund is raising money for recovery. Various national funders have indicated they want to devote resources to the rebuilding of the region, but not until they see how their money will be spent. And I haven't even mentioned the tens of billions of dollars of federal money that will be made available through agencies like HHS, HUD, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration.

So the five areas outlined in the Memphis memorandum may cover the waterfront, but they don't come close to describing how deep we need to go in terms of the long-term issues and being able to do a good job of — I will not say coordination, because I don't think coordination is the name of the game — but of understanding and, more importantly, delineating the roles for different players and different funders. If the path of least resistance wins out in this situation, we're going to end up with a lot of different funding organization going their own way and pursuing their own individual initiatives. Making sure that doesn't happen is one of the major challenges we all face. Philanthropy has an opportunity here to do something historic, and if we're successful the benefits will be with us for generations to come. But let's not kid ourselves — it will be a very difficult and complex thing to pull off.

PND: Obviously, the lion's share of funding for reconstruction and recovery is going to come from the federal government. Does philanthropy have a role to play in shaping the federal response to this disaster?

GP: I think so, yes. In fact, I think philanthropy has a role to play at the state and community levels as well. And so far, we've had a seat at the table as state and federal officials consider their next moves, which is nice to see. But I'm concerned that the overall recovery effort is being driven by business and government priorities, and I don't think anybody would say that the nonprofit sector is seen as an equal partner in the rebuilding of the region by either business or government.

The other part of this is what happens at the grassroots level, where there's a huge and immediate need to rebuild the nonprofit infrastructure. We're talking about organizations doing good work that didn't have a whole lot before the storm hit and now, in many cases, literally have nothing. Imagine that — hundreds of nonprofit organizations that are without offices, computers, even clients. But the one thing we hear from communities and nonprofit leaders we work with, the one thing they say over and over again, is that there is an immediate need to train people in how to access public resources. Whether Congress and the administration ultimately make $100 billion available for reconstruction and recovery, $200 billion — it really doesn't matter; if the path of least resistance is followed, people who live in small towns and rural areas, people who don't have access to transportation or the Internet are never going to be able to navigate the complicated array of service providers and funding mechanisms. We're hearing over and over and over again how hard it is for people to get assistance. Remember, these are people who, in many cases, have lost their homes, they've lost their job, they may not have transportation, they may still be looking for family members, they're trying to get their children settled in a strange school. And on top of all that, they're being asked to navigate a needlessly complicated system in order to get basic assistance. It's just more than a lot of people can cope with. As one of our partners put it, giving somebody an 800 number is not case management; if we really want people to be able to get the assistance they need, we've got to create a better system of guiding and advising them about how to get that assistance. And that's definitely a role that the philanthropic sector should be playing, both in Washington and at the state level.

PND: A few minutes ago, you backed away from using the word "coordination" to describe one of the roles the sector might play in post-Katrina recovery efforts. Lack of coordination among relief agencies and service providers was one of the aspects of the philanthropic response to 9/11 most often cited by critics of that response. Why shouldn't the philanthropic sector step up and play more of a coordinating role post-Katrina?

GP: There are several answers to that question. First, for foundations and many nonprofits, the best way to react in an emergency or relief situation is different than the way they ideally should respond in a reconstruction/redevelopment situation. When you're in relief mode speed is of the essence, so having a single point of coordination through which assistance and services flows makes sense. Trying to provide, say, flood relief through a collaborative process is a recipe for failure. In a redevelopment situation, on the other hand, it's my sense that everybody wants to coordinate and nobody wants to be coordinated. People are willing to share information and to make sure that what they are doing is understood and makes sense in terms of what others doing. But coordination in that situation requires both a very strong hand and relationships based on trust, which require time to develop. Maybe funders, nonprofits, businesses, and public-sector agencies will develop those kinds of relationships over time; we'll see. But we don't have the luxury of time. Should we be working to rebuild the Gulf Coast with an eye to the next major hurricane? Absolutely. That's something we can, and should, plan for. But if we're talking about the next two to four months, I just don't think any group or sector has the standing to play that central coordinating role.

Don't get me wrong. People are willing to cooperate, or to be coordinated, around certain pieces of it — what's happening in Mississippi right now with the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, which was set up by Governor Barbour with funding from the Knight Foundation and Jim Barksdale, is a good example. Nobody else is trying to do what they're doing, and the fact that they've kind of staked out the territory and are doing it means they're in a much better position to play that coordinating role. But in situations where there are a lot of different groups with their own agendas — whether those agendas are around housing, children's programs, small business development, whatever — I simply think there are too many players from too many sectors to result in what I would call coordination. Collaboration is possible, cooperation is possible, and sharing of information is possible. But coordination? I don't see how it would work.

PND: Are you concerned that the continuing focus on the situation in New Orleans will result in other parts of the region receiving fewer resources for reconstruction and rebuilding? In other words, is recovery and rebuilding in the Gulf Coast and mid-South regions a zero-sum game?

GP: No, I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think it's very much a game of people looking for opportunities to help, and if those are opportunities are made plain to them, they'll help. If they don't see an opportunity to help, they'll back away. Obviously, New Orleans is a special situation with special needs, but if New Orleans doesn't develop a strong, well-coordinated plan for recovery, if it shows, instead, confusion and competition and a lack of consensus going forward, then New Orleans isn't going to get any money, either. Nobody will put money into something that has little chance of succeeding. Having said that, it's a long-term process for everybody, New Orleans included. And, again, I don't think it's a zero-sum game. People will fund effectiveness, regardless of where they find it. So, to the extent that one group or one part of the mid-South gets more money than someone else is very much going to be a function of how good a job they do with the philanthropic and public-sector dollars made available to them.

PND: Can we learn anything from Katrina and its aftermath that might help us avert a disaster of this magnitude in the future?

GP: There are three key issues that I think that every organization can learn from this disaster. First, following the relief stage, be strategic about how your work will not only rebuild the organizations, services, and programs in a community or region, but how that work will also build and strengthen the community's leadership for the long-term. It will be terrible if the focus is only on building structures and not on building people.

Second, until Katrina, I had never thought of safety as a justice issue. But if a society cannot keep all of its people safe regardless of race, class, or geography, then all the other demands for services and programs pale in comparison.

And third, in a very real, personal sense, this has been a huge education in terms of what your own office contingency plan should include. After 9/11, we developed backup plans for offsite storage of records, computer data, etc., but these proved wholly insufficient for us and for others. Organizations should be prepared to be back in business as soon as possible — and especially if they are needed as part of the recovery efforts — even if the support systems from their entire community are destroyed. If your community's electricity, roads, telephones, and other basic services are all of a sudden unavailable, will you still have the ability to communicate with the outside world, to contact staff and board members, to provide needed services — even if you have to operate from a remote location?

PND: For all of the destruction and dislocation caused by Katrina, you and your colleagues have described what happens next as an historic opportunity for the people of the mid-South region. In what way has this unprecedented disaster created an opportunity for the mid-South?

GP: Look at it this way: If you were to rank the fifty states according to any quality-of-life indicator you choose — economic opportunity, education, housing stock, poverty, anything — our three states — Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas — would be pretty much at or near the bottom in every category. Now Katrina and, of course, Rita, too, have taken that hole and made it deeper. How is that an opportunity? Well, it isn't, if all we do is focus on filling that hole back up. Not only would that be an opportunity lost, it would be a tragedy. But what if, instead, we step back and ask some hard questions. We all know what they are: How did we end up with such unequal communities in the mid-South? How do we reinvent our schools in a way that they really provide a quality education to everyone, regardless of race or class? How do we create a regional economy that works for everybody? If we approach the rebuilding of the region in that spirit and with those kind of questions in mind, then I think the three states and the region as a whole — I'm including west Alabama and east Texas in this, too — can not only fill the hole and repair the damage caused by Katrina and Rita, but can begin to make real progress making this a better place to live for all people.

PND: To fix the deep-rooted problems you've just mentioned will involve a sustained, multi-year effort by many, many players. Are you confident you can keep foundations and large nonprofit organizations — both in the mid-South as well as in other parts of the country — not to mention policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels focused on the needs of the region for however long it takes to address those problems?

GP: I am...hopeful. Katrina and Rita have forced a lot of national funders who had never invested down here to realize that this is more than a regional problem and who, as a result, are prepared to put major dollars into rebuilding the region. We were just talking about opportunity coming out of this disaster; if only one positive thing comes out of this situation, I hope it will be that people around the country understand that issues of racial and social inequality are still alive in our society and that, especially in the mid-South, we need to make sure that efforts to address inequality are built in to everything we do going forward. This is about more than feeding evacuees or putting up structures. This is about building a better mid-South instead of repairing the damaged mid-South, and about systemic change in our society.

PND: After fifteen years as founding president of the Foundation for the Mid South, you announced your intention earlier this summer to step down as president at the end of the year. Have Katrina and Rita caused you to change your mind?

GP: No, they haven't. The hurricanes have put the Foundation for the Mid South in a position, both in terms of contributions received and national visibility, to play a significant role in affecting long-term change in the region. It's a position we've never been in before, and thank goodness we have a structure in place that allows us to do the things we have been doing and hope to be doing more of in the future. And although the impact of the hurricanes will surely complicate the transition a bit, I do feel it's an ideal time to bring in new leadership with a fresh vision for the foundation. As I said, the problems before us are great. But so are the opportunities, and I'm sure that my successor will make the most of them.

PND: Well, George, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. And best of luck in your future endeavors.

GP: Thank you.

Mitch Nauffts, PND's editorial director, spoke with George Penick in October. For more information on the Newsmakers series, contact Mitch at mfn@fdncenter.org.