Alphabet Soup

There will be a test. Please memorize the following non-profits and government agencies and their functions for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Omaha.

Red Cross - A short-term relief agency that gave evacuees $360 debit cards when they arrived and put them up in hotels. Now has a long-term program called Means to Recovery that requires evacuees to fill out an ungodly amount of paperwork. Red Cross has come under a lot of heat for making the application especially arduous and for not publicizing it (their defense was pretty much, "well, it was on our website"). Red Cross requires evacuees to go through a registered case manager to access the program. The contract for the Omaha evacuees' case management program, Interchurch Ministries, ran out before they finished their applications.

FEMA - Duh.

RON (Reaching Out Nebraska) - Crisis counseling program funded by an emergency 60-day grant from FEMA; FEMA was supposed to follow that up with a 9-month grant, but it came through 4 months late, forcing Reaching Out Nebraska to operate on a shoestring during until spring 2006. RON staff were supposed to recognize the difference between outreach and case management, but it was difficult, considering the case management void (how do you not give a sick man a ride to the doctor?). Their contract ran out in December 2006.

OHA (Omaha Housing Authority) - Over 100 evacuees applied for public housing. Over 20 were disqualified for a drug arrest or felony in the past three years. Many evacuees ended up in high-rise housing towers. Others went to Section 8 apartments. I don't know how many evacuees got signed up for FEMA's 18 months of rental assistance...it didn't sound like many. Maybe they never heard about it.

Open Door Mission - Fifty or so evacuees went to Open Door Mission, a local charity, for help finding housing.

ENOA (Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging) - ENOA did case management upon arrival, then transferred under-55 clients to Catholic Charities.

CC (Catholic Charities) - A few weeks after the storm, Catholic Charities hired SourceNet, a group that had worked with homeless veterans, to do case management with the evacuees. A team of two case managers ended up with close to 50 clients.

SourceNet - Did case management for many evacuees, and continued to work with them even after a separate case management contract--which excluded SourceNet--went into effect.

UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief) - When FEMA got all those international donations, they turned $66 million over to UMCOR and told them to set up case management. They started a group called Katrina Aid Today.

Katrina Aid Today - They were several weeks late awarding the contracts, and their case management in Omaha, through Interchurch Ministries, didn't start till June 2006.

ICM (Interchurch Ministries) - Through the Katrina Aid Today contract, they launched a faith-based case management program in Omaha in June 2006. The contract lasted a year, but the director worked weekends through August 2007 trying to process Means to Recovery applications. In their quarterly reports, ICM criticized RON for stepping over the case-management/counseling line and for not letting go of their clients when ICM started up. ICM also criticized SourceNet for undermining their efforts.

(Okay, brief case management review: everyone under ENOA, then if you're under 55, over to SourceNet, until June 2006--10 months after the storm--at which point you go into a totally different program with Interchurch Ministries/Katrina Aid Today/UMCOR where someone from a local church becomes your case manager, and that person is supposed to recruit four volunteers, which may or may not happen, and then in June 2007, case management ends, just as you're realizing you need a case manager to access Red Cross's Means to Recovery program.)

Salvation Army - Providing clothing, furniture, phones, basically anything on an ad hoc basis; also had evacuees do volunteer work, although this didn't always lead to jobs.

Region Six - Division of Nebraska's state mental health agency that covers Omaha; they launched Reaching Out Nebraska.

Charles Drew Medical Center - Medical care for low-income Omahans.

One World Community Health Center - Another health care center for low-income Omahans.
Douglas County General Assistance Agency - This is where many evacuees have effectively gotten themselves on welfare.

There's more--Douglas County provides some mental health services, for example, and there's the year's worth of free bus passes the evacuees had in 2005-2006. And there are also many individual Omahans (Douglas County Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson, ENOA Director Beverly Griffith, and many others) who went all out to help the evacuees transcend the bureaucracy.

Anyway, just kidding, there won't be a test. But you can see how one way to succeed as an evacuee in Omaha might have been to just get as far away from the system as possible as soon as possible. Soon, I'll be writing about Brian Wickem and Darlene Anderson, a brother and sister from the September 10 flights who did just that...