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Casey Fellows

The Casey Foundation’s Children and Family Fellowship, an intensive 11-month leadership development program for accomplished professionals in the field of children and family services, strives to increase the pool of leaders with the vision and skills to sustain major reforms in human services systems. Several fellows now serving in influential positions in state and local government and community organizations are helping to spearhead efforts to direct relief to hurricane-stricken areas and assist evacuees.

San Antonio

As director of the Department of Community Initiatives in San Antonio, Texas, which is also one of the sites in the Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, Dennis Campa has been a key player in the city’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The city’s three-tiered approach to supporting Katrina survivors includes:

• Addressing evacuees' immediate emotional, physical, and medical needs. Campa and his staff were the first to greet evacuees as they arrived in San Antonio. After showers and hot meals, around 13,000 people filed into a coordinated intake and registration center where they were connected with counselors, medical services, and other emergency resources. The shelters were open seven days a week and admitted several thousand people, many of whom were later taken in by others or placed in public housing.
• Reunifying victims with their families. This ongoing effort involves helping people find relatives and loved ones already living in San Antonio, or sheltered in Texas or the surrounding states.
• Resettling families into communities. The Department of Community Initiatives has connected with other nonprofits offering resettlement support to individuals and families interested in relocating to San Antonio on a long-term basis. For example, they are partnering with organizations that work with the elderly to help several hundred displaced seniors in need of nursing care, dialysis, and other medical and mental health support. The department is also working with other human services partners to connect families with employment, housing, tax credits, transportation, and health care – key ingredients of family stability and economic success.

San Antonio’s human service community has designed a comprehensive approach to getting people what they need while maintaining their connection to family and community. When asked about applying Katrina’s lessons to long-standing human service initiatives, Campa said, "How well we treat the evacuees can only inform and improve partnerships in those initiatives, create opportunities for new partnerships, and forge new ways to broker relationships."

Los Angeles

When Yolie Aguilar, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Children's Planning Council (CPC), saw news reports of the 13,000 Gulf residents streaming into San Antonio and read about the city’s need for help performing intakes and getting people connected to resources, she called Campa and volunteered to fly in.

Aguilar and her employees at the Children’s Planning Council made plans to send a team of workers into the Gulf Region. But they soon learned that with 2,000 displaced citizens headed toward Los Angeles, their skills would be needed at home.

Aguilar says Los Angeles County was prepared and waiting for the evacuees. The Department of Health Services had been coordinating the public benefits, medical care, and resources the families would need. The evacuees would arrive first at the Dream Center, a nonprofit outreach center located in the city of Los Angeles, where city workers would perform intake assessments and connect them to housing.

The city has made a commitment to enroll all children in preschool, waiving its residency requirement. The Los Angeles Unified School District is taking several measures to ensure that children and their families who are victims of Hurricane Katrina receive expedited services. In fact, the Department of Health Services has streamlined the process for connecting Medicaid-eligible Katrina victims with services in California through Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

As the immediate crises are addressed, Aguilar and the Children’s Planning Council are turning their efforts toward Los Angeles’s own preparation for disasters. With 25,000 children in foster care and almost 2,000 in the delinquency system in the county of Los Angeles, Aguilar and her colleagues are working to influence how the county could track and maintain connections with these children in the event of a large-scale disaster.

Atlanta

Casey Fellow Jo-Anne Henry, statewide director of Community Partnerships for Protecting Children in Atlanta, says Georgia received about 15,000 people needing shelter. The county child welfare offices – including the Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) – have been central points for new arrivals to sign up for benefits; try to deal with unaccompanied children; and find donations of food, clothing, and other necessities. Henry has divided her time between working at two department offices and a shelter and dropping off clothing and food donations.

Beverly (B.J.) Walker, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Human Resources, under which DFCS is housed, has been directly overseeing all the major agencies responding, including the mental and public health responses.

Chicago

Molly McGrath, as deputy commissioner of Chicago's Department of Human Services, helped set up and managed a comprehensive intake center serving the 6,000 evacuees that came to her city. After welcoming people to Chicago, she and her staff were able to quickly connect people to a range of resources by having 40 agencies housed in the intake center. This allowed families to interview with FEMA and the Red Cross, receive Social Security cards or state identification, have their mail forwarded, look for work, and get their children enrolled in school. "You didn’t get a slip of paper giving you an appointment to go somewhere else," explains McGrath. "All of it was done under one roof. Our role was to coordinate all of those agencies coming together."

The intake center, which started as a gymnasium, was transformed into a department store through the work of volunteers, businesses, and city workers. Donations were organized by category, such as housewares, toiletries, and baby furniture, with arrows painted on the floor to guide people in perusing their choices. Workers from SBC Communications, the city's Internet service provider, pitched in and worked with dispatch to lay two miles of underground cable so that the agencies working out of the gymnasium would be able to access necessary data and Internet services to link families to needed resources.

What McGrath is most proud of, however, is that none of the 6,000 evacuees went to emergency shelters. While most people came to the city because they had a relative there, Chicagoans called the city’s information line to donate extra bedrooms, apartments, or some form of shared housing. The priority was to get people someplace stable so they could begin thinking about next steps. Most evacuees came to Chicago on charter flights, so McGrath and her colleagues are beginning to look at ways to get people back home. "What these people want," McGrath says, "is their independent lives back. After something like this, sooner or later you just want to go home to your own couch."