We Started in 1727

Martin Gutierrez with Catholic Charities is ensuring the success of the Hispanic immigrant population.

Hispanics and immigrants have been in New Orleans from the beginning. Before Katrina, we had 80,000 to 100,000 Hispanics in the Greater New Orleans area. Within maybe a year after Katrina, this number jumped all the way up to perhaps 150,000.

As the Hispanic Apostolate in Catholic Charities, one of the challenges we faced was how to assist the newcomers. There were very limited resources to assist those who came here after Katrina to help rebuild and clean up. That help was very seriously needed. We were able to get some funding from different sources, including the Greater New Orleans Foundation, to expand what we were already doing. We knew that all the issues we were dealing with prior to Katrina would be magnified by the disaster: housing, access to health care, immigration services, English as a second language, public safety. We had to more than triple our capacity to respond to the post-Katrina reality.

We did what we could within our existing programs, but we also made sure that we developed partnerships with other groups that were interested in reaching out to the Latino population. I think one of the success stories of the aftermath of Katrina was that all of a sudden, people who were not involved in providing services or interested in helping the immigrant community became involved.

Katrina was a unique situation that never happened before and hopefully will never happen again. Immigrant groups made a huge contribution to the recovery of our city, but their presence created certain challenges, too. But I’m very glad to say that the tensions that these changes created were not as intense as they could have been. Diverse communities of people worked together and got to know each other. Since Katrina, we have experienced a level of civic engagement in the community that I don’t think we ever saw before. And that’s another byproduct of Katrina that I hope will remain in our city forever. I think if it does, it will make our city much stronger.

Catholic Charities has developed a very good reputation for doing case management, being able to sit down with a family and help them develop their plan. We like to use the term early responders. We’re not necessarily first responders, but we are early responders, and we are there for the long term. We started in 1727. That’s when the Ursuline sisters came to New Orleans to help the local community and the immigrant groups that were here. We were incorporated legally as Catholic Charities in 1939. So we’ve been around for a while, and we are going to continue to help the community for a very long time.

This post is part of a series, “In Their Own Words”, that acknowledges the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. Five years later, they’re still at work.