How Katrina Shaped the Foundation’s Leadership in Disaster Response and Recovery
By Andy Kopplin
A few hours before midnight on August 29th, 2005, I got a phone call from General Hunt Downer of the Louisiana National Guard. Hurricane Katrina had made landfall earlier that evening, and General Downer was calling to report flooding in the Louisiana National Guard’s Jackson Barracks, which sits between New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish.
“The levees must have broken,” he said. “Water is rising about a foot every 10 minutes, and people are swimming in from the neighborhood.”
Not long after, Doug Thornton, the manager of the Superdome, called. Fifteen thousand people had evacuated there, and he reported that a large part of the roof had just blown off. Thornton put me on the phone with Colonel Doug Mouton, an engineer and architect, who assured me there was no structural damage and there was no danger that the building would collapse. But the people seeking shelter inside probably didn’t know that. Rain was coming in, it was dark, and the wind was fierce and, like those facing the floods in the Lower 9th Ward, they were surely terrified.
I was Chief of Staff to Governor Kathleen Blanco at the time. It was my job to share this information with the Governor. It was our job to act. We didn’t have time for grief—not yet. We only had time to take in the facts, digest the horrific reality, and figure out how to support the first responders working to save lives. And in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years that followed, our team tried our best to do everything we could to help, alongside so many others. Nonprofits, churches, and social aid and pleasure clubs were among the first to step up. Neighbors helped neighbors. People from across our region and state came together to take stock of the disaster, rebuild, and repair, even amidst their own immense personal losses.
Governor Blanco later asked me to lead the state’s rebuilding efforts as the Executive Director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Our most important job was to get the federal money we needed to rebuild our levees, our houses, our roads, our police and fire stations, our hospitals, our parks, and our schools. While it was nowhere near enough, over the next 27 months we secured nearly $70 billion in federal rebuilding dollars–by far the most money ever appropriated by Congress after any disaster before or since.
It has been 20 years now since Katrina, but my memories are always close at hand, especially in August. Many people, families, and institutions mark time as “pre-Katrina” and “post-Katrina,” and the same is true for me. Katrina shaped my life, my family, my career, and how I see the world. It shaped the way I seek to make an impact, including in my role now, as the leader of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
Katrina shaped the Foundation itself, too—marking a transition from our time providing support in reaction to events to proactively working to ensure that when the next storm hits, we’re prepared. And that includes especially making sure that our most vulnerable citizens have the resources and the opportunities they need to thrive–in good times and in the face of challenges. Today, as our climate warms and storms grow more intense and we continue to confront persistent inequities, that shift is even more important.
A Century of Relief and Recovery
The Foundation’s first recorded disaster response was nearly one hundred years ago. After the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the Foundation (then the Community Chest) stepped up to respond. The Foundation again activated fundraising for relief during the Great Depression and World War II, and established an Emergency and Greatest Needs Fund in 1955.
Left: Corner of Dupre and Baudin Streets, 1927. Right: Excerpt from the Foundation’s 1927 Annual Report.
But Katrina changed everything for us. From temporary offices courtesy of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the Foundation’s team got to work. The scope of the disaster was enormous; we resolved not only to address the crisis at hand but look ahead.
Addressing the crisis and looking ahead
Right away, we established a relief fund, the Rebuild New Orleans Fund, making 1,200 awards to organizations working on the ground to rebuild, repair, and recover. These groups were mucking and gutting, distributing food, offering first aid, and helping families fill out insurance and FEMA paperwork. This was the essential response work the people of our region needed right away. Later our grants helped organizations rebuild housing, provide educational, recreational, and cultural programs for children and families, expand workforce training, and support small businesses and entrepreneurs.
We also looked ahead. The Louisiana Recovery Authority and City of New Orleans asked for our help—they wanted the Foundation to help lead the planning process for long-term rebuilding, and the Rockefeller Foundation and Bush-Clinton Katrina fund stepped up with significant investments to make this possible. This was an incredibly important charge, and we knew that our community’s plan would only be as strong as our community engagement efforts.
In New Orleans—as well as in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, and many more cities nationwide, we hosted planning meetings with community members who had evacuated. We wanted those meetings to be accessible to all, so we offered transportation and provided food and childcare. We asked what people wanted to see in a rebuilt New Orleans—and used those conversations to guide our work.
With their input, extensive research, and planning experts we assembled to help, we guided the creation of the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). This became the blueprint for the recovery of our city. It both unlocked state and federal resources and guided investments that have been made with recovery dollars ever since—including projects like the Foundation’s transformational Community Revitalization Fund, a new $23 million affordable housing fund that we raised and then invested in projects that helped rebuild nearly 10,000 units of affordable housing.
This became our signature approach—we raised as much as we could and planned for the future as we responded to the present.
A Transformed Foundation
As time went on, we grew more and more proactive in our grantmaking and approach. As we responded to other disasters—like the BP oil spill, Hurricane Isaac, the floods in Baton Rouge in 2016—we codified our growing knowledge into a Disaster Response Framework. We built out the steps and best practices of our approach, rooted in the principles of resilience, equity, sustainability, and civic participation.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with the help of extraordinarily generous donors from across the region and the country, we were able to raise and distribute $10 million in response efforts, from meals and shelters to vaccinations and public health announcements. We invested in our region’s most vulnerable families, and gave out 2,000 grants of $1,000 each to hospitality workers who were responsible for supporting their families but had lost their jobs.
As we grew our expertise in disaster relief and were increasingly recognized as an organization that can do big things, we attracted more incredible supporters and resources and grew our assets and our team. By the time Hurricane Ida tore through Southeast Louisiana on August 29, 2021—on the anniversary of Katrina—our capacity as a Foundation had been transformed. We had grown from $100 million in assets in 2005 to $500 million. We’d expanded from 7 staff members to 25. We had a Disaster Response Strategy. We had strong relationships with philanthropists and nonprofits across the region and the country. We were ready. We quickly raised $8.5 million, and this allowed us to provide essential support to our communities both before and after Ida hit.
Most of our funding after Ida went to spectacular nonprofit organizations providing immediate relief, but we also launched two major programs to help make our region more resilient going forward. The Community Lighthouse Project turns neighborhood hubs like churches and community centers into disaster response centers by providing solar panels and battery storage that keep the lights on when the power’s out. Our Next 100 Years Challenge inspired nonprofits and their local government partners across the region to compete with their best ideas for resilient infrastructure projects–and our Challenge winners have turned their great ideas and our $1.2 million in grant dollars into over $120 million in state and federal infrastructure grants!
In 2024, with a generous donation from Mrs. Gayle Benson, the Foundation established the Gayle and Tom Benson Disaster Relief Fund, an endowment dedicated to supporting nonprofits on the frontlines of response and recovery. This permanent fund represents our commitment to play an immediate role in aiding our region’s communities when the next disaster strikes.
On New Year’s Day this year, we faced such a moment–a horrific terror attack in our city. The Foundation got to work that very morning and established the New Year’s Day Tragedy Fund. We raised over $3 million and worked with a steering committee of local leaders to distribute 100 percent of all donations for grants to the families who lost loved ones as well as to individuals who were severely injured or impacted by the tragedy.
When our partners in other regions face disaster, we show up for them, too. We’ve been privileged to share both our experiences and our strategy for managing disasters nationally and worldwide. We helped when fires ravaged California and Hawaii, when flooding hit Kentucky and Texas, when hurricanes hit Florida and North Carolina, and even supported colleagues in Japan after a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear accident. We’re grateful to be able to help. This is hard-earned knowledge, built over a century of disaster response—and particularly the past 20 years of work since Hurricane Katrina.
Looking Ahead
Everyone has a job in times of disaster—and ours is raising money and deploying it to the most effective nonprofits working on the frontlines helping our neighbors. Now, two decades since Hurricane Katrina, we’ve become experts at that job. When leaders get a call in the night that a crisis has struck, we’re funding the nonprofit that shows up in the early morning, ready to help.
We couldn’t do this without our most important partners—our extraordinarily generous donors—from the thousands who make online donations to national foundations committed to the people of Greater New Orleans. Then as now, they fuel this work. So many of them have their own Katrina stories. So many of them also mark time as before and after the storm. They know—as do our nonprofits, local leaders, and community members—that even as we mark 20 years since that tragedy, hurricanes aren’t a thing of the past. For us, the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is not only a moment for somber reflection. It’s a moment for readiness—and because of our donors, our nonprofits, and our hard-won expertise, when the next disaster hits, we’ll again be ready to serve—so that the people of Greater New Orleans have the opportunity to thrive.
