Public and Private Responses to Katrina: What Can We Learn?: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Public and Private Responses to Katrina: What Can We Learn?: Newsroom: The Independent Institute: "Public and Private Responses to Katrina: What Can We Learn?
October 20, 2005
Mary L. G. Theroux

This talk was presented at the Chief Executive Organizations’ Women’s Seminar October 7, 2005.

For the lessons to be gleaned in the aftermath of Katrina, I look to two non-profits with which I have been involved for many years and that I see as providing a two-pronged strategy for solving problems—immediate-term and long-term.

I’ve served for 10 years on the San Francisco board, and three years on the National board of The Salvation Army, which Peter Drucker has termed “the most effective organization in the U.S.” It does an amazing job at addressing and alleviating immediate problems and suffering. It brings people in off the street to become clean and sober and learn to lead productive lives through its detox and transitional housing and programming. It provides job training, character-based after-school and summer camp programming for children, toys at the holidays; shelters for battered women and their children; senior feeding and housing; delivery of hot meals to the homebound, housing and programming for aged-out foster care young adults; and is one of the largest relief agencies worldwide. Based in London, it operates in 109 countries every day, with 65,000 employees in the U.S. alone. So when disaster strikes, the Salvation Army is already there, ready to spring into action."