New York Cares:
One Organization's Role in Post-September 11 Relief and Recovery Efforts
By Ariel Zwang, Executive Director

New York Cares was founded in 1987 by a group of civic-minded friends interested in taking action against the social problems facing New York City. After searching in vain for an organization with a range of volunteer opportunities for people with demanding work schedules, they formed their own organization - New York Cares. Currently, New York Cares creates nearly 42,000 volunteer opportunities each year for busy New Yorkers who want to give their time through flexibly-scheduled volunteer projects. New York Cares responds to our City's most acute needs by reaching out to social service agencies, schools, homeless shelters, and other deserving organizations, and mobilizing teams of volunteers to help with their work.

Our Initial Response
Immediately following the World Trade Center disaster, we, like everyone else, put our normal operations on hold and turned our attention to helping in every way that we could. For New York Cares, that meant several new roles and responsibilities.

Firstly, we became one of the city's most current resources for information on non-monetary donations being accepted. Although there were many staging areas in New York City and New Jersey that were collecting donated supplies and providing them to the rescue effort, these collection efforts were not coordinated. Although there were rapidly-arising needs for various supplies - warm clothes, gloves and masks, saline solution - there was no easy way for potential donors to know where such supplies were needed. Typically, the needs changed by the hour, with notification of new needs (at the Javits Center, for example) being written down and then erased from a big chalkboard; and these staging areas were not accessible by phone. By posting New York Cares staff at these staging areas, we were able to maintain one of the most current, central lists of what was needed where, and we posted this information online. Eventually, even local news stations were directing people to our website. And once we realized that the relief effort was seeking the kinds of supplies (masks, etc.) that we had stocked in our warehouse for use during our upcoming New York Cares Day (a city-wide, school cleanup project) in October, we donated our materials, too.

New York Cares also managed a several-day volunteer feeding effort for the rescuers that sprang up at Chelsea Market (at 15th Street and 9th Avenue, just above the zone). The merchants of Chelsea Market, most of them in the food business, began preparing meals for the rescue workers immediately after the attack. Because of the Market's proximity to the disaster site (in the early days, everything below 14th Street was cut off), it was an excellent staging area for donating food and supplies to the relief effort. Hundreds of individual volunteers presented themselves at the Market, leading to an initially chaotic situation. But New York Cares staff - using our expertise in managing very large volunteer projects - organized the effort there, allowing thousands of meals a day to be prepared and delivered to Ground Zero workers.

Another important contribution to the relief effort was the role we played in convening a group of non-profits and government entities, including FEMA, and named the coalition VOAD (Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster). In the days following September 11, VOAD helped to increased cohesion and communication within the voluntary sector. The Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, which coordinates VOAD, was located in 7 World Trade Center. Unable to reach its office and files, it relied on New York Cares to coordinate the organizations from the voluntary sector that would become central partners in the relief effort.

In other ways, though, the early days after September 11th were a frustrating time for us. We were inundated with requests by potential volunteers who wanted desperately to help, and yet the Ground Zero site was not a place where groups of unskilled volunteers could be helpful. It was a professional rescue effort, and those who were not rescue specialists - fire fighters, metal workers, medical professionals, et al. - were being turned away.

The Ongoing Relief and Recovery Effort
After the initial few days, however, our nation's disaster relief systems were put in place, and a more orderly operation began in and around Ground Zero. The Red Cross created respite centers to which workers could come during their shifts to eat and to decompress. The Salvation Army organized food warehouses to accept and deploy donations. Safe Horizon, a local victims' services organization, began distributing checks that would amount to millions and millions of dollars in direct relief for families of victims. The City of New York began to operate a hotline with information for families of the missing. Working with these organizations and many more, New York Cares began to deploy volunteers in very significant numbers - some 5,000 in the first three months, nearly a doubling of our normal volunteer placements and a quadrupling of the hours of volunteer service provided - to assist in the relief and recovery efforts.

In the months since September 11, New York Cares volunteers have provided critical services to the relief workers, the victims, and their families, including the following:

• Mayor's Community Assistance Center: staffing a hotline that provided information on the death certification process to families of the missing.
  

• Safe Horizon Family Center: preparing and distributing emergency relief checks to victims and their families.
  

• State Emergency Management Office and the Salvation Army: sorting, packaging and distributing disaster relief supplies at several warehouses.
  

• Red Cross: bookkeeping related to their emergency funds distribution efforts; serving meals at respite centers for relief workers close to Ground Zero.

And our unique position and organizational expertise have made us New York City's central resource for meeting disaster-related needs for volunteers. The City's Office of Emergency Management has asked us to act as the primary clearinghouse for volunteer needs expressed by public and private organizations active in the relief effort. The September 11th Fund, under the auspices of the United Way, has asked us to manage and deploy the thousands of volunteers who are signing up on its Web site. And even partners that normally run their own volunteering programs - including the Red Cross and Salvation Army - have increasingly come to us to fulfill their volunteer needs.

The tremendous activities we have undertaken since September 11 have had many implications for our organization. In early November, New York Cares was chosen as the recipient of a sizable grant from The September 11th Fund, which will allow us to continue to operate our Disaster Relief Program for an entire year. This is a tremendous benefit, as it allows us to focus our attention on operating the Program rather than on garnering the resources for it. On the other hand, the Program has called for drastic programmatic and operational changes, which we have adopted while still working hard to ensure the high program quality that is our hallmark.

New York Cares responds to our city's most acute needs, and will continue to do so as long as the victims, their families, and the rescue workers require assistance. Since September 11, we have quadrupled the amount of service we normally provide to our City. At the same time, we continue, day in and day out, to provide our core service: creating opportunities for our volunteers to take homeless kids to the library, feed the hungry, visit the ill and the elderly, clean up school buildings and parks, tutor public school students, provide coats to those who would go without, and so much more.