A Discussion at the 2010 Global Philanthropists Circle Annual Meeting, May 6, 2010
The Rockefeller University, New York City

With
Irwin Redlener, Director, National Center for Disaster Preparedness
Kerry Kennedy, Founder, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights
Moderated by Beth Cohen, Senior Director, Global Philanthropists Circle

BETH COHEN: So we’re going to start our next session in just a minute. If you have not yet wrapped up your table introductions, if you would in just a minute or so, we’ll start our first session.

COHEN: So we’re going to start our session on responding to natural disaster. Can everyone hear me okay?

Peggy said, “If you stop talking you’ll be able to hear me.”

[LAUGHTER]

COHEN: Hi, everyone. This is our first session and it’s on “Responding Strategically to Natural Disasters.” When we asked several members this year what topic they wanted to hear about, several mentioned natural disasters. And in some ways you would think that this wouldn’t be a typical topic for the global philanthropist circle to explore. Well, we are working deeply in issues of poverty and inequity. We talk about systems change. We talk about being strategic. We talk about structural reasons for poverty and inequity. And in many ways, disaster seems to come upon us suddenly, and we respond, and that in some ways, is in a different camp than some of the longer term strategic interventions that many people in this room are working on in areas of health, and education and human rights.

And I think that what we’ve seen recently as natural disasters have become more and more prevalent, that there is quite an important nexus between long term thinking about disaster preparedness, short term response, and long term recovery and some of these more systemic issues that are so important. Before I introduce our expert distinguished panelists, I just want to say a few words about the seeming increase in natural disasters. And it actually is something that’s born out empirically.

According to the International Rescue Committee, the frequency of natural disasters has increased from 1994 to 1998 disasters were about 428 a year. From 1993 to 2003 this figure shot up by two thirds to an average of 700 plus natural disasters a year. And the biggest rise was in poor countries which suffered an increase of 142 percent. And I think that this was punctuated most strongly with the Asian tsunami in December 2004. Over 230,000 people died in that, or were still missing.

Since then, we’ve seen almost on an annual basis, major natural disasters from Katrina in August 2005 to the earthquake in Kashmir in October 2005. In May 2008 there was an earthquake in Southwest China. The Haiti earthquake in 2010, of course most recently, has re-stimulated our interest in large scale natural disasters that are very close to us geographically and where we feel very compelled by the images that we’ve seen and also, very concerned about the role that we could play. Since then, unbelievably, the Chilean earthquake and then in April in Yushu, China, on the Tibetan plateau.

In one report that I read it said, “Natural disasters are episodic, but recurrent.” They’re not going away and we have to think about how the incidents of natural disasters really intersects some of these longer term efforts that everyone in this room is engaged in. And so, we’ve invited Irwin Redlener who is the Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Mailman Center at Columbia University to join us. Irwin is also the author of a book called Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Mega Disasters and What We Can Do Now. And Kerry Kennedy who is the Founder and Chair of the Robert F. Kennedy Center on Justice and Human Rights.

KENNEDY: An endless fight.

COHEN: And Kerry has had a long term relationship with Haiti and other places, and promoting human rights, particularly in this post disaster context. So we’re really delighted to have both of them here to talk to us about how to engage in a sustainable, strategic ways to address disasters not only in places where one might not have been engaged previously, but is compelled because of proximity or the magnitude, and also places where people are already engaged, what can you do to become more involved in helping to build the infrastructure and capacity so that when disaster does hit, local populations are more prepared?

So I’ll be delighted to chat with Irwin and Kerry and to give the opportunity for all of you to engage with them. But before that, we’re going to have a few brief words from President Clinton who apologizes for not being here today, but wanted to say a few words about ways that we might think about the special role that philanthropists can play.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

COHEN: So Irwin, I’m going to start with you. One of the things that President Clinton talks about is the need and the opportunity post disaster to build back better and to build back stronger. If you could share with us, from your perspective, what are some of the lessons learned and ways that we might use this as an opportunity to build back better? What are some of the things to think about?

REDLENER: Thanks Beth. Well, this challenge of building back in general is very difficult. Building back better is proportionately as difficult as the preconditions were bad in the community. Rebuilding a relatively affluent community is a very different situation than trying to rebuild say, the Gulf Coast after Katrina, or now Haiti after that extraordinary earthquake. So part of our ability first to respond effectively, and secondly, to recover and rebuild is very much effected by the pre-conditional factors like poverty, like of access to healthcare and basic education, clean water and so forth.

It’s a very complex problem, but in some ways, that very notion of rebuilding better is the place where we can feel that there’s an opportunity and a challenge in addition to just the tragedy that just occurred. And one of the lessons that I think we’re particularly concerned about is—do we have the capacity to learn lessons from previous disasters? And, this is one of the things that’s actually troubled me for a long time. You know, these events, including the tsunami in the end of ’04 and all the other events that you went through, have we learned lessons? Have they been true wakeup calls? And, what I fear is—and I mentioned this last night—is that a lot of the events that should be wakeup calls do in fact get us aroused, and excited, and a lot of media coverage and a lot of intense focus for a short period of time. But then, we drift into kind of complacency. We forget.

You know, it was just a week ago we were dealing with terrorism in New York, the oil spill, the volcano. I mean, it was like, in certain ways, more than we can absorb. That suggests two things. One is—the things that I hoped would be wakeup calls turned out to be more like snooze alarms where we kind of get aroused, they do something and then we sort of hit that snooze button and we’re back off into some other state of forgetting about the last thing. We’re onto other business.

And the second thing is that one of the key roles, to me, of philanthropists is the capacity to keep ourselves focused on what needs to be done over a long period of time. I told somebody last night, “Haiti will not be where it really needs to be probably in my lifetime.” But the reality is that it will be nowhere if people like yourselves don’t retain the focus that’s needed to kind of carry them through—that tsunami for instance.

What we need is simple basic warning systems for tsunamis that allow people to move to higher ground in a short period of time. Even that process has taken a very, very long time and it’s very unevenly developed, very low cost technology, but we just kind of keep stumbling over it. I can’t forget to tell you and I’ll stop now, but the issues around the recovery from Katrina in the Gulf trouble me greatly.

We’ve done a lot of healthcare, over 100,000 visits with children and families. But the thing that’s most troubling is that the children in the Gulf for whom uncertainty and instability has become a way of life are now going to have consequences which will affect them literally for the rest of their lives. Kids can’t wait really for us adults to be sort of, you know, trying to, but not really solving the problems of recovery. As they miss school, access to healthcare are persistent with ongoing stress, they will get these consequences that really won’t go away very easily, so I’ll just leave that as a pediatrician as my sort of final message for these comments is that we really have to remember that underneath all this are children really struggling to survive and stay resilient through very difficult times.

COHEN: Great. Thanks Irwin. So one of the issues that keeps coming up is that the large amounts of aid that have been committed to places like Haiti and that making sure that those resources actually get to the ground and do their job is one factor. And also, to make sure that they don’t do harm, that they’re actually there for the purpose for which they are intended to help the population. Kerry, can you talk a little bit about the work you’ve been doing and your perspective on that?

KENNEDY: Sure. Let me begin by introducing Monica Kalra Varma. Monica, could you just stand up? Some of you met Monica last night and she runs the RFK Center for Human Rights which does our work on Haiti. So I hope you’ll join us in a few moments Monica. But, our view is that aid is not a charity and it’s not to be given as a gift and welcomed with open arms. It’s people have rights. And aid is to be given with those rights in mind and with dignity in mind which is the basis of all human rights. And therefore, you can do no harm when you give that aid.

Now, let me give you two examples of what happened in Haiti. A slightly more benign example is that every year, as you know, the United States produces more grains than we can use. So, the government buys those grains and we give them to countries that are in need of food. So about four or five years ago, the U.S. government, the Department of Agriculture, looked around and said, “Haiti needs rice. We’ll send the extra rice to Haiti.” So they went and took all the extra rice from the United States, dumped it on the Haitian rice market and Haitian rice was selling at three dollars a pound, and the U.S. rice was sold at $1.50 per pound.

Well, of course, the people of Haiti bought the $1.50 per pound rice and then the rice farmers in Haiti all went out of business. The next year, they didn’t plant the rice. The next year the American rice went to Zimbabwe and there were rice riots in Haiti and hundreds of people were killed. So that’s one example. The donors need to be held accountable. You can’t just do this and walk away and say, “Well, you should be grateful for the gift that I’ve given.”

We have another example which is much scarier which is that a few years, about eight years ago we gave the RFK Human Rights Award to one of the leading doctors in Haiti, a woman called Loune Viaud, and she runs a clinic for Paul Farmers Group partners in health there. So, we said to her, “How can we help you?” She said, “We want you to turn on the water and make sure it never gets turned off again.” “Tell us about that.” She said, “Well, we went to the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB, and we asked them for a water treatment facility for the central plateau of Haiti. The IDB came in, built this great water treatment facility and it was a miracle,” she said.

”The people started to stay in school. People started to stay in the factories, and the clinic was virtually empty.” Then Aristide came into government in Haiti, the Bush administration came into government in the United States. The Bush administration didn’t like Aristide, said to the IDB, “Turn off the water.” The IDB said, “We are not allowed to do that because we’re not allowed to mix development with politics.” We, Monica, got a FOIA request and got the emails back and forth between the IDB and the Bush administration, the Bush administration saying, “Stop sending the emails and turn off the water.”

The water gets turned off, no kids are going to school, factories are closing and the clinic is overwhelmed by children with waterborne diseases that they haven’t seen for the last six years. And those kids are known as IDB kids because there’s such a close linkage between what IDB did and the death of those children. So what we want to say is, traditionally you have been able to hold people, hold governments accountable for political rights—if the police beat you up, if you’re a victim of genocide, something like that. But, how do you hold the government accountable for economic, social and cultural rights? How do you hold the government accountable for the right to water? What we’re saying is, there is a right to water and you can do no harm. And if you do harm, we’re going to start to hold you accountable for that.

COHEN: Thank you Kerry. In response to the Haiti earthquake, there have been many donor meetings and one of the largest announcements was that 130 countries came together to pledge almost $10 billion. And so, I’m wondering what kind of mechanisms have been put in place—maybe Irwin, you can start. And I know Kerry, you’re engaged with this too—to make sure that this multi donor fund, or these efforts have the kind of transparency and accountability to ensure that some of these things are going to learn from some of these examples and that the local population is more engaged and consulted?

REDLENER: A critical question, of course. But, before I get into it—listening to your stories Kerry and the first one—so, I was in Ethiopia and Sudan in ’85, ’86 when there was the gigantic drought and then famine and then the “We Are the World.” And I was the medical director for “We Are the World” which was why I was there. So, the same exact phenomenon happened. Now, how many—25 years —agowhich was that the external aid realities were that they completely shut off and destroyed the local markets. It was an extraordinary phenomenon, people thinking they’re doing whatever, kind of god’s work, and they end up turning upside down the possibility of economic recovery in badly afflicted areas.

If you need a better example of lessons not learned, I can’t even imagine what it would be, but the entire world, philanthropic and aid community understood what was happening eventually. And why this happens again in Haiti, I mean, I’ll just leave it to your own imaginations to understand that, and again, I think the philanthropists can help keep feet to the fire, and this was a lesson we learned already. We’re not going to do this again. Somebody’s got to be very outspoken about that.

But, to your question Beth, about the accountability of donors, it is very, very easy. And again, this has happened many times before where the world community, after a major disaster, commits billions of dollars. We’re caught up in the heat of the moment, the statements get made, we’re at the donors conferences and everything looks hunky-dory except significant percentages of those commitments never materialize. And it is not clear who are the monitors of that? Who is checking the accountability? Who is making transparent the failure to deliver on a solemn commitment that’s made to protect people, to assure people their basic rights as human beings, and to make sure the institutions get built that have to get built? And it is not clear where that is.

And again, I think that the philanthropic world, especially the more sophisticated philanthropies, can deal with these kinds of problems and make sure there are mechanisms in place so that attention is never diverted. You know, yes, it’s going to take a long time to rebuild Haiti, but no, it won’t take a long time to make sure that when somebody, or an agency, or a country promises a billion dollars for aid, that that actually materializes. And I think that’s another big role for the philanthropic community.

COHEN: Kerry, I know that the RFK Center is working on mechanisms like this. Can you talk specifically about some of them?

KENNEDY: Yeah, let me just respond to what Irwin said. The reason that it’s repeated is because no one was held responsible before.

REDLENER: Right.

KENNEDY: And believe me, if you could sue them 25 years ago and those bureaucrats knew, “If I do this, I could be held accountable.”

REDLENER: Personally, yeah.

KENNEDY: And that they’re going to be hauled before a judge, then they have a different attitude about what they’re doing, so that’s what we’re trying to do. One thing we’re trying to do is make these rights justiciable, because if it’s not justiciable, it’s just really nice, pretty language. But, if it becomes, if it’s justiciable, if you can sue somebody, then suddenly people take it very, very seriously, so that’s one thing.

Now, what are we trying to do? We want all of the aid organizations to set up a website, and in that website—so at the EU, or a USAID, or the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation is now doing this. We want them to put up a website that says how much money has been promised, how much money is actually in the pipeline—usually a very different number—what are the projects that are going to be funded? Where can you find those projects on Google Maps? Very specific. What are the metrics by which those projects will be judged? What is the judgment of those projects by your experts? And then, a blog, so that NGOs and Haitians, local Haitians and others can go on there and say, “Well, it says here that your water treatment facility is working, but it hasn’t worked for the last six weeks.” Or, “It says it’s been working and I want to tell you it’s transformed my community.”

So this, if we’re able to do that, will totally transform aid. And let me just say that Monica and her team went to USAID and said, “Just tell us what projects you’ve done in Haiti over the last 10 years.” And there wasn’t a human being in that entire building who could answer that question. You know, people talk about the problem of accountability with the developing country, with the government of Haiti. Well, if we could get the aid organizations to be a little bit more transparent and accountable, it’s going to be a lot harder for corruption to take place.

COHEN: Great, thank you. One of the things that has been in the paper a lot, the nuances with transparency and accountability is, how much do you use for immediate relief, tents, water, food? And then, how much of the resources should be allocated toward longer term reconstruction? What’s the right mix? I know that the Red Cross has been criticized because they haven’t gotten enough money out the door, and they’re contending that they really want to have a thoughtful long term response. So I’m wondering Irwin, if you could tell us a little bit about your perspective on that.

REDLENER: Well, first of all, for a mega-disaster which, by the way, I use that term when I’m talking about disasters that are unable to be handled, managed by local and regional resources, where there has to be really a significant amount of outside aid coming in. So when we look at the Gulf after Katrina, when we look at Haiti, we look at the earthquakes in China, we say that there’s going to be a significant need for ongoing redevelopment and what we call, recovery. On the other hand, there is a primary responsibility to save lives in the initial phase. And I think we can’t take that lightly, and actually, we don’t do that very well either.

You know, I was yelling about the fact that in Haiti there was a 72 hour window to save lives. It’s not that complicated, search and rescue teams, it’s pulling rubble away. And what we saw for almost four days were individual Haitians with their bare hands trying to move rocks to rescue relatives out of the rubble. And I kept saying—and I said this on CNN a number of times, “Where are the urban search and rescue teams?” The bureaucracy actually impeded the deployment of a lot of that sort of immediate rescues. So, it’s not that we’re that good at the immediate response part of it. And then, we sort of finished and struggled through that. God knows how many extra people died because of those inadequacies in the first few days, but then we come to this period of, “Well, now we’re going to try to rebuild,” and that’s institutions. It’s macro funding. Its enormous amounts of money.

But, I don’t think there’s a specific formula. The other problem is that I say somebody and you should be asking, “Well, who?” You should be saying, “This is the situation in Haiti or any other place.” It’s going to take, in the first two months for life saving this amount of dollars. And then to rebuild the capital of a country which was terrible to begin with is going to require X billions of dollars. So, I don’t think there’s been sufficient attention to the master plan that is custom designed for each of these large disasters. And probably, one of the reasons, I know it is in terms of U.S. disaster planning is, there is actually nobody in charge. There’s no agency in charge. There are people who are players, but there’s also 10 or 15,000 NGOs in Haiti. There’s USAID. There’s every other developed country on earth is contributing this and that, there’s the UN agencies. But, altogether if you wanted to bring the person in charge to come here and overview the entire process, she or he does not exist as far as I’m aware. Unless anybody else thinks differently—do you Kerry? Who is in charge?

KENNEDY: I look to you.

[LAUGHTER]

REDLENER: Yeah, okay.

COHEN: So that speaks to one of the important points that recovery in any geography needs to be owned if not entirely managed, but owned by that local population. And I know Monica had a talk with our team about some of the experiences she’s had with some of the local governors in capacity. Sometimes we overlook, even though the capacity in Haiti, for example, was severely impaired by the epicenter of the earthquake being so close to Port-au-Prince, but there is local capacity building. Can you talk a little bit about efforts to really ensure that local populations are owning the response so that they do become sustainable and do allow for some of these instances to not occur?

KENNEDY: All right, so first you have to look at the structural issues. India has the third largest number of NGOs in the world. The United States has the second number of NGOs in the world. The country with the largest number of NGOs in the world is Haiti. Now, who’s surprised by that? Everybody is surprised by that. Why is that? The reason that Haiti has the largest number of NGOs is because the Bush administration, in its wisdom said, “Well, we are not going to give any money to the government of Haiti because it’s a cleptocracy and we don’t like Aristide’s politics. And then they put significant pressure on other governments to follow in step.

So basically, there was no money going to the government of the poorest country in the world for eight of the last 10 years. And, that country had no way of creating money internally to run. Imagine a government which can’t afford police, can’t afford a healthcare system, can’t afford to train their teachers and teach them? Everything was done by these NGOs. Now what happens with an NGO as you know, because you’re philanthropists, is that they’ll get a pot of money, they’ll go in and build a project and then either they run out of money or there’s a change at headquarters and they start to work on some other project in some other country and then nothing is left there if you’re not working in conjunction with the government of Haiti.

So what we’re trying to do is make sure that in all the aid that goes forward there is transparency, there’s accountability which are the two issues I talked about earlier, and there’s local participation. That means working with—we have to build the capacity of the people of Haiti. We have to build the capacity of that government. And part of it is financial accountability capacity and part of it is just real world capacity on the ground. It’s so much easier and so much more fun just to go do it yourself, but if you want it to be sustainable and effective long term you’ve got to work with the local population. You have to get their buy in and you have to work through that government so that it can continue after the NGO has left.

REDLENER: You know, just to kind of state that I completely agree with that. The reality is that charity is not a substitute for institution building and for recovery. Charity is something we do to save a life and we must obviously continue to do that. But, the really hard work where big time philanthropy has a very important role is to be thinking always about the leave behinds.

So when your grant is done, when your engagement is over, if you have not left something substantive for that community or that nation in terms of reinforcing, strengthening or rebuilding vital institutions, you have done something very temporary and transient. You have spent money. You may have helped people, but in terms of the long term big picture, you have left that country not having made sufficient progress. I don’t mean to obviously be critical.

All of you and others like you have done really unspeakably fantastic work all over the world. But, the way to maximize your ability to leverage is to make sure that you do nothing that does not have something that you’ve left behind in that country or in that place. And you can, by example, be very helpful to the 15,000 or whatever it is, charities or NGOs that are down in Haiti by showing an example to all of them. People came to us. They want us to help build a mental health program for children who have been affected by the calamity in Haiti. But, my reaction was—yes, if we can work with the Haitian medical school in Port-au-Prince, if we can help develop local resources, if we can train Haitians to continue to the work that happens after the NGOs leave, of course, that is something we want to do. We don’t want to go down there with an army of people who are Americans, or from other countries, do some work, help some people and then, you know, see ya later, we don’t have any more funding and we’ve done nothing to build up that infrastructure. So, I think that’s a message that I think we should be promulgating.

COHEN: Irwin, that’s such an important message and one that Paul Farmer reinforced when he spoke to this group a few years ago, that initially when he went to Haiti they worked in a very parallel track with the government. And he realized quickly that if you don’t engage with the government to build long term capacity then your efforts will really be very limited.

REDLENER: Exactly.

COHEN: I think that’s a perfect note to open up the floor and invite questions and also some perspectives that others might have who have either been engaged in Haiti, or in Pakistan, or in some of the other natural disasters that we’ve seen, or to ask questions. I’m wondering if there are any?

CHUCK SLAUGHTER: Chuck Slaughter from San Francisco. One of the challenges when you’re in a philanthropist position when you want to support something local that’s sustainable and long term as you described. You often face a choice between an indigenous organizations and a multinational organization.

The question I have is, in your experience, where is the better long term return on investment? There’s been a strong move in the last 20 years towards locally planned, locally designed, locally conceived, locally managed. But in many cases I think it’s hard for the indigenous organizations, particularly when there’s 15,000 of them to have an economy of scale, and where our dollars can be really leveraged to help as many people as possible because of course, all the philanthropists in the world don’t have enough money to solve the problem. So do you have a strong point of view about locally owned and managed versus multinationals that have larger economies?

REDLENER: Well, the first thing is, I just want to underscore a point that you just said in passing in your question which is that all of the philanthropies in the world do not have in total—maybe I don’t even know that this is correct—but, I think you all don’t have the resources in total to definitively solve problems. These are problems like the rebuilding of Haiti is a problem for the international community on the scale of the UN and national governments. And that point is part of the humility of being a philanthropist, that you’re not going to solve everything, or definitively, but you’re going to lead the way and you’re going to start programs that have significant consequences and long term effects.

The point about how you actually—and to whom you actually give resources is complicated. You know, I was made Director of Grants for “We Are the World” and “USA for Africa” which I thought was going to be the most fun I’ve ever had in my life since I spent the entire rest of my career asking for money. So, here we had $57 million from sales of the “We Are the World” and we had to spend it in a year.

And I thought, “Well, this is great,” except we got thousands of applications from on the one end of the spectrum were full color glossy bound proposals from World Vision, and then things literally handwritten on parchment from very small indigenous organizations in remote parts of Ethiopia. And trying to sort through this and figure out—where are we going to put money—was excruciatingly difficult to be done, if you want to do it responsibly. So, I think the answer to the question—and I’m beating around the bush while I’m formulating the answer here is…

REDLENER: So the answer is that it really depends. What it depends on is the stability of the organization and its ability—and to go back to what I was saying before—to materially affect something that has some permanence in the area. So, let’s say there’s a very small grassroots organization that has cropped up de novo in the aftermath where you really can’t judge history, you don’t know who they’re connected to or what they’re connected to. You know, I’m going to be a little hesitant.

If it’s an indigenous organization that’s been working with Partners In Health for some time and they look like there’s a history and they look like they can count for something more permanently, then that’s where, to me, where I think you want to go. Do you give to organizations that are huge, to a Red Cross that has an enormous endowment? Do you want to support them? Or, do you want to get more activists?

And I think to me, I’m looking at, where are they going to make a long term difference? And Karen for the Merieux Foundation was talking to me about—they build laboratories which are vitally needed in developing countries and in Haiti for instance. But, they don’t do them in isolation. They do them with the government, with existing institutions there so when they go away, that foundation, they’ll be left with something. So, it’s that kind of very hard work of really understanding who these potential recipient organizations are, and what can you legitimately expect out of them. But, I would lean towards those that are part of Haiti as opposed to just another extension of another, you know, group that’s based in the west some place.

SLAUGHTER: I just want to follow on that. It seemed like there was a flood of dollars in Haiti from many organizations at the beginning of the year. And I haven’t done a study of it, but I assume that the total dollar amount far exceeds the absorptive capacity of most of those organizations in the near term. Is that something you’ve looked at and do you have a point of view about?

REDLENER: Well, I think that’s true because there are very great limits. And as philanthropies and philanthropists get more sophisticated about this, understanding the absorptive capacity is one of the big challenges, and what does that actually mean? So you say, “I want to give a million dollars to work on healthcare.” Who are you giving that to? How long will it take them to absorb that? They have to hire people. They have to set up programs.

You don’t want to give things in a situation like that that are only one year in duration anyway. Maybe the million dollars is a five-year plan that you’ve worked out with the recipient organization so that they have time to build what needs to be built and do it responsibly so it stays permanently. If your money’s going to go to the immediate rescue and response, then yes, you want to use that to leverage very rapid actions to actually save lives. So, it depends on what your objective is, but getting sophisticated about how to relate to and negotiate with those organizations is clearly critical.

KENNEDY: I think it’s very, very hard to answer that question, the abstract without a specific country in mind, or are you talking about an environmental issue, or helping empower girls, or is it education, is it in the health sector? So, it’s kind of hard to answer that. But, I would say this about Haiti. Haiti’s got tens of thousands of NGOs. It doesn’t need a new NGO. What’s happened is that because so much funding has flowed into NGOs, they’ve sort of created a parallel structure to the government, and that has undermined the capacity of the government to function. And therefore, that has harmed the people of Haiti.

One of the reasons that people were frustrated in the aftermath of the earthquake—where the heck is the government? Why aren’t they doing anything? Well, because there is no central command in Haiti because the government was so undermined by the creation of all these NGOs. So what I would say is, some of those are incredibly important and very valuable and doing great work. I would direct my funds to the ones that are working with the government, building capacity and not undermining the efforts to have a central kind of control. Monika?

MONIKA KALRA VARMA: Let me just add to that. I think that just to drive home the point that Kerry made about the way that the funding flows into Haiti—at the end of March we had a hearing before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, and the Haitian government said that since the earthquake, this is the end of March, they had only received $10 million, and the money had come from Ghana, from Ivory Coast. This is what the reality was on the ground.

I think to sort of talk a little bit more about what to look for, I don’t think there’s a black and white particularly in Haiti about indigenous versus international NGOs. International NGOs have a lot of resources and really can make a good difference in Haiti. But I think that there are certain principles that need to be examined. And one is—we say driven by human rights, but really driven by the dignity of the person.

If they’re really looking at what the Haitians need, and the way that they do that is through making sure that there’s a place for them to participate in the projects, to determine what it is that they need, that they have a say in how the project is moving along. And really, to make sure both within the NGO itself and, you know, one of the things we were trying to do was build on the capacity of the government to have accountability mechanisms, to have a complaint mechanism to say, “You know what? You’re a great NGO. You try to do great work, but you’ve actually made it worse in our community. You’ve put the road in the wrong place, or you’ve built the school, but there aren’t teachers there.”

I think that’s also important for building within the capacity of the government because ultimately we want to get to a point where the Haitian government can do its job. And to be strong enough to do that, they need the capacity to also receive those complaints and be held accountable. But I think that what Kerry said about the parallel government in Haiti is critical in that change is only going to come from the donors.

You know, the international NGOs don’t have an incentive to change in Haiti unless USAID says, “You need to partner with the government.” Or, “You need to coordinate with the government.” I think it’s also important to look at—we’re serving as a watchdog or sorts of what’s been going on and we have been for a long time related to foreign assistance, but there are some really great NGOs in Haiti that are trying to do that as well. And so, I think it’s important to not just build, you know, physical structures and schools and things like that, but to really build the capacity within Haiti to hold different people accountable and to do a lot of that monitoring themselves.

COHEN: I think we have time for one or two more questions or comments. Tony?

TONY CUSTER: Hi. My name is Tony, I’m from Lima, Peru. We have had one of the major disasters—I don’t know if it was on the list that was mentioned. But, in August of 2007 we had an earthquake that was a 7.9 on the Richter Scale, and it was off the town of Pisco on the south coast of Peru. It causes a huge tsunami. About 350 people were killed just in the church, in the main church of the Cathedral of Pisco when it landed on top of everybody.

And my question is—the government of Peru had the money to help Pisco get back on its feet. They had the central decision making that we’ve been talking about. It was obviously a local solution. It was something that was happening inside Peru. And I was there just a week ago and the streets are still full of rubble and about half the town fell down and pretty much everything that’s been done is the rubble was moved to one side or another of a given block. As far as I’ve been able to tell talking to people, the main reason is that the local government of Pisco is not in agreement with the national government. So my question is, if we do everything that we’ve just been talking about and we have national or local solutions, we have a single group or a person in charge, we have everything, we have money on hand and nothing happens, how can we ensure that something will happen despite local politics?

REDLENER: I’m glad you asked that Tony. So one of the things we talked about at the table I was sitting at last night is—you have information, you have resources here and then you have policy makers, decision makers who can actually implement whatever it is over here. And one of the things that’s been lacking in the not-for-profit, or the issues community in general, and especially people that are dealing with disaster response are the core political skills to take what we know and make a convincing case to those who are in charge that we need to make a decision now and this is the direction we need to go.

It is amazing to me, because it happens in this country all the time. I mean, that’s why the lower ninth is still a mess in New Orleans. They have not begun to rebuild the healthcare system down there. It’ll be the five year anniversary, which we’re going to do a major thing about later this summer. But, it’s paralyzed. Why is it paralyzed? The same kinds of reasons—tremendous differences in perspective and ideology between the state government and the local government, between the state and local government and the federal government. And then, the administrations changed midstream.

So, all of this really comes down to politics, and I suggest the same is probably true in Peru. Something is breaking down in the political decision making process. And, we haven’t spent much time talking to people who do recovery. We’re talking about this issue. So, you have your idea. Where are you taking that? How are you going to advocate for it in a way that’s not turning people off, but is bringing people along? And one of the dreams I’ve had is to set up a disaster communications program that will help train people to take what they know and make sure that the process begins and follows through to completion.

But otherwise, I mean, by the way, the earthquake in China from May of last year, you know, they were great on the initial response and horrible on the recovery. The Bam quake in Iran years ago is still not recovered. There’s very few examples actually worldwide including the developed countries of successful recovery from large scale mega disasters. I mean, what’s downtown here in Manhattan? What’s going on in Ground Zero? Now we have some steel going up? How many years ago was that? What’s one minus 10?

KENNEDY: 2011, yeah.

REDLENER: Yeah, a long time ago. We just don’t have a grasp on it. This is something that again, the philanthropic community might want to think about—what do we have to do to build up our ability to understand and to do recovery effectively?

KENNEDY: I’d just like to add to that. You know, I think there’s a big role to be played for politics, a big role to be played for development assistance and I’m a lawyer and I think you should be able to sue. I think that if you could hold people accountable in a court of law then they’re going to pay attention. Under the UN Declaration of Human Rights there are political rights—which are the right to free expression, the right not to be beaten up by the police, the right not to be tortured, the right to be protected from genocide. And then, there are economic, social and cultural rights which is the right to education, the right to food, right to water and the right to return.

The Cold War pitted one set of rights against the other. And, the West was an advocate for political rights. We won the Cold War and you can sue on political rights. What we need to do, and what the cutting edge of change in the human rights movement is right now is to make economic, social and cultural rights justifiable so you can hold those people accountable, you can hold bureaucracies and governments accountable for their failures. And if we were successful in doing that, they would be rebuilding in Peru.

COHEN: Great, thank you. Kim, you have a question?

KIM SAMUEL JOHNSON: I’m Kim Samuel Johnson. I’m from Canada and a member of Global Philanthropists Circle. I just wanted to mention one other group because we’ve been talking in this session a lot, and I had the pleasure and honor of moderating a discussion last night at dinner with Irwin and with Monika. And we were talking about health as a human right and water as a human right. And it was really—thank you—it was a great discussion.

But this morning I’ve been thinking a lot about something that we don’t get to talk about so much, not only about disaster relief as GPC members, but also about the important role of government and about supporting governments and building infrastructure. I just wanted to add to this dialogue the private sector, because that seems to be the one sector that hasn’t been mentioned in this discussion when we talk about, for example, Haiti and rebuilding, or the building of Haiti. Monika and Kerry gave me a study about the history of water rights in Haiti for the last 20 or more years. So it’s not even about rebuilding and building, it’s about starting over in a lot of ways.

But, I also would like to suggest and see if the panelists think this makes any sense—that there is a role for not only for philanthropists and not only for government and NGOs, but also for entrepreneurship being much more creative. And to come to where we ended up at our discussion last night and talking to people from a lot of other tables, was the importance of trust and building, to quote Peggy, “Chains of trust through all of this.”

KENNEDY: Thank you. I think that Kim, I’m so grateful for your comments because you’ve kind of pulled it all together and I think that’s exactly what we need to do. There are a lot of different organizations with very good intentions trying to create change, and that is going to happen most effectively if we do work together. And that’s going to require a lot of building of trust and developing those ties to create real change in that country, so thank you.

REDLENER: And Kim, just to emphasize another point that you made, the absence of the private sector, which I was sort of inadvertently including, and when I say philanthropy, it’s not really accurate of what I was thinking. But, what is true is that the private sector has an enormous role to play in every aspect of this. To see how the private sector functions, in many cases, is far more effective than government after Katrina for instance, or what they’re capable of doing. Sometimes they do it through their philanthropic outreach efforts and their philanthropic institutions, but I’m talking about the private sector as is in terms of their ability to deliver things, for instance, to warehouse, to distribute.

You know, 85 percent of America’s infrastructure is privately owned. I mean, it’s a real failure of us not to be thinking about the role of the private sector in not only solving problems, but providing the creativity and innovative and actual assets that make it possible to take on the really, really big jobs. And the more the government itself may be weak, or in the process of rebuilding, the more important that sector becomes, but it’s always important.

You know, the Department of Homeland Security has an office on sort of private sector of liaison—I can’t remember what it’s called. This is the U.S. Department for Homeland Security. They have about 15 people working in that department. There’s 25 million businesses in the United States. So I guess they must have very, very busy days. But, you know, it’s just sort of this impossible disconnect between what we should be doing and what we actually have the capacity to—but a very good point, thank you for bringing that up.

COHEN: Great. Thank you so much Irwin and Kerry, for providing us with your perspectives and your experience. It’s not only a call to action, but a call to thoughtful and coordinated action when we think about when these natural disasters hit and they seem very sudden. But, it’s really a longer trajectory that we should be thinking about. So thanks for stimulating that. And I’m hoping that both of you will be here for at least another bit of the day so that if other people have questions or things that they want to share with you, they’ll have the opportunity. So please join me in thanking Irwin and Kerry.

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