LETTING GO : A Year Later, Hands Across America Goes Low Profile

What a difference a year makes.

On Monday, one year after Hands Across America, the only official event commemorating the linking of some 5.6 million Americans across the country last Memorial Day will be the dedication of a monument at the site of the Queen Mary.

The Hands line ran from Manhattan to the luxury liner-turned-amusement park, permanently moored at Long Beach.

“There are a lot of photos . . . something like a collage,” said Dave DePinto, public affairs spokesman for Coca-Cola, which underwrote the $10,000 cost of the Queen Mary exhibit. “About 1.5 million people every year will pass through it.”

He described the monument as an 8-by-10-foot back-lit wall where about 60 photos shot on Hands Across America day will be on display. In front of the wall will be a separate relief map of the United States depicting the route of the Hands line.

“It’s almost like a photo opportunity for the family. They can stand next to it and have their picture taken,” DePinto said. “Also, we’ll put a little box there with envelopes for contributions.”

Dedication festivities get under way at 1 p.m. on Monday and everyone who visits will receive a free Hands Across America sun visor, DePinto said.

In the last six months, the pop charity has spent almost all of the $33.9 million that it raised with its 15-minute transcontinental singalong last May 25.

The sponsoring USA for Africa Foundation has about $3 million in Hands grants left to award and expects to give all of it away to projects aiding the homeless and hungry by the end of September. About 500 applications for the last $3 million have been winnowed to 75 finalists, said foundation communications director Joyce Deep.

As the Hands staff has pored over these final proposals, the foundation has evolved into a low-profile, down-scale operation. The public image and private reality of USA for Africa is subdued. Outside of the irregular grants announcements and the unveiling of the Hands monument, there are no major public events in the immediate future, said foundation president Ken Kragen.

Gone are celebrity-studded press conferences and other media events. Gone are the flood of Coca-Cola sponsored TV, radio and magazine commercials that urged Americans to stand in the line. Gone, too, is most of the Hands Across America staff which, at its height, numbered more than 450 full-time and dozens more part-time and temporary employees. But the foundation has no intention of putting itself out of business. In a board meeting Tuesday, the 12 directors did some talking about future fund-raising plans. Because foreign royalties on sales of “We Are the World” continue to come in from overseas (“About $3 million so far this year,” said Kragen), generating immediate income is not a problem.

But the man who came up with the idea in the first place refuses to let the Hands legacy become just a photo opportunity at the stern of the Queen Mary.

“The really legitimate question to ask is whether or not any of this has done any good,” Kragen said last week. “That’s what this is really all about. Not whether our offices in Century City were plush.”

Because USA for Africa has been battling the public’s perception of the Hollywood-based organization as glitzy and glamorous almost from its inception, scant media attention has been paid to the $50 million in both African and U.S. relief grants that his foundation has delivered, Kragen complained.

Along with everything else that has plagued the public image, Kragen pointed out, the offices on two floors of a Century City high-rise have also vanished. These days, a crew of 27 full-time employees works out of 12th-floor offices near Los Angeles International Airport. But Kragen and his staff emphasize, the old offices in Century City were comfortable, but never plush.

“For the sake of comparison, we were paying about 99 cents a square foot (for rent in Century City) and we’re paying 85 cents a square foot now,” said Deep.

Since moving into the new offices in March, employees have made a point of trying to ignore such criticisms. They have been more involved in meeting a self-imposed May 25 deadline for giving away $12 million of the $15 million netted by Hands Across America.

The foundation is continuing to solicit donations. The music video/documentary of “Hands Across America” went on sale May 13 in record stores for $14.95. A portion of that price will go to the foundation and each videocassette contains a postage-paid “Keep the spirit alive!” envelope for mail-in contributions.

The second edition of a quarterly eight-page newspaper, “USA for Africa/Hands Across America Update,” was mailed out to 75,000 businesses and individuals last week. In addition to reports on how several million dollars in foundation funds are being spent on both African and American relief projects, the newspaper contains clip-out coupons asking for donations ranging from $10 to $100.

But lately the emphasis has been on spending rather than raising money, according to Kragen. Last summer, Executive Director Martin Rogol created a complicated, multitiered grant review process that involved months of volunteer effort from thousands of relief professionals.

A national 37-member panel of relief experts drafted grant guidelines that were distributed to organizations in each state. Committees formed at the state level authored proposals on how to spend the money and the proposals were then reviewed by the foundation staff and a second national organization of experts known as the Program Review Board. Proposals were often sent back two and three times to the state committees to be revised but, ultimately, they went to the foundation board of directors for final approval.

The grueling process was designed to maximize equitable distribution of the money to as many of the most-needy organizations, according to foundation officials.

In California, there was some grumbling from agencies that didn’t win grants. Officials at homeless shelters in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, which the Hands line passed, complained to local newspapers that they did not share in the $1.2 million that 51 California organizations received.

But Gene Boutilier, a United Way official who sat on the 26-member California Organizing Committee of Hands Across America, called such criticism “making a mountain out of a mole hill.

“I live in Alhambra,” he said. “Pomona was funded. (The Pomona Valley Council of Churches received a $7,000 Hands grant.) Alhambra wasn’t. Is that fair?”

Catherine Camp, a Sacramento advocate for the poor, chaired the California Organizing Committee and had nothing but praise for the Hands hierarchy. Instead of telling committee members how they were to spend the money, USA for Africa officials asked them how to spend it, she said.

“It’s the first time I know of any funding agency doing that,” Camp said. “My hat is off to them. I could criticize the way they ran their operation just as I could criticize how we decided to spend the money. If we had two years to decide, maybe we would have done a better job. But they listened, they let us define the needs and they were very supportive.”

Kragen pointed out that 700 proposals came in for California seeking six times the $1.2 million that the foundation had available to spend.

“This is the evidence (that the process worked),” he said of the list of about 1,700 grants that have been made since the beginning of 1987. “I’m proud. Proud of the 7 million people (who contributed and/or stood in the Hands Across America line) and the staff that stood up to the criticism.”

Only one state organizing committee openly mutinied against the process. The New York Organizing Committee called a press conference May 1 in Manhattan to challenge the foundation to “go with our plan or disband us.

“The Hands Across America guidelines say that donated funds should go to fight poverty, hunger and homelessness,” New York state committee chair Robin Morgan said in a prepared statement. “Our proposal took that mission seriously. But the Hands Across America bureaucracy would prefer we fund New York City’s institutionalized poverty pimps. They’re sitting on our plan.”

Morgan and the other 11 members of the committee that foundation officials selected to write the New York state proposal, held that existing shelters, food banks and relief agencies only perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

Their proposal called for spending most of the $839,000 that the foundation had earmarked for New York on advocacy and publicity campaigns to aid the poor. The New York allotment was too small to do much good if put to use in any other way, Morgan said, so they planned to put about $500,000 into a Children’s Survival Fund.

Kragen said the plan was “like asking us to give them a blank check.”

That proposal was rejected, so the committee drafted a plan to set up a lottery for the poor and simply give it away to lucky street people. That plan also was rejected.

Committee members didn’t just complain about their rejected plans at the press conference. They also criticized foundation officials for their alleged bureaucratic red tape and high overhead.

“The proposal is hardly the only problem here,” said New York committee member Theresa Funiciello. “A number of us in New York have observed the frivolous practices of the Los Angeles office. They have made a mockery of every American who clasped hands last spring, who donated money, who participated in the state committee organized to dispense the funds.”

Four days after the press conference, Rogol sent a letter to the committee thanking them for their work and telling them that they were disbanded.

Last week, the USA for Africa directors approved a partial set of grants for New York consisting of funds for shelters, food banks and other existing relief agencies. The money that would have gone into the Children’s Survival Fund will be spent later this summer.

Despite the frustrations of the grant process, committees in the remaining 49 states had ultimately been able to cooperate and come up with proposals satisfactory to all levels of the grant review process.

“Just our luck that the one state where we have a problem is the media capital of the country,” Kragen said.