A Flood of Donations for a Mountain of Need

Lilliam Barrios-Paoli can’t tell you about all the people who need help without breaking down herself.

There are the elderly parents who lost the daughter who paid their mortgage. The families whose survivors’ benefits depend on a death certificate they can’t bring themselves to sign. The people who wander into assistance centers so ravaged that officials wonder if they’re going to make it.

“Some families will never recover,” said Barrios-Paoli, a vice president of New York’s United Way who is at the front lines of efforts to distribute millions of charity dollars to victims of the terrorist attacks. “The more quickly you can bring people back to another reality, the more of a chance they will become productive again.”

Yet, even as nonprofit organizations rush to get cash to the families of some 6,000 dead or missing victims, disagreements are emerging over precisely how to administer a pool of donations that, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, has now surpassed $675 million.

With an estimated 140 entities to help the victims now in existence around the country, the potential for fraud is a mounting concern. The Chronicle reported that the FBI is already looking into a suspicious mass e-mail solicitation for donations.

New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer, who met with government and nonprofit agencies to coordinate relief funds this week, is calling for the creation of a database to keep track of the grants and prevent overlap.

The Red Cross has raised more than $211 million since the attack, and committed $100 million so far to grants that are helping grieving families with three months of emergency funding for everything from burial to bills. The average grant has been between $10,000 and $20,000, officials say.

Officials say getting the money to families quickly is a top priority: The one-page application is being processed, in many cases, overnight.

“We have never faced a disaster of this size, scope or intensity,” Bernardine Healy, president of the American Red Cross, said in a statement.

Checks from the United Way-administered Sept. 11 Fund are also already being distributed, though the official guidelines for the dispersal of funds are still being drawn up and the oversight board has not been named.

Since Monday, between 200 and 400 survivors a day have received emergency grants, typically about $1,000, from the Sept. 11 Fund, Barrios-Paoli said. The grants are being channeled through a social service fund, Safe Horizon, which has received $1.2 million from the fund.

“We gave the agency $700,000, thinking it would last at least a month or two,” she said. “They went through it in just a few days.”

There is a big demand from people who have lost their breadwinner or livelihood yet do not, for some technicality, qualify for relief under existing disaster relief rules, she said.

For example, there is the window washer at Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat atop the north tower of the World Trade Center, who is alive because he happened to have a day off Sept. 11--but now has no way to support his family. There is the ex-wife and children who do not qualify for the survivors’ benefits of a man who had remarried and started a new family.

Distributing money quickly is essential after disasters to prevent the chain reaction of misfortune and stress that can push people into a downward slide, she said.

“It’s important that we help people normalize their lives as quickly as possible,” Barrios said. “It’s very difficult, even at this stage, to know long term what each family is going to need. Some people are resilient, and other families are not.”

In New York, people who walk into family assistance centers are getting emergency counseling, and even back rubs, she said.

“A lot of people need to talk about what they saw,” she said. “They saw people jumping from the building. They saw their best friend killed.”