St. Rose’s Role in the Recovery Effort
It may take as long as 15 years for Hancock County to recover fully from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. A fundamental step in that recovery is creating affordable housing for the individual families that live here. St. Rose Outreach and Recovery operates on the premise that no single family can recover until it has a decent home in which to live. A variety of other organizations are dedicated to helping solve to problem of affordable housing in this area. CityTeam Ministries, Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Social Services, and Camp Coast Care among others, operate with goals similar to our own. By working with these various organizations, St. Rose has been and will continues to be effective in helping families move back into their homes.
Although various organizations collaborate and exchange information, those partnerships can be cumbersome. Immediately following the storm, relief organizations scrambled to help as many people as possible in whatever fashion possible. As a result, each organization developed its own system of assisting residents, usually without communicating information gathered with other groups, so residents found the most effective way to get help was to sign up with every relief organization available. Unfortunately, those individual systems remain today, which translates into organizations with overlapping lists of people who need help. More than once, we have shown up at a job to do work, only to find another organization already working there.
To address that redundancy, we have developed an effective system of cross-checking with other organizations to help residents. If a family signs up with us for help, our case manager makes an appointment with the person to determine whether they qualify for assistance (most families do), then we scout the home to see if the project is viable from a construction perspective, then our case managers check with the other organizations in the area to see who else is helping the family. Finally, we bring the resident to our task force to decide whether or not to adopt the family. This process generally takes less than a week, and by partnering with other organizations on particular projects, we have been effective in working with other organizations to address individuals in need without putting people through unnecessary bureaucracy.
The result of this back and forth communication between groups is a friendly, informal network amongst the various groups. A typical example of this network is our relationship with the organization Camp Coast Care. Camp Coast Care has been awarded a grant from the people of Saudi Arabia to rebuild 150 homes before July. Camp Coast Care will provide the plans and the materials and we will provide the oversight of the project and the labor. We have selected two residents on whose homes we will begin work in May. Our construction manager, Brian Treffeisen, will be the project manager, and we will work with Camp Coast Care to find affordable housing for two families that did not have a place to stay before.
This web of organizations requires extra legwork on the part of our case managers to determine how we can best serve an individual resident, but we have found it to be an effective way to navigate the different needs of the various organizations, and most importantly, we have found it the best way to help a resident through the recovery process. As we finish a project and move a family back into their home, we move onto the next client and begin the process over again. In this manner, we will work from house to house so long as it is feasible.