From the
Washington Post, 12/14/2005, A01
Marsha Evans, executive director of the Red Cross resigned her $495,000/year position in the midst of a Congressional investigation. Ms. Evans' $495,000 salary represents a 50% raise from pay in 2001. Her acting replacement is from Blood Services -- one would have wished for an Emergency Services person in the position.
The Red Cross received raving-mad reviews from representatives of both parties who were in Congress and doing their jobs. More below the fold...
Evans's exit "raises some serious questions about the mission and viability of the organization," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, who has criticized the Red Cross's response to Katrina. "Frankly, it is not clear to me that new leadership alone will cure the ills of the Red Cross."
[...]
At the congressional hearing yesterday, Rep. Jim McCrery, a Louisiana Republican, assailed the Red Cross and called on Congress to consider whether to continue giving the charity a lead role in responding to natural disasters, the Associated Press reported. The designation gives the organization a substantial advantage in fundraising.
Too bad for us that it was a Republican who dared bring up the Lead Responder issue. The American Red Cross is monitored by several Congressional committees as part of its lead-responder role, making it almost a quasi-governmental agency.
But members of Congress, civil rights groups and Katrina evacuees have criticized the Red Cross performance. They complained of long lines and lengthy phone delays when evacuees tried to get financial assistance from the organization. They also said the charity was insensitive in its treatment of minority evacuees. Evans's exit comes at a time when the Federal Emergency Management Agency is also under scrutiny.
An accusation of racism against the Red Cross is particularly shocking, more shocking than embezzlement. The Red Cross doctrine of Neutrality saw conservative Christians disbursing benefits and checks to surviving same-sex and unmarried partners after 9/11.
But, chapters are governed by people who volunteer to be on the chapter board, and those positions tend to be taken by donors, politicians and the connected. A couple board members (out of 10 or 15) may actually volunteer for other Chapter work. If a chapter board's dominated by a racist cabal, too bad, for it often picks its own members.
Easily 90% of people who wear the Red Cross would be saints except for their continued breathing on Earth. Thousands of volunteers live lives of perpetual disruption so they can assist the Red Cross in disaster relief. The volunteer workers you see travelling the country in the first days after a disaster are people who have chosen underemployment so they could have three weeks off on a weekend's notice. These volunteers are chosen from the people called to house fires, which tend to take place in the worst parts of town in the middle of the night. Paid staff at the chapter level work to the point of exhaustion after 9/11 -- six weeks of unpaid overtime without a day off -- and I can state from experience that outside 9/11, the pay was sometimes bad enough to invite intervention from a red-state Wages and Hours Division -- but who would rat on the Red Cross?
Update: NBC News tonight, in its "In-Depth" report, showed a volunteer in tears crying that she was ashamed of the organization and never wants to wear the Red Cross again. It also accuses the American Red Cross of disbursing only $180 million of over $500 million raised for tsunami aid and mentioned the $5 million in FDA fines levied against Blood Services this year.
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In closing, one purpose of having a quasi-official volunteer network is to avoid charity scrums, the unedifying spectacle of charities stepping on each others' toes to get to victims and snap pictures before other charities do. Until New Orleans, this was best practice, even to the point where UN Administrators are provided with a (figurative) chair and whip to make sure that charities and NGOs don't step on each other's toes. Unfortunately New Orleans provided spectacles even less edifying than a charity scrum.