by Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune
A network of private relief workers that helped thousands of battered families put their lives together after Hurricane Katrina has begun unraveling with thousands of families still on waiting lists, even as its managers cast about for new sources of money to keep it going at a reduced level.

As the network shrinks, about 4,600 families will have to wait longer for help, officials of the network said. Some might become entangled in more red tape — and face longer waits — as their files are shifted from laid-off workers into new hands.

Members of the network are sorting through their cases, trying to prioritize which families need immediate help before the program shuts down March 31 and their cases are transferred, said Tom Costanza, a local Catholic Charities relief executive who leads the board of the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership, a coalition of private relief groups.

"We're tying to correct it at all levels, but no question it's going to have an impact," he said.

Nationwide network

At its peak the network called Katrina Aid Today said it paid the salaries of 400 case workers across the country who helped families, some of them homeless, repair their lives. Nearly 175 worked in the New Orleans area, officials said.

Nationally, the network helped nearly 200,000 people and disbursed nearly $138 million in goods and services, spokeswoman Enid Johnson said.

In many instances the case workers used their contacts in the social-service world simply to lead bewildered families through the labyrinth of post-Katrina aid, relief officials said.

But often case workers also doled out some tangible help directly from their own organization's resources: a utility deposit, a refrigerator, or placement on a list to receive volunteer-hung drywall to speed a family's return to a damaged house.

In addition, case workers sometimes presented their client-families' continuing, unmet needs at a regular regional round table of cooperating private agencies. There, as officials explained, a case worker from the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana might profile a family's continuing needs and get a commitment for rebuilding help from a Methodist volunteer center.

Grant ends March 31

The case workers' salaries were paid out of $66 million in international donations, much of it from the nation of Qatar on the Arabian Peninsula. The money made its way through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the United Methodist Committee on Relief, which in 2005 constructed a national partnership of 10 secular and faith-based relief organizations, including charitable arms of the Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal churches, as well as the Salvation Army.

To varying degrees those agencies used shares of the Qatar grant to hire additional caseworkers to help Katrina victims.

But the grant ends March 31, and the ranks of the caseworkers that it financed have been dwindling for months, headed for zero at the end of the month, when Katrina Aid Today essentially goes out of business.

Relief workers around New Orleans say there are many more caseworkers in New Orleans than those financed by Katrina Aid Today.

In fact, Kay Wilkins, chief executive officer of the American Red Cross' Southeast Louisiana chapter, said that agency, which is not in the Katrina Aid Today partnership, recently hired nearly three dozen new caseworkers and supporting staff to push $18 million in Red Cross relief money into the community by autumn.

'Bridge funding' urged

Even so, Katrina Aid Today was the largest collective supporter of case management, said Kimberly Durow, director of Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership, which coordinates private aid across the metropolitan area.

Katrina Aid Today produced figures indicating it had provided significant help to more than 9,000 families locally. Durow said that number is probably a significant undercount, given the relatively haphazard reporting that marked the program's early months.

"You have this infrastructure: people who are already providing the services. They know how to work with their client, they know the databases, they know the processes, they know how to present cases to the round table," said Nell Bolton of the Episcopal Diocese's Office of Disaster Response.

"You have that infrastructure that will go away March 31 if there's not bridge funding," Bolton said.

Ironically, Costanza and others said Katrina Aid Today was winding down only a few months after the round-table technique of sharing resources was truly finding its feet.

Costanza said the round table's first year and a half was a long learning curve, filled with relative inefficiency as partners learned new skills in a damaged environment more daunting than any had seen before.

He drew an indirect comparison to the Road Home and its private contractor, ICF, which engineered the state's famously tangled system to funnel federal relief to homeowners.

"For better or worse we got caught up in the same thing about making sure there was no duplication of benefits," he said. "Making sure there was no hanky-panky going on. So we made it real hard. We were like the ICF of the nonprofit world. We went overboard about being too careful."

But Costanza said that after streamlining breakthroughs took hold last fall, the New Orleans area round table has been pumping out increasing amounts of aid to more and more families, rising from $380,000 in goods or services given to 27 families in November, to $1.3 million given to 91 families in February.

Most of those cases were pushed by partners in Katrina Aid Today, Durow said.

"The whole system is humming now," Costanza said.