Steve Saldaña, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Antonio and central coordinator for all volunteer and ministry efforts related to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, was interviewed by Today’s Catholic Editor Jordan McMorrough Oct. 12 regarding the distribution of $1,030,000 raised by Catholics throughout the archdiocese from special collections held throughout September. This interview is the first in a series of articles chronicling the variety of short and long-term relief efforts being funded for hurricane evacuees.

    TC: How would you characterize the impact of the Catholic community on hurricane relief?

    Saldaña: Since day one, the Catholic community has been involved in working with relief for Katrina evacuees. Catholic Charities was very active in the inprocessing of all Katrina evacuees, working side by side with the city of San Antonio and Family Services Association. We helped to process the 13,800 people who came into Building 171 of KellyUSA. What was important about this was it got them registered so we could do ID match-ups later on for missing family members. It also got them the medical treatment they needed; it got them any other needed services. All through that process, there were members of all sorts of different parishes who walked bed to bed talking to people, listening to their stories, helping them, praying for family members, bringing them emotional relief through the trauma. It was fairly immediate that a lot of parishes adopted families, brought them into their homes and the community, helping them to find apartments, taking them to a better environment than the shelters. That’s the immediate impact.

    TC: How has Catholic Charities been impacted by both Katrina and Rita?

    Saldaña: We’ve been there since the very first day. What became evident was that this was not something we could just assign one or two people to and that would solve the problem. The issue was so involved and so encompassing, that we asked every department, every employee to give some of their time to go out and work at the shelters. The shelters have been open now for more than six weeks and Catholic Charities has been there every single day. Every single department was impacted in some way by having to adjust their regular schedules. Certainly the problems of San Antonio did not go away with the advent of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We still had a tremendous amount of our own work to do at the same time trying to stretch ourselves to help other people.

    Catholic Charities immediately formed new partnerships, working again with the city of San Antonio and Family Service Association. We were immediately assigned grants and new work; specifically Catholic Charities was assigned two areas after initial inprocessing. After that we were assigned the responsibility of providing all the long-distance travel for family reunification. When things are catastrophic, there is a state of chaos that occurs. Some family members are pulled to Mississippi, while some family members are moved to San Antonio, and there is a lot of trauma of not knowing where a family member is. By working with the family reunification data bases we started to find out where different family members were and then helped them make the decision about where to go. We have transported over 1,000 people in or out of San Antonio for family reunification. This is an ongoing process and is one of the last specific processes that still continues.

    Catholic Charities has two offices, one in Building 171 and one in the command center at Building 1537, in which we are providing transportation reunification. Once people got into the shelters they had a tremendous amount of needs, chief among these were medical needs. Catholic Charities was asked to provide medical transportation in and around town, helping people get to the hospital, helping them get to dialysis, helping them get to chemotherapy treatments, and that is one of the coordinations we did in working with a local travel service, to provide vans to be able to move people around.

    Day in and day out we have provided case management, working with Family Services, side by side with them, providing case management to the families in the shelters, going bed to bed, setting up tables and offices. We were helping them to find out, “What are your needs?” and if you have these needs in San Antonio, here’s where can you get those needs met. This allowed people to start on the road to recovery, even though they were still in the shelters. There’s been a tremendous amount of work in the shelters.

    Because New Orleans is a predominately Catholic community, a lot of people, as they got out of the community, one of the first places they went to was Catholic Charities or to a parish. So we immediately started getting phone calls from people who had needs. Because San Antonio is a giving community, we immediately started working with St. Vincent de Paul to start storing and working on needed items — especially food, clothing, personal hygiene items. We set up a special center within the Catholic Charities office so that when people came to us we could provide for them immediately. If they needed food, we allowed them to take bags of food with them. If they needed personal hygiene items, we had those there in order to give them immediately.

     We’re now in the process of hiring new staff to provide these services as well as our other staff pitching in until we can get that new staff hired. We have hired four new people and we’re going to be hiring eight evacuees to work with this process over the next six months. St. Vincent de Paul Society has hired six new people to work in the warehouse they are opening up that has been lent to us by BudCo. That warehouse will provide for the ongoing needs over the next six months.

WHERE HAS THE MONEY GONE?
    TC: The Catholic community has raised $1,030,000 so far. At the outset we heard a lot about the Red Cross and the Salvation Army providing all the services. Where does the Catholic Church fit in?

    Saldaña: Catholic Charities and the Catholic Church have traditionally been what are called second responders. You have different stages of a disaster. You have the disaster itself, the rescue, and then you have relief and recovery. You get people in shelters and start taking care of their immediate needs.

    By legislation and statute, the Red Cross and Salvation Army are the first responders of record. They actually provide certain monetary stipends to help people. They work with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and match certain dollars. That provides the immediate relief to help take care of people on the short end. They then have to make decisions depending on the disaster as to what is going to happen with the individuals: whether they are going to go back home, whether their homes are going to be rebuilt, etc. At some point FEMA, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, all their work is done. They have a specific time frame and a specific work responsibility. At that point is when secondary responders become very, very important. This is the first time that Catholic Charities has ever been put in the position of being a first responder, working immediately out in the relief centers. That thrust us into a role we’ve never been in before. Because of the large amount of people coming to San Antonio, the needs that typically go to recovery immediately fell to second responders like Catholic Charities to provide the food pantry relief, the clothing, the immediate needs for gas, transportation, medical needs. All of that fell to Catholic Charities like never before. But we did learn from the floods of the last five years, that the needs of individuals in disasters are ongoing. That’s where the million dollars the archdiocese has raised is going to be used.

TWO APPROACHES TO SPENDING
    It will be used in two fashions. First, we have used a lot of money already to provide immediate relief for people who have needed food, clothing, or some other specific need that fell through the cracks from what FEMA or the Red Cross has done. A good example of that is the furniture we are about to buy. There was going to be a federal furniture program but no one will participate in it because it is very unclear as to who will actually pay for it. Nobody will sign up for it. That means that people go into apartments with no furniture whatsoever. Thanks to programs such as the one the archdiocese is setting up with St. Vincent de Paul Society, we’ll be able to provide furniture, beds and mattresses so that people can immediately start to have their apartment be habitable.

    We’re in the process of buying H-E-B vouchers in which we will be able to give each family a $100 voucher to be able to buy food. That money can also vary on the size of the family. We’ll be able to let them get food immediately so they can start providing for their family. We have leveraged money from the archdiocesan fund to buy gas vouchers. We took $5,000 of the archdiocesan money and got matching funds from the city of San Antonio. We then took this $10,000 to Valero Oil Company and said, “We would like you to match our donation of $10,000 with a donation of your own.” They gave us $10,000, so we now have $20,000 worth of gas vouchers to be able to provide people to go back to their cities, or to those living here, to be able to look for work, to be able to get jobs, to be able to get their lives started again. That’s what these vouchers will be used for.

    We’re in the process of working with VIA to get bus vouchers, so that a person can take the VIA bus around town if they didn’t come here with a car. They can take the bus around town for a month and be able to get transportation to look for work, to go to the doctor, to be able to do the things they need. We have made an agreement with the city of San Antonio to do a $25,000 match for furniture because nobody else will provide that. We told the city of San Antonio if they would give us $25,000 for furniture we would match that. We’re going to be able to buy $50,000 worth of furniture leveraged against this grant to provide furniture for the people in apartments. We know the city of San Antonio has put over 1,000 apartments into use for evacuees, so we know that there are 4,000 to 5,000 people out in the community who need this. To provide furniture to help them get going is going to be important. We’ve been told that one of the number one needs is pots and pans. We’re in the process of working with Wal-Mart and Target to be able to get $100 vouchers from them to be able to let families get the sundries that they need to be able to complement their houses, if they need pots and pans or towels.

    All of this is matched against the tremendous generosity of the people in San Antonio. That’s why we’re helping to fund the warehouse of St. Vincent de Paul. They’ve got the donation of a warehouse from BudCo, but we’re providing the staffing with the archdiocesan fund to be able to provide staffing, we’re going to get a delivery truck, to be able to load that furniture out. St. Vincent de Paul is getting several truckloads from other parishes throughout the state. We’ll be able to complement those donations with funds from the archdiocese. We’re setting up with St. Vincent de Paul a process very similar to Teleton Navideno in which, when they have a family come to them, there will be a request form that will be able to tell us what that family needs. They will be able to make that request of the archdiocesan fund and we will turn around and send that to the parish. If they need help with a deposit, clothes or food the St. Vincent de Paul Conference in that parish will be able to request that.

    We’re spending $100,000 initially with H-E-B, we’re going to spend $100,000 with Wal-Mart or Target, we’re going to spend $30,000 funding the warehouse for the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and in addition if a parish has a project they are working with and they have some special thing they want to have funded they can make that request of the archdiocese. A good example of that is Dress for Success, a small agency in town that is working to provide relief for families and helping them get ready to look for jobs. They have a program where for a very low cost they can help someone get ready to apply for a job. We know that work is going to be an important thing for those people coming here in order to get back on their feet.