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Meeting the Open and Transparent Platform - a new Gulf Coast demand
8/15/07 Kathleen Johnson
Kathleen Johnson is a long term full time volunteer who has been working in Waveland, Hancock County, Mississippi, since just after the onset of the storm. She currently operates her own disaster relief agency serving a growing list of 1500 clients. Her fiscal arm is the Waveland Citizens Fund - a registered 501 (c) 3. Website: http://www.wavelandcitizensfund.org
8/16/07 Kathleen Johnson
Open door leadership has not been the foundation of many of the boards working on the relief effort in the aftermath of Katrina. With the threat of losing “power and control", and a hierarchical finger-pointing culture that traditionally drilled down to the one root-cause analysis of mistakes and assigned blame, relief organizations are poorly prepared for the Gulf Coast resident movement that is demanding openness and transparency from the various and sundry non profit 501 ( c ) 3 platforms that have emerged since the onset of Katrina. The residents, now clients, want to be recognized and respected as the directors of their own long term recovery.
Non Profits set up for relief efforts owe this transparency to the public. To make informed reconstruction decisions, clients, now consumers, can easily access the Internet for information on any other subject. But they can not easily access information about the benefits and grants available to them as victims of the storm. It must become usual, rather than unusual, that all residents know what their outcome measures are, how those compare to other Disaster Relief Organizations benefits and grants, and what improvements are possible, and in place, to improve the process for grant, benefit applications and disbursement of goods and building materials associated with the relief effort.
When clients ask questions about outcomes often they are told that policies vary widely from disclosure to nondisclosure However, there is a pent-up demand of residents to be full and respected partners of the recovery process. This should be forcing the organizations and non profits to full disclosure – but it is not.
One organization in Hancock County has taken the step, under the pretext of client confidentiality, to force the Case Mangers to sign an excessive Confidentiality Agreement that disallows them from discussing anything brought up in their closed door meetings regarding clients, grants, or the process. This closes the door for the Case Manger to pass on the “good news” of any new available funds that may be available from that non profit to any Case Manager that might not have been at the meeting, a consumer looking for a long term recovery solution on the internet, or any other relief worker looking for solutions for a client. And to further compound the consumer accessing the information, the non-profit refuses to disseminate information via email or by publication on a website. All matters relating to the non profit charged with distributing funds via the Governor of Mississippi are hidden behind corporate doors in an organization that has a policy that is not open or transparent. That same organization is openly hostile to anyone attempting to inform the public of the ongoing issues with failure to distribute funds made available thru Governor of Mississippi to the Gulf Coast Recovery Fund in an amount over two million dollars.
Openness is one of the most important characteristics upon which we judge the character of a person or an organization. As the operating framework of partnership - transparency is one thing that our residents here in the Gulf Coast expect. Our ability to handle openness will be an all important way in which the credibility of the organizations we deal with will be judged.
The abuses because of lack of openness and transparency have led the public to question our integrity as relief workers. It is time for all organizations dealing with relief work to have an open and transparent platform with regard to mission statements, board members inclusive of email address and phone numbers, policies, funds, grants and benefits and all other available resources including supplies. | 
