re: #104 sagehen

I’m a traditionalist; I just assume Red Cross has the institutional memory, warehouses full of supplies and sufficient personnel and transport.

They don’t. Unfortunately the Red Cross has a terrible track record of late, their responses to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was heavily criticized. So too were their 2012 efforts for Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac.

The Red Cross botched key elements of its mission after Sandy and Isaac, leaving behind a trail of unmet needs and acrimony, according to an investigation by ProPublica and NPR. The charity’s shortcomings were detailed in confidential reports and internal emails, as well as accounts from current and former disaster relief specialists.

What’s more, Red Cross officials at national headquarters in Washington, D.C. compounded the charity’s inability to provide relief by “diverting assets for public relations purposes,” as one internal report puts it. Distribution of relief supplies, the report said, was “politically driven.”

During Isaac, Red Cross supervisors ordered dozens of trucks usually deployed to deliver aid to be driven around nearly empty instead, “just to be seen,” one of the drivers, Jim Dunham, recalls.

“We were sent way down on the Gulf with nothing to give,” Dunham says. The Red Cross’ relief effort was “worse than the storm.”

In additions they took in half a billion dollars in donations for the Haiti earthquake and nobody seems to know how it was spent.

NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success, according to a review of hundreds of pages of the charity’s internal documents and emails, as well as interviews with a dozen current and former officials.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.

The Red Cross long has been known for providing emergency disaster relief — food, blankets and shelter to people in need. And after the earthquake, it did that work in Haiti, too. But the Red Cross has very little experience in the difficult work of rebuilding in a developing country.

The organization, which in 2010 had a $100 million deficit, out-raised other charities by hundreds of millions of dollars — and kept raising money well after it had enough for its emergency relief. But where exactly did that money go?

Ask a lot of Haitians — even the country’s former prime minister — and they will tell you they don’t have any idea.

This last Pro Publica article is incredibly well sourced and informative. It breaks down how the Red Cross is primary a business that takes in donated blood and sells it, spending $2.2 billion annually mostly employee salary and benefits while on average spending less than a fifth of that on disaster response. All while deceptively conflating the money spent on operating the blood business with their charity spending for reporting purposes. They purposely cloud their operating efficiency and refuse to provide transparency when questioned about specifics.

In recent years, the Red Cross’ fundraising expenses alone have been as high as 26 cents of every donated dollar, nearly three times the nine cents in overhead claimed by McGovern. In the past five years, fundraising expenses have averaged 17 cents per donated dollar.

But even that understates matters. Once donated dollars are in Red Cross hands, the charity spends additional money on “management and general” expenses, which includes things like back office accounting. That means the portion of donated dollars going to overhead is even higher.

Just how high is impossible to know because the Red Cross doesn’t break down its spending on overhead and declined ProPublica and NPR’s request to do so.

The difference between the real number and the one the Red Cross has been repeating “would be very stark,” says Daniel Borochoff of the watchdog group CharityWatch. “They don’t want to be embarrassed.”