Page 143 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

112 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

communication between agencies opened. Yet he could not overly influ-
ence the giving criteria of member agencies, many of which kept a Canal
Street boundary in their criteria of “direct” victim.
In response to the evolving systems of aid distribution and in partner-
ship with advocacy organizations like the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and
Education Fund (PRLDEF) and the New York Immigration Coalition, faith
communities that had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in dona-
tions began to find their individual roles in the 9/11 long-term recovery.
Meetings started between representatives of Lutheran Disaster Response
of New York, their case management grantee Lutheran Social Services,
the New York Immigration Coalition, PRLDEF, the Urban Justice Center,
and the FEMA Voluntary Agency Liaison to discuss the idea of creating
an unmet needs table. As this small committee continued its meetings,
strategy was discussed on several levels.
The staff of Lutheran Social Services focused on studying the case man-
agement forms used by Church World Service and UMCOR in response
to other types of disasters. However, aside from Oklahoma City, this was
the first time that an unmet needs table was being developed for a disas-
ter that did not destroy people’s homes, but rather their livelihood and
psychological well-being. As well, in Oklahoma City many of the victims
were government employees, allowing them access to different financial
resources, and the number of victims and economic impact, though real,
was smaller. The World Trade Center disaster in 2001 was an economic
disaster, according to some estimates, destroying one fifth of the office
space in Manhattan. The approach to case management, type of aid avail-
able to clients, and the concept of what a recovery plan would look like for
a client had to be reconstructed.
Rather than rebuilding a roof for a family that still had a job, but whose
home was destroyed by a tornado, people had to rebuild their lives after
witnessing the attack and then losing their job a few days later. Thousands
of people in the hotel, garment, airline, and taxi cab industries were among
the first groups being told that they were not eligible for assistance because
they were not “direct victims.” To make this more clear, a person who lost
a job below Canal Street on December 12, 2001, might have been eligible
for assistance, but a hotel worker who received a letter from his or her
employer on September 14, 2001, laying him or her off in midtown with
explicit language that it was due to the World Trade Center attack would
not have been eligible for assistance. The staff involved with developing
the forms for presentation of cases at the newly forming unmet needs
table had to take all of this into consideration, while the leaders in faith