Page 148 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Working as an Ally to Underserved Communities 117

in past disasters, MRA had been slated for removal from FEMA’s program
offerings through the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. However, the 9/11
World Trade Center attack was an economic disaster and the scope of its
impact went beyond physical loss of property and human life. Ultimately
approximately 16,500 households facing foreclosure or eviction as a result
of income loss due to the terrorist attacks accessed MRA assistance. Due
to coordinated advocacy between human service organizations, FEMA
expanded its definition of “direct” victim to include all of the residents of
Manhattan and the elimination of the MRA program did not take effect
until October 2002, with last distributions of aid in January 2003. The
elimination of MRA from FEMA’s programs remains an area of concern
for New York organizations that would respond to future disasters.
While this advocacy effort eventually led to expansion of FEMA’s MRA
eligibility criteria so that it included all residents of Manhattan; the evolv-
ing policies of FEMA continued to exclude people living in the other four
New York boroughs—Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx.
Like the Canal Street boundary, the criteria for distribution of FEMA’s
MRA assistance continued to be a point of controversy where two people
with the same disaster-caused needs could be eligible for aid if they hap-
pened to live in Harlem, or not eligible for aid, if they lived in Queens—a
negligible distance of perhaps 5 to 10 miles.
Who would pay attention to such boundaries in the distribution of aid
when the entire world was afraid of a next attack and mourning those
who had died in the Towers? Faith communities stepped into this breach,
while, as noted earlier, most of the large nonprofits distributing assistance
through the United Services Group had restrictions that were, arguably,
as arbitrary as those designed by FEMA. It was exactly these arbitrary and
unnecessarily exclusive categories that the faith community did not abide
by and these populations that the NYC 9/11 Unmet Needs Roundtable
actively sought to serve.
An invaluable legacy of the NYC 9/11 Unmet Needs Roundtable is that
it has allowed us to document the needs of individuals and indeed entire
pockets of people who would otherwise go unnoticed and underserved
because they did not fit the particular eligibility requirements of larger
less flexible programs. Faith-based relief providers stepped into these
breaches, putting together individual aid packages and, in some cases,
entire programs or projects to reach underserved communities. At other
times, faith-based agencies partnered with existing grassroots community
organizations, paying for extra caseworkers, so these groups could bet-
ter distribute relief. It was often faith-based organizations that identified