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9/11 aid groups close or adapt as money wanes

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Gwendolyn Sinning
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« on: August 17, 2008, 04:27:21 am »

9/11 aid groups close or adapt as money wanes

By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 16, 1:42 PM ET
 


NEW YORK - Terry Grace Sears knows she has still has work to do helping the families of Sept. 11 victims, seeing the proof last week on the faces of kids just beginning to open up about their parents' deaths in the terror attack.

 
"This year, some kids were able to express things for the first time," Sears said after a summer retreat for the children. "Particularly the young boys were grieving."

But Sears, executive director of a charity called Tuesday's Children, isn't sure how many more kids she will be able to help. Her agency and others like it are struggling to stay afloat as donations dry up nearly seven years after the attack.

Several are closing, some are cutting budgets and others are rethinking their purpose as donors become harder to persuade.

"We fight every day for money," said Sears, whose charity cut its staff by a third last year to 11 people.

The groups sprang up after Sept. 11, offering everything from counseling to music lessons to families of the victims. They have long relied on funding from an American Red Cross long-term relief fund that distributed more than $1 billion in direct aid and recovery grants to over 100 organizations.

But on June 30, the Red Cross distributed its last $40 million to 26 groups it still funded. Two groups have grants that last a few more months.

"We have no more money to award," said Joan Hernandez, deputy director of the Red Cross' Sept. 11 recovery program. The program used to have nearly 300 employees and now has two, she said. "We will be gone at the end of the year."

The last grants included $1.37 million to South Nassau Communities Hospital on Long Island, which shut down counseling programs for thousands of family members and first responders when the Red Cross funding expired. One of those programs, the World Trade Center Family Center, recently changed its name to 9/11 Forward to help participants look to the future.

The nonprofit New York Disaster Interfaith Services is ending its Sept. 11 program on Oct. 31, said Scottie Hill, the program's director of disaster recovery and advocacy services. The program manages the cases of 300 survivors and first responders, primarily with health issues. More than 50 new clients a month call for services but the organization can't take them, Hill said.

Most private foundations say they are no longer funding Sept. 11 programs, Hill said.

"The public at large really does think ... why haven't people moved on," Hill said. "There's also a population of people who have been very active in 9/11 recovery that know that this is very real."

Programs treating ailing ground zero workers exposed to toxic dust can still seek funding from Congress and state and city government, but counseling and community programs don't have that option.

"Many donors, in terms of mental health services, begin to ask the question whether the trauma is really related to 9/11 anymore or not," said Melissa Berman, CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which creates fundraising strategies for over 100 major donors. "I think many donors feel a sense of responsibility to make a one-time response to this kind of disaster, but rarely an ongoing one."

But ongoing is precisely how charities like Tuesday's Children see their mission. The organization has offered programs to more than 5,000 Sept. 11 family members, and Sears sees the repressed grief of still-struggling children as evidence of the community's long-term need for groups like hers.

Dr. Minna Barrett, a psychologist who ran programs for the World Trade Center Family Center, said first responders in particular repressed their trauma and waited years before seeking support.

"People sort of build walls around it," she said. "It's a culture that doesn't orient people to seeking help. Responders are supposed to be tough."

Barrett warned her clients of the center's closing, and encouraged them to continue to meet in peer support groups. More than 6,000 families and first responders have been served by the programs, including nearly 700 the past year.

"The effects of 9/11 continue," said Anthony Gardner, a Sept. 11 family member whose World Trade Center United Family Group was among those receiving Red Cross grants.

Gardner has run the organization from central New Jersey with a few interns and a bookkeeper since 2003, and says it could eventually become a volunteer operation.

"The effects of 9/11 continue," he said. "We need to be able to be there for people who need us."

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