Kevin Murphy doesn’t want his hometown of Reading, Pa., to join the list, but he feels it’s almost inevitable.
The president of the Berks County Community Foundation, in Pennsylvania, has watched as the tally of mass shootings across the country has grown: Thousand Oaks, Calif., Las Vegas, Parkland, Fla., Charleston, S.C., Pittsburgh.
Murphy believes that the grants made by the foundation to education, health, and the arts make Reading a better place to live, he says. But after mass murders in El Paso and Dayton in August, he decided that the foundation had to add another role: philanthropic first responder.
Murphy is one a growing number of community foundation leaders who fear that their city will be next. In Berks County as in communities across the nation, regional grant makers are taking steps to prepare for how to best respond to the trauma that follows an attack. Over the past year, the Council on Foundations has received a growing number of phone calls from community foundation leaders who want to prepare for the worst. The council is in the process of putting together materials gleaned from foundations that have already responded to incidents of violence in their cities, so that others can get ready.
“We want to memorialize what people are learning,” says Kathleen Enright, the council’s chief executive. “These are rapid-response situations, and we want folks to have at their fingertips what others have already learned.”
The next attack could happen anywhere, says Murphy.
“We have our share of people with mental-health issues. We have our share of large gathering places. And we have at least our share of guns,” he says. “That’s the tinder, you know. This isn’t something we’re going to prevent.”
Getting Ready
Murphy has already started preparing, by reaching out to the Berks County Department of Emergency Services and the regional director of the Red Cross, to join in preparing for a rapid, coordinated response.
The region doesn’t get a lot of practice dealing with emergencies. The Schuylkill River, which runs through the city, occasionally floods but doesn’t cause much damage, Murphy says. Reading’s biggest natural calamity, the Pennsylvania Cyclone, killed 17 people in 1889.
The meetings helped Murphy appreciate how difficult it is to plan for a catastrophic event. Each one is different, the officials told him, and residents and their families will have different needs. Rather than compile a list of nonprofits to which support should be directed after an attack, Murphy focused on designing a fund that can be deployed quickly and with a minimum of bureaucracy.
He plans to present the foundation’s Board of Directors a detailed response plan in December. Among other things, he’d like the board to preauthorize a grant “in the $50,000 range” that staff members could use at their discretion, to do things like to buy gifts cards for victims who have been separated from their belongings.
The process does make Murphy a bit uneasy. “This is a little like writing your will,” he says.
Learning From Others
Unfortunately, there are more than a few peers Murphy can call on for help: leaders of community foundations where killers have already struck.
In the days after a gunman shot and killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart on August 3, donations to the area’s two regional community foundations, El Paso and Paso del Norte, poured in. Children raised cash from lemonade stands, and food-truck operators, tattoo artists, and residents throughout the community wanted to chip in.
The two foundations decided to pool the gifts — which totaled more than $6 million as of October — into the One El Paso Fund and place it in the National Compassion Fund, a program of the National Center for Victims of Crime. The center, a 501(c)(3) organization, ensures that all of the money goes directly to people affected by the killings, with no credit-card fees or other expenses.
“We learned early on that there are donors interested in giving funds directly to victims, and we had to have a unique fund for that, that wouldn’t be used for any other purpose,” says Tracy Yellen, chief executive officer of the Paso del Norte Community Foundation. “There are immediate needs for people who were physically present and affected, and there’s long term community healing. There winds up being a need for different pockets of resources, and donors are able to choose.”
The community foundations held public meetings and developed a protocol for how to disburse the money in the One El Paso Fund. The grant makers decided that victims would receive different amounts of charitable assistance, based on whether they were a loved one of someone killed, had themselves been injured and hospitalized or injured and received outpatient care, or had sought help for psychological trauma.
Victims can apply for assistance through November 8, and donations to the fund will be accepted through November 25. The amount each person receives will depend on how much the fund collects.
In the meantime, the Paso del Norte Community Foundation has been helping victims with gift cards and money orders. It provided $500 a week at first, and then upped that to $1,000 in October With help from Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, the grant maker assessed whether the proper family members of victims were receiving the assistance, and whether the extra money put them over income limits that would cut them off from any public benefits they receive.
Lessons From Pittsburgh
On October 27 of last year, a man walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people as they were gathered for morning services on the Sabbath. Within hours, as parts of the city remained on lockdown, the Pittsburgh Foundation issued a statement that expressed grief, thanked law enforcement and emergency responders, and called on local nonprofits, including the Jewish Community Center and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, to look to the foundation for support.
Two days later, the foundation put out a “critical needs” alert, using the hashtag #LoveIsStronger, and gave people a suggested list of charities participating in the response. The foundation committed a total of $150,000 in matching gifts. The campaign raised $800,000 in three days for organizations including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Fraternal Order of Police lodge that was managing a fund to help officers wounded in the attack, and the Jewish Community Center.
Now the Pittsburgh Foundation is looking to make a long-term difference.
Lisa Schroeder, who became president in June, wants the grant maker to do more than to provide a salve to physical and emotional wounds. She envisions a new line of grant making dedicated to reducing gun violence and reducing the proliferation of firearms.
“Our staff is conducting wide-ranging research about where we are in terms of legislation and data and getting our arms around the issue,” she says. “We’re interested not just in where the funding opportunities are. We’re also interested in where the advocacy opportunities are. We take that responsibility very seriously.”
Common Goals
Other community foundations may take a similar tack. CF Leads, a network of community-foundation leaders, is using a $50,000 grant from the California Wellness Foundation for a study to gauge interest among regional grant makers in supporting ways to reduce gun violence.
The grant is an attempt to “take the temperature” of regional funds to see where their interests overlap, says Alex Johnson, who directs violence-prevention programs at California Wellness. Mass killings are anomalies, he says, but they can focus community foundations from different regions, whether small towns or large cities, on preventing gun deaths.
“For many community foundations, figuring out how to respond to a mass shooting is the first entry point into that space,” Johnson says. “At the end of the day, it’s all gun violence.”
Assessing Readiness
For Randy Royster, president of the Albuquerque Community Foundation, the first step to prepare for a violent attack is to make sure his employees and visitors to the foundation are safe. After the El Paso shootings, he assembled a team to assess security and to develop a plan for communicating with employees and grantees should an attack occur.
Royster hopes that others in Albuquerque can use the plan as well. “Because we’re the major funder in our community,” he says, “we want to put something together that would be easy for other nonprofits or businesses that support the foundation to take and tweak to fit their respective locations.”
He has also established a $10,000 fund to be used in case of an emergency, with the expectation that if there were a mass killing, more money would arrive from donors.
Since he left his career as a businessman and lawyer, in 2005, Royster has put a lot of effort into supporting the arts, education, and health care in the region. He didn’t think getting into philanthropy would mean getting prepared to help gunshot victims.
“You know,” he says, “random acts of violence never crossed my mind.”
