After Hurricane Sandy hit land eight years ago, killing more than 100 people and causing $75 billion in damage, New York Cares quickly mobilized 13,500 volunteers to aid recovery efforts. What the group learned then has helped shape its response to Covid.
New York Cares deploys volunteer leaders who coordinate with nonprofits and are at the site when volunteers show up. That alleviates the primary reason volunteer efforts fail. “We all know the nightmare,” says Gary Bagley, the group’s executive director. “You show up to volunteer, and they forgot you were coming out. And that’s because it’s nobody’s full-time job in most organizations.”
The organization took a similar approach during Sandy. It had nine staff members in hard-hit locations in the city, many areas where it had not worked before.
Coordinators made connections with local nonprofits so when volunteers arrived, they were effective. Bagley says his organization was mindful of its role as an outsider. It built trust and relied on local nonprofits to tell it what was needed. The group was able to commit to its Sandy recovery effort for three years, in part because it raised an additional $3.5 million on top of its $6 million budget.
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Lessons from Sandy have helped the organization respond more effectively during the pandemic — despite big differences between the crises. From the beginning, New York Cares knew that it would need to assign staff to coordinate with nonprofits in the hardest-hit areas, just as it did during Sandy.
The organization has thousands of volunteers who are fluent in a second language. During Sandy, people who spoke Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu canvassed neighborhoods to find people who needed help. When the Covid crisis began, the group immediately started to think about the languages spoken in the hardest hit areas and developed scripts in different languages for volunteers with language expertise to use when they called people. And because of Sandy, the group increased its focus on the safety of volunteers, something that is paramount when volunteering during a pandemic.
“What was a scrappy, let’s pull this together approach in Sandy turned into things that now the organization wants to deploy on a regular basis,” Bagley says.
Unexpected Source of Volunteers
New York Cares was far from the only group of volunteers to help communities recover. Local Rotary clubs volunteered, and the American Red Cross brought in more than 17,000 volunteers.
Yet after Hurricane Sandy, the volunteer effort that marshaled the most people — an estimated 60,000 volunteers — was not an established group but a very different type of entity: Occupy Sandy.
The Occupy Wall Street movement — protests in lower Manhattan that brought attention to America’s wealth inequality — began about a year before Sandy. By the time the hurricane arrived, the group’s members had spread throughout the city and started working on issues such as housing and increasing the minimum wage.
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Occupy organizers developed a close relationship with a local church. The storm spared that neighborhood, and the church became one of the group’s disaster-relief hubs. Organizers fanned out to look for people who needed help in hard-hit parts of the city like the Rockaways in Queens.
They would go to store fronts, cellphone stores, and churches — places where people were gathering — and ask what residents needed and which people or groups knew the most about the needs in those areas.
“These community leaders had already been doing triage for their communities for years or generations. We were very much trying to support the work that they had already been doing,” says Brett Goldberg, a former Occupy Sandy organizer. “It was very much about trying to identify what are the places where people gather, who are the people that that are trusted. and how can we support that.”
The needs in devastated neighborhoods were relayed back to the church and another site where supplies were kept. Volunteers would get the needed items — generators, power tools, shovels, diapers, and more — from towering shelves, and other volunteers would drive the supplies to those who needed them.
The group fed thousands of people a day while also coordinating volunteer efforts. There were people who cooked or delivered meals and supplies, gutted damaged buildings, and canvassed neighborhoods to learn more about the needs there.
“People were pretty grateful to Occupy Sandy,” says Leigh Graham, a senior adviser for the Cities Challenge at Ariadne Labs who studied the role of nonprofits in the storm recovery effort. “They did a lot of cleanup and support in the Rockaways.”
In Red Hook, Brooklyn, a low-lying neighborhood with 10,000 residents in public housing, Occupy Sandy volunteers proved adept at preparing and distributing meals, says Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president for programs at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and a frequent columnist for the Chronicle. During Sandy, she was president of the board of the Red Hook Initiative. “They turned out a lot of people very quickly,” she says. “They were really willing to do anything.”
However, she says, they also antagonized the local police. That was a problem for the Red Hook Initiative since it worked with the police regularly and valued that relationship. While it was a challenging issue to manage, she says, she still valued the help from the Occupy volunteers.
‘Voluntarily Houseless’
Occupy Sandy was so new and untraditional that it was not a nonprofit. The money it raised for Sandy relief had to be routed through another charity that acted as a fiscal sponsor. The staff chose not to be paid so all money went to storm relief. But that made it hard for volunteer organizers to stay with Sandy relief for years on end. Goldberg spent a year with Occupy Wall Street and another with Occupy Sandy, cashing out his retirement savings to do so.
“I was voluntarily houseless for two years,” says Goldberg. “I cashed in every single favor I had. And in order to do that work, I slept on couches, house sat, cat sat. I slept on the street sometimes.”
Although the group was run by volunteers like Goldberg, it was effective. In Staten Island, for example, the group’s volunteers fed large numbers of people. Others did grocery and clothing distribution, and they worked alongside Community Health Action of Staten Island, which was providing mental and physical health services. “They were very collaborative,” says Diane Arneth, the group’s executive director. “They were a good resource for all of us.”
