Sept. 11 survivor charity ends

The funds helped families in a variety of ways.

Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Nearly seven years after a hijacked airplane crashed into the Pentagon, the largest charity established to help Washington area victims and their families is closing, becoming the last major Sept. 11-related charity to shut down.

The Survivors’ Fund raised $25 million from more than 12,000 area residents and businesses in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and spent it over the subsequent years treating the grieving, the distressed and the traumatized.

The charity’s closure brings an unofficial end to the nation’s philanthropic response to the attacks, in which millions of people donated $2.7 billion — at the time an unprecedented sum of private dollars — to hundreds of charities.

Although some leading charities cut large checks to the families of victims, the Survivors’ Fund followed a unique approach to giving, establishing a long-term personal trust of sorts for the victims, their families and first responders. Using a model similar to the one used after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the Survivors’ Fund hired professional case managers to work with families one-on-one to help them move beyond their grief, heal their bodies and return to work.

That meant paying household bills for families who fell behind and guiding survivors to medical care and mental health counseling. If a family’s primary breadwinner had been lost, the charity helped other family members return to school and find jobs.

“There really was no way to compensate anybody for what happened,” said Terry O’Hara Lavoie, the fund’s executive director. Instead, she said, case managers helped guide people through the maze of available charities and programs.

Although the nation’s confidence in charities fell amid intense scrutiny of many Sept. 11 nonprofit groups that had poor accountability and made spending decisions, the Washington area’s experiment with disaster-relief philanthropy is being hailed as a model by some experts.

“I think it was extraordinarily well organized,” said Kenneth Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who served as special master of the federal government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001.

Paul Light, a nonprofits expert at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, said a case-management model works particularly well in some instances.

The federal Victim Compensation Fund provided significant financial relief to those directly affected by the attacks. Of the $7 billion in public dollars given to victims, $224 million was allocated to victims of the Pentagon attack. Most of the rest went to those affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Feinberg said the Pentagon victims had different emotional reactions than the New York victims, many of whom worked in the financial sector.

Over the first seven months after the attacks, the Survivors’ Fund spent just $800,000 of its donations. This was by design. The charity’s leaders wanted to be around to help families over the long term and knew that donations eventually would dry up.