‘UN’ of faith groups sets roles in disaster relief

June 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C.

For every hurricane, earthquake or flood, there is help: food, bottled water, crews of volunteers nailing shingles to brand new roofs.

What even grateful recipients of that aid may not realize is that much of it comes from an unlikely hodgepodge of religious groups who put aside their doctrinal differences and coordinate their efforts as soon as the wind starts blowing.

Southern Baptists cook meals from Texas to Massachusetts. Seventh-day Adventists dispense aid from makeshift warehouses that can be running within eight hours. Mennonites haul away debris, Buddhists provide financial aid and chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team counsel the traumatized and grieving.

This “juice and cookies fellowship,” as one organizer calls it, is mostly invisible to the public, but it provides interfaith infrastructure for disaster response around the country that state and federal officials could scarcely live without.

“Think of us as the United Nations of disaster relief,” said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, the main umbrella group for coordinating emergency response from private agencies.

Although “Vo-ad,” as it’s usually called, includes groups with no religious affiliation, the bulk of its 50 or so members are relief arms of churches and other faith-based organizations. The organization, which formed in 1970, has grown from seven founding members and this spring signed a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that will help its members respond quicker to disasters.

“There’s a tendency when disasters happen to look at government, but there’s an inherent risk in taking a government-centric approach to disaster response,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.

The national group, which also works through state-level versions of the coalition, provides essential on-the-ground knowledge that government responders don’t have time to develop on their own, Fugate said.

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, for instance, is famous for its ability to prepare tens of thousands of hot meals at disasters from Hurricane Ike to flooding in New England. The North Carolina Baptist Men, for example, have three food trailers that can serve a combined 75,000 meals a day.

“The Red Cross distributes the meals, but it’s Southern Baptists doing the cooking,” said Lin Honeycutt, a volunteer with the North Carolina group for 20-plus years.

The denomination apparently developed its affinity for mass meals after a hurricane hit Texas in the early 1960s, but the vast group — there are more than 10,000 Southern Baptist disaster volunteers in North Carolina alone — can do everything from dispensing supplies to cleaning out inches of mud in flooded basements.

Deciding who does what has been a delicate process of building confidence in the capacity of groups as different as Jews and Scientologists, according to Bill Adams, director of Disaster Response Services for the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and a former NVOAD president.

“Just getting all those people at the same table is a miracle, when you think about it,” Adams said.