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On a Saturday afternoon last December, he paused near a greenhouse filled with rare plants and pointed to a plaque from 1935 on the brick-and-glass structure explaining it was built as one of the New Deal’s hundreds of projects in the area. Unlike many people in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, Liebaert resists the notion that unlimited federal disaster relief–a "New New Deal" as some have come to call it–is the appropriate response to Katrina. "The United States government cannot bail everyone out every time something happens," he says. "It should be there for emergency response so people don’t starve to death and have at least a tent to live in, or maybe a trailer. But to come back and say, ‘We’re sorry you decided to build your house below sea level and we are obliged to put it back’–I don’t think so."

Liebaert prefers a different recovery strategy, one that relies upon tax incentives, private philanthropy, for-profit enterprise and limited government assistance. Shortly after Katrina hit New Orleans, he and Patrick Fitzmorris, assistant director of the Azby Fund, which was established by his third cousin Herbert Harvey Jr. in 1969 to assist regional causes, put this idea to work by cutting foundation checks on the hoods of their cars to several Katrina-related efforts beyond City Park. They gave $20,000 each to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department and the Louisiana State Police, and $50,000 to the River Road Historical Society to save nearby Destrehan Plantation, built in 1787 by a distant relative of Fitzmorris’. One of the largest grants was $125,000 to the New Orleans Museum of Art, located in City Park, to pay for a generator to maintain the building’s climate and protect its collection, which is valued at more than $200 million.

Reinventing the Response
The federal government’s haphazard response to Katrina, coupled with the enormity of reconstruction costs, have led to calls for greater input from the private sector during times of crisis. While charities are still struggling with the human and economic catastrophe of Katrina, they must also somehow find a way to step back and reinvent their approaches to disaster response, experts suggest, before the next calamity hits. "We think this is a good time, as economists, to try and stress the role that the private sector should be playing here, and how the government has been such a failure; maybe it’s time to rethink how much we let the private sector do," says Russell S. Sobel, an economics professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown who studies FEMA and disaster relief efforts. He points out that businesses and other private-sector organizations made water available to Katrina refugees days before FEMA did.

Traditionally, charities parachute in during initial relief efforts, alongside government first-responders, while philanthropic projects take on longer-term roles. Some nonprofit executives have urged their peers to adhere to these roles following Katrina. "The primary role of foundations can be in helping with the long-term recovery, in part because public attention is going to wane and there are going to be other disasters," says Martin C. Lehfeldt, president of the Southeastern Council of Foundations in Atlanta. "So from the beginning, we have urged foundations to keep their powder dry and respond to the long-term needs."

U.S. Individual, Foundation and Corporate Donations to Disaster Relief, 2005 (as of December 13)

Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma: $3,123,451,588 Tsunami: $1,781,686,912 Pakistan Earthquake: $127,957,436

Source: Center on Philanthropy

Yet, even if foundations reserve their funds for well-planned, long-term goals, Katrina has shown that the gap between the private sector’s available resources and the affected region’s needs is more like a chasm. Total reconstruction costs in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast are estimated to run as high as $250 billion. Yet, as of December, individuals, foundations and companies have given and pledged to give only $3.1 billion to relief efforts for hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University in Indianapolis. In times of cataclysmic natural disaster or national emergencies, private philanthropies may be hard-pressed to respond financially to victims looking for more and more aid from the private sector.

Endurance Tests
The fear of donor fatigue–the anticipated unwillingness of contributors to continue giving over an extended period of time–is a constant for many organizations as they commit to longer-term disaster relief projects. Given the events of the last year, this threat looms large: Within a nine-month period beginning in December 2004, the world witnessed a devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, a cataclysmic earthquake in Pakistan and the worst hurricane season the United States has ever suffered–along with worsening humanitarian crises in regions such as Darfur in Sudan and the devastating famine in Niger. This sheer number of events has tested the generosity of Americans; for the most part, however, they have responded with record-breaking donations.

In the short term, fear of donor fatigue has proven unfounded. A recent survey by the Center on Philanthropy revealed that 58 percent of the nonprofits that responded agreed generally that disaster-related giving came at the expense of other charities in the short-term, but only about one-third agreed or strongly agreed that hurricane relief giving came at the expense of giving to their own organization. "They believe that there’s donor fatigue out there, but when you ask them about their own organization, they’re not experiencing it," says Gene Tempel, executive director of the center.