How were you personally affected by Katrina?

My hometown, Opelousas, is on one of the higher spots in Louisiana, of which there aren’t many. It was not affected directly by the storm, but it was affected by the large number of displaced people. I can remember talking to my brother, and he told me that the parking lots were full, and he couldn’t move on the streets because of all the people who were fleeing Hurricane Katrina, and then, later, Rita.

You have stated that the true driver of philanthropy is never losing a sense of outrage. How does that apply in Louisiana?

A lot of people were outraged by what they saw—and so they gave money and moved on to other things. We want them to sustain some sense of that outrage, and to recognize that this wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime event that occurred and has passed; it’s a process that continues into the future in terms of responding to the need. All around the country, we do press interviews, editorial board briefings, everything we can to try to keep this on the minds of the American people, to remind them that the business of the Gulf is not finished.

The public sector promised New Orleans tens of billions of dollars in assistance. The city has only received a small fraction of that.

I was in New Orleans in August, and we had a town hall meeting with the police chief, the mayor and a number of other folks affected by the storm that was broadcast on public television. They were wondering where this money is, because they haven’t seen it appropriated.

Yet, although the levee system has been plugged, the Army Corps of Engineers recently admitted that the infrastructure for flood control is a system “in name only,” and more work needs to be done.

Nothing is really sufficient until we secure those levees. It was a man-made disaster because almost 80 percent of the damage came about because of breaks in the levee. Those breaches would never have occurred if they had been engineered soundly.

That’s where the billions of dollars come in. To get the displaced people coming home to invest in New Orleans and make workers available for its economic growth, we need to make them feel that they’re secure and that the levees have been built to their appropriate standards. We would certainly like to see the levees improved.

But there will be life in New Orleans. There may not be a Lower Ninth Ward of the same capacity as before Katrina, but life has resumed in the city. You’re beginning to see a reassertion of the cultural vitality of the place, though a lot of the low-wealth people were the ones who fueled that culture.

How do you respond to donors worried about supporting projects that could bring residents back to a dangerous flood plain?

It’s not simple. I can sit back and be an armchair critic, but I face people who say, “We’ve lived on this block for several generations,” and see the comfort they get from a sense of place in this time of posttraumatic stress. They are uplifted by their sense of place. So it’s very difficult to say to them, “While we respect your rights as an American citizen to own property, we are now going to say you can’t live there.” There are two goods in conflict: How do you resolve the moral dilemma, as well as the political dilemma? Do you play God and say you can’t live there?