In the past several years, I've written a number of posts about the Red Cross. They have not been favorable: the lack of transparency, problems with its handling of blood, fines, rapid turnover of presidents, etc. ProPublica has a scathing indictment of the Red Cross handling of the storms Isaac and Sandy. The essential point is that the organization is more focused on public relations than helping people.
The report uses a number of documents internal to the Red Cross to make its point. One internal document admits that the organization “diverted assets for public relations purposes,” and that distribution of relief supplies was “politically driven.”
One of the assets most commonly used for PR was emergency vehicles, which were often used as backdrops for press conferences rather than ferrying supplies. The whole matter of supplies was another issue. According to interviews and documents, the Red Cross lacked basic supplies like food, blankets and batteries to distribute to victims in the days just after the storms. Sometimes, even when supplies were plentiful, they went to waste. In one case, the Red Cross had to throw out tens of thousands of meals because it couldn’t find the people who needed them.
They probably also lost a lot of volunteers. Some were ordered to stay in Tampa long after it became clear that Isaac would bypass the city. After Sandy, volunteers wandered the streets of New York in search of stricken neighborhoods, lost because they had not been given GPS equipment to guide them. Some volunteers were too old or not well prepared for disaster relief. The “ biggest challenge,” one top Red Cross official said in the December 2012 meeting, is the “skillset that is possessed by our workforce.” Another was even more stark: The “ caliber of the people is a major issue (this is not a training issue),” according to the meeting minutes. The Red Cross acknowledges that nearly two-thirds of the volunteers responding to Sandy had never before provided relief after a large disaster.
They made conditions more unsafe. Red Cross officials are supposed to track sex offenders who come to shelters and confer with law enforcement. But staff “didn’t know/follow procedures,” the presentation notes. There was an additional problem with “ unrelated adults showering with children.”
The PR campaign did pay off. Last year the Red Cross received more than $1 billion in donations.
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