OldShooter
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Yes. My uncle had exactly the same experience and stories from the Korean War. There was also some negative press more recently regarding how money was spent in Haiti.
So I went to talk to them (American Red Cross -- ARC) with a little bit of "alert" feelings, maybe even suspicion. Frankly, though, my evaluation of them from the perspective of a career in management is that they do an excellent job. An astonishing number of jobs are done by volunteers, including administrative and middle management jobs. Very economical. The other thing, I think, is that from the outside it does not look like a lot of the donations get to clients. That's really because of the way they work. For example, I landed in FL on November 1, 20 days after Michael made landfall. By that time, there had been 2,000 ARC volunteers (in roughly 2-week rotations) supporting relief efforts including opening and staffing shelters for victims. There were about 850 clients at the shelter I was assigned to. In addition to housing, feeding, and connecting clients into local support resources, all those volunteers had to be brought in, mostly flown in from all over the US, housed, fed, supported, etc. On October 31, IIRC the daily situation report said that ARC had provided 400,000 hot meals to survivors -- typically ones that are living in damaged homes, etc. (No typo; in the next few days the tally ran past a half-million.) ARC provides the food, the Southern Baptists cook it (https://www.newsherald.com/news/201...ontinues-for-southern-baptist-disaster-relief) , and ARC delivers it on neighborhood routes -- 100% with volunteers. I think I met two full time paid ARC people out of the couple of hundred ARC folks staffing our shelter. The number of moving parts was incredible. Case workers, shelter staff, medical staff, spiritual support, sick bays, computer & radio communications infrastructure, hospital beds and/or wheelchairs for some clients, etc. All volunteers. There was even a a kennel tent for clients' dogs.
Example: A day or two before I left for FL there was a story on NPR about a mayor who was bashing the Red Cross because a volunteer had promised 200 meals to people in his town and they never arrived. A mistake, yes, but at that point the ARC and the Baptists were preparing and delivering over 6,000 meals a day. A few mistakes are inevitable, but this context was not included in the story.
Sorry if this post is sort of a thread hijack, but ... BTDT and from my experience the ARC that I have seen is a pretty impressive outfit.
