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What Oxfam is Doing

For the first time in its history, Oxfam America launched an emergency relief effort in the United States to respond to widespread devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In the months ahead, we will continue our work on the Gulf Coast helping shattered communities to rebuild.

March 2006

Late in 2005, a string of severe hurricanes hammered the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Their names—Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—will be forever linked with an ugly truth about our country: Poverty exists deeply and persistently here in the United States, particularly in the regions hit hardest by the hurricanes. The storms swept away the veil of pretense, revealing the face of a national shame.

In the absence of a vigorous official response to the disasters, particularly among the poorest communities, Oxfam America launched its first relief effort in the United States. Working through local partner organizations, we have focused our efforts on Mississippi and Louisiana.

In the early weeks following the disasters, we provided emergency grants that helped our local partners to distribute an array of relief goods including food and medicine. We worked with leaders in Biloxi, Mississippi, to establish a critical coordination center in a poor section of the city, and we helped fund a local organizer to address immigrants’ rights issues. In Louisiana, we worked with partner organizations to distribute kits with protective gear so people could safely begin to clean up their homes. We also provided relief supplies in remote rural areas where severe losses went unnoticed as the nation focused its attention on New Orleans.

Our program has now evolved into a long-term commitment to help the region rebuild—and not just to its previous condition, but with the goal of providing a more promising future for the Gulf Coast’s poorest residents. Through state and federal advocacy efforts, we are working to ensure that the billions of federal dollars allocated for the reconstruction of the coast benefit those who need them most, such as low-income households, renters, and elderly people. We are also offering technical assistance and support to local organizations—some new, some well-established—so they can have a clear say in the rebuilding of poor minority and immigrant communities.