August 24, 2010
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

Lessons learned and relationships built in the wake of the Gulf Coast's ongoing recovery from 2005's Hurricane Katrina and subsequent storms are being put to work as the region deals with the impact of the BP oil spill.

"We had these rich relationships that had developed that made it easy for us when the oil spill was occurring and we were looking for where we could best make a positive contribution and help support community resilience and meet community needs," Nell Bolton, executive director of Episcopal Community Services of Louisiana, told Episcopal News Service recently, adding that those relationships have come "as a result of all the struggles of the last five years."

The nearly five million gallons of oil that gushed in the Gulf of Mexico after the April 20 explosion aboard BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform have polluted the waters of the gulf and decimated the area's seafood and tourism industries. After BP failed in a number of attempts, the company said on July 15 that it had capped the well a mile beneath the surface of the gulf. The well has been plugged with cement, but work on two relief wells to ensure a permanent fix has been delayed until at least sometime in September.

One of the partnerships that Bolton said ECSLA has drawn on is its relationship with Bayou Grace Community Services which developed after workers and volunteers of ECSLA's predecessor, the Diocese of Louisiana's Office of Disaster Response, were gutting and repairing homes and an Episcopal church in the Bayou du Large area damaged by September 2008's back-to-back hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

The two organizations are working together, with the support of Episcopal Relief & Development to provide food assistance, gas and grocery cards, information referrals and pastoral care to coastal communities. So far, according to an Episcopal Relief & Development press release, at least 244 people have received food assistance, and priests and lay ministers have talked with more than 300 people at two community meals and a health fair in the bayous, south of Houma, Louisiana.

ECSLA is one of three organizations through which Episcopalians, with support from Episcopal Relief & Development, are responding to the needs of their neighbors. The other two are St. Andrew's by-the-Sea in Destin, Florida, in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, and Trinity Church in Pass Christian, in the Diocese of Mississippi.

In Florida, members of St. Andrew's by-the-Sea talked to the people who were already being helped through their feeding and homeless ministries to learn about their needs.

"What they did as a first step was ask their folks at their Monday lunch program what was going on [as a result of] the oil spill," Katie Mears, program manager of Episcopal Relief & Development's USA Disaster Response Program, told ENS.

They learned that, in addition to the individuals and families who have been hurt by the collapse of the local fishing and tourism industries, there are unemployed people who came to the area thinking that there would be oil-spill clean-up jobs, Mears said. Residency is required to get those jobs and thus some of the out-of-towners are stranded and need assistance.

There are also "folks who never would have needed a feeding program before," Mears said, but who now find themselves unable to make ends meet.

"And, we don't like to talk about it, but lots of people have slightly off-the-books income and, if you're poor, it's even more tempting to not report your waitress tips, but [then] it makes it really hard to get assistance," she said, explaining that unreported income then makes it harder to document lost income when applying for financial and other assistance.

St. Andrew's asked Episcopal Relief & Development for help with its food programs and emergency assistance efforts, and the agency is supporting the parish's effort to expand its feeding programs to help those who now find themselves unable to buy all the food they need, according to a press release. St. Andrew's leaders told the agency that a 60-70 percent drop in vacation bookings and even sharper decline in chartered fishing trips has had a trickle-down effect on related industries, from hotels and seafood companies to restaurants and small businesses, according to the release. The town had already experienced job loss due to last year's economic downturn.

In Mississippi, a parishioner at Trinity Church in Pass Christian has long-standing relationships with the people who work on the docks and helped the parish understand the needs of those workers and of laid-off seafood factory workers, Mears said.

Trinity is helping the children of dock workers get school supplies, and aiding the workers to acquire the specialized equipment that will make them employable in the clean-up effort, Mears said. Episcopal Relief & Development also is giving financial assistance to the church for its Sunday night dinner program, which is serving laid-off seafood factory employees.

"The church is directly engaged in the ministry, so it's not handing it to a professional," Mears said. "Professionals definitely have a role, but sometimes what people need is … to eat lunch and [the local church] can say ‘we can do that, we don't need to farm that out to a professional lunch maker.'"

Looking to the future, Mears said she knows that the sort of work her agency is supporting will go on for some time, especially because there may be employment gaps between the time that the BP clean-up jobs are over and the time when the seafood and tourism industries rebound. "As with all disasters, the needs will continue past the attention" span of the rest of the country, she said.

In addition, Mears said, the work being done by all three groups is bringing Episcopalians face-to-face with people whom they may not have previously encountered and they are learning about on-going unmet needs in their communities.

"Everywhere, we need to recognize that we can be doing this ministry, whether it's disaster-based or not," she said.

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service and editor of Episcopal News Monthly and Episcopal News Quarterly.