Rosie O'Donnell's Foundation Helps Katrina Victims

Nov 1, 2006— -- Annie Ford, 98, is a woman propelled by faith. As the winds of Hurricane Katrina raged and the water rose rapidly outside her home, she and her family waited anxiously for help. None came.

"We stayed there while hoping that someone would come by," Ford recalled. "Nobody came by, and so we started walking."

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Ford walked 40 blocks that day through waist-deep water.

Eight months later, on a visit to the Gulf Coast, Rosie O'Donnell was stunned to find Ford, and so many others like her, living in the sprawling and derelict trailer park known as Renaissance Village.

"In my mind, I couldn't rectify a woman 97 years old [at the time], all she had seen, all she had lived through, spending the last years of her life trying to balance herself in a trailer to use the toilet," O'Donnell said. "I couldn't do it. It broke my heart."

So O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation helped find Ford an apartment, and it set aside millions of dollars to help the Katrina refugees of Renaissance Village move on with their lives. But liability issues and a spider's web of red tape, along with a wary Federal Emergency Management Agency, kept the money from reaching the people who needed it.

Finally, a year later, the foundation's efforts are getting through. Suddenly, Renaissance Village feels like an actual village. A space once defined by its silence is loud, alive with the sound of children playing, and vibrant with hope.

'Like a Prison Yard'

Trailer park was one way to describe Renaissance Village. Refugee camp was another. To O'Donnell, the park was something even worse.

"It looked like a prison yard," she told "Nightline's" Cynthia McFadden. "Even in prisons, they have running tracks. They have an exercise gym. Here was a fenced-in area, trailer after trailer after trailer, with people sitting, tired, vacant eyes. … It looked like an emergency trauma room for people who were emotionally dead. And it was unbearably heartbreaking to me."

Seven months ago, when "Nightline" visited Renaissance Village -- the largest refugee camp on U.S. soil -- it was a starkly haunting place: silent and desolate, its 3,000 inhabitants stripped of their possessions and idle nearly all the time. Depression was rampant. It was possible to go to Renaissance Village and never see a soul. Thousands of people remained cooped up in their trailers, watching television for days at a time, afraid to step outside. Of the 600 or so children who lived there, only about a hundred were registered for school. And for the young kids, there was nothing to do: no swings, no playground.

"They'd been sitting in trailers just pining away. It's been horrible," said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the For All Kid's Foundation. "For much of the days -- and we've been here from the beginning -- it's like a no man's land. Every aisle between trailers is empty."

Natichia Banks, 28, is a single mother of three children and had lived in Renaissance Village for more than a year. She, like many of the other young, single mothers there, rarely left her trailer.

"A basic day is get up, eat breakfast, basically you would just stare," Banks said. "You did not know if you were dreaming. You know, was it real or not. … I was real depressed. I was sick. I had to be rushed to the emergency room with anxiety attacks. I couldn't breathe -- felt like I had heart attacks."

The foundation sought to provide more than just the baseline essential services -- to provide, O'Donnell said, "[what] is needed in order for people to thrive and not just survive." So she asked her Katrina tactical team to design and equip three trailers to provide the nascent community with day care, education and career and psychological counseling. The trailers arrived at the gates of Renaissance Village in December 2005 -- and stopped there.

The reason the trailers were not allowed in, according to FEMA, was that the government was concerned about liability. What if someone were injured moving them? Who is responsible? The "Rosie" trailers came to be seen as a perfect little picture of the big FEMA problem: an overwhelmed bureaucracy unable to untangle itself enough to make even simple things work.

Additionally, FEMA said federal statutes required that any structure at the camp had to be temporary. So O'Donnell's foundation went about the task of building playgrounds that could be packed up and moved in 60 days. It was daunting work. And the trailers sat outside the gates of the encampment for more than six months.

But since a young age, O'Donnell set her sights on fixing seemingly impossible problems.

"You know, when I was a kid I thought if I got rich and famous that I would get a magic wand," O'Donnell said. "First I'd fix my mom -- she had cancer and I didn't want her to die, so I thought I'd magic wand my mother. And I'd magic wand away child abuse and kids dying from guns. I got to the height of my fame and fortune in America, and I was like I've got the wand, but it doesn't work."

She persevered, she said, finding hope in her own past.

"Whenever anyone tells me its impossible, I think everything in my life has been impossible," O'Donnell said. "I've lived impossible. I know impossible can be done."

Hope Arrives

After months of cutting through red tape, the "Rosie" trailers are now inside Renaissance Village, whose population is now under 2,000 but expected to swell again with the closing of temporary shelters in Houston and at other spots around Louisiana. Today Renaissance Village is beginning to live up to it's name: the vast expanse of grassy lanes weaving between the trailers, where months ago silence reigned, now hum with the sound of children playing.

Adults meet with career counselors and mortgage advisers, and many are moving their lives forward.

The trailers have become a symbol of hope. More than a hundred organizations hope to provide services here.

"They cannot move on with their lives if someone tells them there is a job office 10 miles away and they don't have a car. You have to bring the services to the people," said Birch, the foundation's executive director. "For the first time in over a year, these 1,600 residents are going to come to one place and say, 'I want to move on with my life. I need a job. I need Section 8 housing. I need your help. I will do anything to be trained. Help me.' And help will be there."

O'Donnell and Birch hope that the model they've developed at Renaissance Village can serve as a prototype for other Katrina refugee camps and for future disasters. But so many questions remain. Chief among them is: Why did a private charity have to do the government's job?

John Byrd, the local FEMA representative in Baton Rouge, declined to comment, saying the question is a national issue and a matter of statute.

"I think that the Katrina response in this country was one of the most shameful things we've ever seen in our history," Birch, said. "In many ways, it's sad that someone like Rosie O'Donnell and her foundation has to … build these solutions."

But O'Donnell emphasized that her goal was not to shame anyone, not even FEMA. She said she just hopes next time the government can do better. There is no question that she has provided a model of how.

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