Q&A: Giving Kids the Support They Need

BY ZACH DUNDAS | May 10, 2006

Country: United States

Topics: Children, Hurricane Katrina

Kerrian, 9, a student at James Singleton Charter School in New Orleans, hugs the bear she found in the backpack delivered by Mercy Corps staff. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps is known for its work around the world - for community-based economic development, conflict resolution and its support for civil society in far-flung countries.

Griff Samples, likewise, spent most of her career focusing on challenges faced by a diverse array of communities, particularly in Africa. She worked with international relief agencies Cameroon and war-torn Angola, and with a micro-finance organization dedicated to providing small loans to women in the developing world.

So how did Samples (and Mercy Corps) end up hip-deep in teddy bears, working with kids affected by tragedies inside the United States?

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Samples helped lead Mercy Corps' first-of-its-kind effort to provide social and psychological support kids traumatized by the event. By assembling "Comfort Kits" stocked with stuffed animals and age-appropriate materials explaining what happened, the organization helped thousands of children in and around New York. By providing training to parents and adult professionals, the Comfort for Kids program ensured that those kids would have better, more informed support through the years.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and large sections of the Gulf Coast, Comfort for Kids jumped back into the fray, reprising (and improving) Mercy Corps' outreach to American kids in distress.

We sat down with Griff Samples to find out more.

Q: Can you explain how Comfort for Kids first started?

Griff Samples: When September 11 hit, some Mercy Corps people went to New York and did an assessment, and decided there was room for us to do a program. It turned out there were no resources specifically targeting the indirectly affected - people who haven't experienced a death in the family, but yes, they've been displaced from their homes, yes, they've been traumatized, yes, their communities are in shambles.

So what do you do for those kids?

In New York, we did three main things. First, we provided 12,500 Comfort Kits for indirectly affected minority, immigrant, refugee and low-income kids. Second, we developed training materials for how to support at-risk kids. And the third part, really the core part, was to create materials that would have a longer-term value both for kids and people who work with them.

We started with a book called "What Happened to the World?" Then, a year later, we published a book called "How Are We Now?" Those publications deal with how to support kids who are at different ages and stages, particularly as time passes, as anniversaries come up, as their perspective and reactions change.

How did things unfold in New York?

We partnered with Bright Horizons, which is the largest workplace childcare provider in America, if not the world. Linda Mason from Bright Horizons is on our board. And Bright Horizons has a client relationship with JP Morgan Chase. They evacuated 15,000 people from the Financial District on 9/11. They also wanted to do something for communities that couldn't afford to do things themselves.

So it was a very unusual partnership, between two for-profits and Mercy Corps. We ultimately provided hundreds of training sessions - everything from macro organizations like the YWCA to very small neighborhood-level organizations. We trained firefighters on how to deal with affected kids. We trained 150 special-victims detectives from the NYPD.

And what did you tell them?

We wrapped the program around two messages: one, what are normal and abnormal reactions to trauma like this? Two, promoting respect and understanding of others. We used storytelling to promote better understanding of others.

This seems very different than most of what Mercy Corps does.

It was completely anomalous, actually. And - well, we had thousands of teddy bears sitting in the office, waiting to go into the Comfort Kits. It was a little strange. The story telling module was completely different than anything Mercy Corps had done.

Flash-forward to Hurricane Katrina. What happened then?

Well, we closed the program down after we ran out of money to work in New York. So Comfort For Kids completely went away for two and a half years. But the day after Katrina hit, we were talking about what we could do. We decided that what we'd done in New York worked. We decided to do 50,000 kits and work with Head Start to distribute them. We identified some key cities to work in: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Baton Rouge.

What's different this time around?

In New York, Mercy Corps ran the program. Here, if we had to set up offices in all those cities, it would cost a fortune. So we partnered locally with YWCA, which kind of gives them a core to hang their other programs of off. They're in the communities, they're well known and well-respected, so they're ideal. And we'll be able to do a clinical study on, for example, the workbook we've designed for older kids, and get some real data on how it impacts them.

As different as this is from most of what Mercy Corps does, how does it fit into the organization's larger mission?

If you think about the mission of Mercy Corps' mission in terms of building secure and just communities, how can you do that without giving kids the support they need in situations like this? If parents are worried about their kids they're not going to be building the economy or civil society. And if we can help parents understand how their kids deal with trauma - that a little regression is to be expected, that their kids are not ruined for life - that's extremely helpful to them.