Plenty and Disaster Relief Background

When Plenty began in 1974, none of us who started it were development professionals. None of us had disaster relief experience. But we were young and willing and running on heart. Plenty's original charter stated that the purposes of Plenty were "To help share out the world's food, resources, materials and knowledge equitably for the benefit of all; To help and aid any people anywhere in the world who due to any natural or man-caused disaster such as drought, famine, flood, storm, earthquake, tidal wave, weather imbalance, disease epidemic, fire, insect devastation, crop failure, population imbalance, war, political oppression, religious oppression, racial discrimination, or greed are in need of food, clothing, shelter, medical aid and supplies, resources, materials; agricultural, engineering, or scientific assistance or education; or anything else, to enable them to lead healthy, comfortable, responsible, and productive lives in the pursuit of happiness." I guess we could have just said, "You name it, if help is needed, call Plenty." Needless to say, we've had to be more discriminating about the requests for help we accept, but in the early days we found ourselves in northern Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee helping towns clean up and rebuild after tornadoes and in small rural towns near our headquarters in Summertown, Tennessee, as well as Memphis, Nashville and Chicago, providing food to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and even the food pantries of the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) who's budget had been cut. Plenty's first international work was a collaboration with the Mennonite Central Committee to ship food to Haiti and Honduras. When a flash flood demolished a shantytown in Baja California, Plenty sent a construction crew to help rebuild. Our first major disaster response was in Guatemala after a devastating earthquake in February 1976 which resulted in 23,000 deaths and left a million homeless. (See Plenty History) While initially helping with reconstruction efforts, we began to learn about the kind of endemic, grinding poverty faced by the poor in countries like Guatemala, especially the rural and urban indigenous population. Realizing that organizations such as the International Red Cross and the Salvation Army and the US Military were actually more experienced, better funded and better equipped than Plenty to do disaster relief, we made an organizational decision to focus our efforts more on development projects to address the roots of poverty. That continues to be Plenty's priority, but when hurricane Iris ripped southern Belize and the tsunami blasted southeast Asia in December, 2004 and Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and Hurricane Stan pummeled Guatemala, Plenty felt compelled to respond. We were able to respond effectively because we had direct links to personnel and projects on-going in regions affected, or, in the case of Katrina, it was a disaster too big and too close to home to ignore.