WHEN A DISASTER like the Asian tsunami strikes, an enormous industry surfaces to provide relief.
In the United States, the companies that make up this industry might be called aid groups or charities or nonprofits. Most of the rest of the world refers to them as NGOs - nongovernmental organizations.
The image - in some cases carefully constructed, usually reinforced by the media - is of straightforward charity, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, treating the sick, in a hands-on, handout fashion resembling so many Mother Teresas dispensing aid and kindness.
The reality is that disaster relief is only the tip of the NGO iceberg. In fact, the organizations are as richly diverse in their goals and methods as private corporations. Many have specialties, ranging from trade policy to environmental concerns, democracy building to disaster relief.
Others are multifaceted organizations that try to coordinate a variety of activities to sustain long-term solutions to problems that are both chronic (poverty, disease, corruption) and acute (natural disasters).
"In addition to saving lives, NGOs promote democracy and civic participation," says I.M. "Mac" Destler, director of the Program on International Security and Economic Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. "They have really had a significant role in a number of situations. The Ukrainian election is the most recent."
An event like the tsunami puts the NGOs in an intense spotlight where they must perform for an audience that will sustain them financially. But few in the audience will have a long-enough attention span to learn which NGOs perform well.
The best of the NGOs know that the kind of relief effort going on in Asia is an unglamorous calling - hard work that continue long after the spotlight has moved elsewhere.
The worst of them look at disasters as little more than fund-raising opportunities and relentlessly follow the spotlight to keep the donations coming in.
"During disasters, there is such a public relations frenzy," says John Hammock, an associate professor of humanitarian aid at the Fletcher School of Tufts University. "Everybody is trying to get on TV with their T-shirts on. And for good reason: That translates into dollars.
"For me, the key is to give money to organizations that are committed to stay there over the long term. Some organizations come in and leave when the money dries up," he says.
Such long-term commitment is seen as the way to turn relief into sustainable development that can make communities devastated by these disasters flourish again.
"NGOs need to move beyond charity to address broader issues like of governance and accountability," says James V. Riker, associate director of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, College Park.
"I think many groups that started in Asia, in Bangladesh after its floods, in India and Sri Lanka, addressing dramatically the needs of hunger and health care, realized as time went on that they needed to go farther than addressing the symptoms, that they needed to get into community building and rehabilitation projects that would have a longer-term impact," Riker says.
A group handing out food to tsunami victims today, for example, might put pressure on international trade organizations next month in an effort to aid economic development in the devastated countries.
Many of today's NGOs got their start in the aftermath of World War II, aiding refugees in war-ravaged Europe. The CARE package is a symbol of what might be termed the romantic image of these NGOs.
For a generation of Americans, CARE - which originally stood for Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe - will always be connected with the package that carried its name, originally a box of military surplus foodstuffs that was delivered to the war refugees amid the devastation of Europe. A later version that included tools and seeds was promised to poor countries around the world in fund-raising appeals that aired during the early years of television. Some 100 million CARE packages were distributed over two decades.
The growth of NGOs in the post-World War II decades paralleled the growth of international awareness. The United Nations was created and helped focus attention on problems across the globe. It contracted with many NGOs to deal with those problems, a symbiotic relationship that still exists.
Television brought pictures of disease and destruction, famine and flood, into the comfortable living rooms of industrialized societies. Improved transportation allowed meaningful responses to the problems. Charity was not as it once was, giving money to a local group for the poor of your community - it was now responding to an outstretched hand halfway around the world.
