Civil Society
December 31, 2005| By The Heritage Foundation
“As Congress and the nation consider how to rebuild shattered lives and destroyed neighborhoods and businesses after the Katrina disaster, it is important that the need to take action swiftly does not lead to steps that cause dollars to be used inefficiently or to unwise decisions that frustrate rather than achieve long-term success.” – From Tragedy to Triumph: Principled Solutions for Rebuilding Lives and Communities, Heritage Foundation Special Report #05, Sept. 12, 2005.
First Lady Laura Bush speaks to Heritage Founders in September.
Many families needed the help of a civil society after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Heritage staffers pitched in immediately, with personal donations and something even more valuable: their best policy ideas on how to aid victims and rebuild the devastated region. Working in special policy groups, Heritage took less than a week to produce “From Tragedy to Triumph: Principled Solutions for Rebuilding Lives and Communities.” White House officials and Congress embraced many of its recommendations. And its “pork-for-relief” suggestion to divert funds from pork-barrel projects to gulf reconstruction projects quickly became popular in among the mainstream media—with 1,400 newspaper articles citing it in two weeks.
Heritage is also a warehouse of critical data on social issues. Consider our Family and Society Database (FSD), an online library of more than 2,000 research findings on issues of family, religion, culture and society. The Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation found this resource so valuable that it donated $843,000 to increase the FSD’s use among the academic and policy-making communities.
