Shreveport VP Helps Hold Together Storm Effort
It’s 10:20 a.m. on Thursday, September 15, and Jessie Schmidt’s cell phone is once again refusing to work.
It’s just a little ironic that Schmidt, Vice President of Community
Development for the North Louisiana Goodwill Industries Rehabilitation
Center, whose job is to have her hand in everything, can’t speak to a
soul unless she’s standing in front of them or is attached to a land
line.
In the two and a half weeks since her Goodwill has responded to the
thousands of storm evacuees arriving in Shreveport, many of the untied
ends of the effort have fallen in Schmidt’s lap. Which means that on
top of her work duties providing help with marketing, public relations
and fund development, publicizing retail store openings and donation
drives, promoting workforce development success stories and advocating
legislation, she is also answering media calls on how her Goodwill is
providing services in the wake of the biggest natural disaster to hit
the country in recent years.
With no working cell phone.
Yet, Schmidt -- a 15-year veteran of Goodwill -- recognizes that beyond
the services her agency is providing, Hurricane Katrina has presented
an opportunity that, right or wrong, is there.
"This has really enabled us to tell our story, to say what we do, and talk about our mission," Schmidt said.
For the past two and a half weeks, that has meant getting to the office
at a little after 6 a.m. to plow through massive amounts of e-mail
including pleas for help, legal information resources.
"I probably got 90 e-mails like that since yesterday," Schmidt said
early on September 15. "And that’s on top of the internal stuff."
Schmidt ticks off the daily calls or twice-daily calls she had with
reporters from the local newspaper, The Times, during the first week
after the storm. When the job fair co-sponsored by the Shreveport
Goodwill, the City and the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce occurred
September 6, she also spoke with reporters and columnists from USA
TODAY, Workwise, Business Week and numerous TV stations.
But, despite the pace, she readily acknowledges how both she and the
rest of the Goodwill staff have gotten stronger as a result of securing
bedding, mattresses and sheets for evacuees when they first came to
Shreveport, working with the Red Cross and Salvation Army to establish
distribution centers and working now to place as many evacuees as
possible in jobs.
"The reality was, with our Goodwill, we’ve been slammed and hit and
buffeted, but we really did stand up to this [storm]," Schmidt said.
"We really are stronger because of this."
That’s not to say that there haven’t been hard days. The lack of phone
coverage in Shreveport, and the increased volume of phone calls coming
into the Goodwill, has lent to more than a couple of frayed nerves.
But days like the job fair, when nearly 1,000 storm evacuees walked the
Shreveport Convention Center to find jobs barely a week after the storm
hit the Gulf Coast, seem to help make the bad days more bearable.
"I felt like we gave [the storm evacuees] something they hadn’t had --
they had hope," Schmidt said. "That’s when I knew our city had pulled
it off. There were so many people who made it work."
Her boss, CEO John Rankin, obviously includes Schmidt in the category of people who can make things happen at his Goodwill.
"Jessie is extraordinarily capable of jumping from one unconnected
thing to another in creative ways and doing it in a professional way,"
he said. "We get better publicity than any other nonprofit in town our
size and it’s because of the foundation she has laid in the community."
"In this effort, she’s been indefatigable," Rankin said. "She’s found a second and third wind."
Indeed, even as the Goodwill’s workforce development professionals
continue placing storm evacuees in jobs at the Hirsch Coliseum, Schmidt
is already thinking about how her Goodwill will need additional
training dollars in coming months and years and how the agency will
need to report to foundations and the United Way on how those dollars
-- if they are beneficiaries -- will be used.
"To me, it’s really, really difficult because these [evacuees] will
need jobs. And some people will lose jobs," Schmidt said. "How do we
keep our clients that we served before from getting jealous? We can’t
be all Katrina all the time."
Schmidt turns her car in the direction of the Goodwill. And, suddenly, her cell phone is working again.
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