Red Cross earthquake grants hit $98 million
The Red Cross has distributed $98 million in cash grants for earthquake recovery in Canterbury.
The organisation released a report into its Christchurch Earthquake Recovery programme this week, showing it paid out more than 105,000 cash grants between 2010 and 2016.
The report did not cover the charity’s work after the Kaikoura quake in November.
Most of the grants for Canterbury’s earthquake recovery were given out in 2010 and 2011, shortly after the region’s earthquakes, and nearly half were emergency and hardship grants.
The organisation provided up to $1000 per household to people without essential services or who could not live in their own homes.
In the two months after the February 2011, the charity distributed $44.5m to 51,817 applicants.
Other grants were for independent advice, temporary schooling, alternative sewage systems, winter assistance, disability support, essential items, and damaged homes.
Between 2013 and 2015, the Red Cross gave $6.8m to 179 primary and secondary schools in greater Christchurch. It also funded 77 community organisations, including three healthcare programmes and an organisation helping to house the homeless.
Volunteers for a ‘‘community outreach’’ project visited the city’s worst-affected suburbs to connect people with services that could help them.
The Red Cross held 130 psychosocial support workshops and launched a youth wellbeing website.
The full cost of the programmes is yet to be determined as they are still running, and a $6.5m resilience and social connection project will be mostly complete by the end of 2017.
The Canterbury Appeal public funding drive provided $103m, which all went back to the community through cash grants and the resilience project.
Another $28m came from other Red Cross national societies and corporate donations.
Those funds paid for some programmes and partnerships, as well as the organisation’s administrative costs, staff salaries, evaluations and reporting, and the purchase and fit-out of five response trucks.