The Red Cross says it has lessons to learn following its Cyclone Gabrielle response — including communicating the work it does more effectively.
Red Cross New Zealand has faced substantial criticism regarding its response to Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods. This led to a Fair Go investigation by John Campbell, who visited the Hawke's Bay and Tairāwhiti regions to find out how the money was spent.
Red Cross secretary-general Sarah Stuart-Black told Fair Go it was important to identify lessons learnt following an emergency response.
Asked what didn't go well, she said "I think that's what we've actually got to work through.
"So for us some of the challenge has been actually communicating the work that we're doing."
Rather than being given directly to affected individuals, money from the New Zealand Disaster Fund is channelled to community organisations.
Stuart-Black says this means it is not always clear to people that the help they are receiving is supported by Red Cross aid.
You can see a list of the spending to date on their website.
Red Cross says all of the money donated to the Disaster Fund, and any interest earned, will be spent on affected communities.
When 1News reported on Red Cross' spending in April just $3.18 million of more than $21 million that had been collected in donations had been paid out.
At the time Stuart-Black said that was because they had been taking time to understand what was happening on the ground from councils, emergency management group managers, iwi and hapū and community leaders.
Now, two months on, $11.2 million has been committed and Stuart-Black said Red Cross is on track to commit the majority of the fund by August.
That disaster fund sits at more than $25 million.
Chloe Johnson runs the Cyclone Hawke's Bay Help page on Facebook, which aims to connect people.
Johnson felt let down by the relief response provided to the Hawke's Bay community.
"Three weeks on, four weeks on, there was still nothing, we were still on our own."
She felt Red Cross' response was too slow. "I would have expected that an agency who specialises in disaster relief and recovery would have been able to roll out the plan, at least, a lot sooner."
But Stuart-Black said they "we were there right at the beginning".
The issue, she said, was the enormity of the damage.
"Certainly in some of the early visits I did to affected areas, you could see people are reeling from what they've been through.
"And in many cases, they didn't even understand the scale (maybe out here) of how big a response effort this was."
Treasury estimates the total cost of Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods will be somewhere between $9-14 billion.
If Red Cross got $25 million, that's roughly a quarter of one per cent of the final bill.
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