Charities Pledge to Include Families' Input
By DAVID BARSTOW

Responding to complaints from victims' families, leaders of a group formed to coordinate the charities responding to Sept. 11 pledged yesterday to include victim representatives on its board of directors.

"The voice of the victims and their families must be heard," Robert J. Hurst, chief executive of the organization, the 9/11 United Services Group, said yesterday at a Midtown news conference announcing the organization's structure, mission and priorities.

"We are not here to make excuses," he added. "We are here to make changes, to open up channels of communication and accountability, and in so doing strengthen the public's trust."

Representatives from 13 of the city's leading charities, including the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, have been meeting privately for weeks to create the group in an effort to coordinate the distribution of donations through a central database of victims.

But so far, those discussions have not included any of the victims' families, despite their requests to participate. Yesterday, Mr. Hurst and other leaders of the group committed themselves for the first time to giving a victim representative at least one seat on the board.

Officials from I.B.M. and other companies have been busy constructing the database, gathering thousands of names, addresses and other information about those killed, injured or left jobless or homeless by the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Yesterday, the gulf between the 9/11 United Services Group and the families of the victims was hard to miss. There were no victims' groups represented among the charity officials and politicians who posed for photographs at the podium.

Patrick Cartier, whose brother James Cartier was killed in the World Trade Center attack, stood up in the audience and said that Give Your Voice, a victims' group he had helped form, had already collected 1,400 names in a database of its own.

"How do we give you our database? What's your telephone number?" Mr. Cartier asked Eliot L. Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, who regulates charities and has been trying for more than two months to get them to build a unified database of victims.

Mr. Hurst, who is taking time off from his position as vice chairman of the Goldman Sachs Group to lead 9/ 11 United Services, said the charities his group oversees must do a better job of working with victims' families, the displaced and the jobless.

"To family members who, in the midst of grieving their loved ones, are overwhelmed by what it takes to get help, to victims who feel they are not being heard and to the thousands of individuals and corporations around the world who have given so generously, and are concerned about how their contributions are being put to work, we have a message," he said.

"We hear you."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company