Joan Woolley, of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Oklahoma, reaches up to pull a tray of lasagne from a portable oven in this Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 photo. She was one of several volunteers preparing meals for the people of Galveston in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, in Galveston. Many religious groups like the Southern Baptists coordinate relief efforts during hurricanes, earthquakes and floods.

Raleigh, N.C. ? For every hurricane, earthquake or flood, there is help: food, bottled water, crews of volunteers nailing shingles to brand new roofs.

What even grateful recipients of that aid may not realize is that much of it comes from an unlikely hodgepodge of religious groups who put aside their doctrinal differences and coordinate their efforts as soon as the wind starts blowing.

Southern Baptists cook meals from Texas to Massachusetts. Seventh-day Adventists dispense aid from makeshift warehouses that can be running within eight hours. Mennonites haul away debris, Buddhists provide financial aid and chaplains with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team counsel the traumatized and grieving.

This “juice and cookies fellowship,” as one organizer calls it, is mostly invisible to the public, but it provides interfaith infrastructure for disaster response around the country that state and federal officials could scarcely live without.

“Think of us as the United Nations of disaster relief,” said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, the main umbrella group for coordinating emergency response from private agencies.

Although “Vo-ad,” as it’s usually called, includes groups with no religious affiliation, the bulk of its 50 or so members are relief arms of churches and other faith-based organizations. The organization, which formed in 1970, has grown from seven founding members and this spring signed a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that will help its members respond quicker to disasters.

“There’s a tendency when disasters happen to look at government, but there’s an inherent risk in taking a government-centric approach to disaster response,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.

The national group, which also works through state-level versions of the coalition, provides essential on-the-ground knowledge that government responders don’t have time to develop on their own, Fugate said.