(FORTUNE Small Business) – During a morning meeting, Ben Crawford challenged his ten employees to think of a unique response to Katrina. "We can do better than donating clothing and blankets," he urged. Crawford Renovation is a Houston company that remodels luxury homes. Its employees decided to pick a family and help bail them out. The plan: Provide the family a furnished apartment rent-free for six months, cover all utilities, supply a $500 gift card from Wal-Mart, and help register their kids in a local school. Crawford also decided his business would hire one member of that family for six months at $10 an hour. The expenses are easy enough to bear; Crawford is having a great year, expecting to double revenues to $12 million.

The family that Crawford Renovation picked are the Nelsons: Kevin and Monica, 43 and 38, and their kids, Jasmine and Kevin, ages 10 and 13. Their New Orleans home is destroyed, and they have lost everything. Monica Nelson taught preschool, and her husband delivered medical supplies for Louisiana State University. Both lost their jobs, quite literally. Crawford hired Kevin Sr. to handle deliveries. "Doors have opened, hearts have opened--it's really unbelievable," said Monica Nelson, as she rolled a cart down the aisles of Wal-Mart, stocking up for a new life.

On its website, Crawford urged other small businesses to take the help-one-family approach. So far, there's been a lot of interest, and Claim-It, a Houston medical-bill-processing company, has already helped another family of evacuees.

While Crawford Renovation adopted a family, Rackspace Managed Hosting adapted an empty building, turning it into a shelter. The San Antonio web company has 630 employees and had revenues of $86 million last year. In 2003, CEO Graham Weston bought a 180,000-square-foot building, formerly a Montgomery Ward department store, planning to use it as company headquarters. But Rackspace found a better building. For years the old Montgomery Ward building has sat empty, slipping into disrepair. Rackspace had just put it on the market.

When Weston heard that San Antonio was about to host 25,000 hurricane evacuees, he called the mayor, Phil Hardberger, and told him Rackspace had the perfect space. Hardberger agreed and gave Weston 24 hours to get the building ready. Rackspace employees raced to fix the electricity and air conditioning while relief workers from the Red Cross brought in cots and portable toilets to accommodate 1,300 people.

Rackspace's employees wound up creating what Weston calls "the Hilton of shelters." They installed homey touches, such as a play area for children, basketball hoops, and a makeshift beauty salon. Its purpose was to pamper evacuees, certainly, but also to help them look their best for job interviews. Rackspace even set up 15 computers in the shelter and designed a program that searches a variety of missing-person lists, which helped many families reunite. "There's more to life than food and shelter," says Weston. "We wanted to help people get going again."