2006 | Post-Katrina Community Organizing Landscape

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Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

130 Prospect Street Cambridge, MA 02139

617-868-6600 (tel) 617-868-7102 (fax) www.uusc.org

April 30, 2006

To whom it may concern;

The Unitarian Universalist Association and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee formed theGulf Coast Relief Fund to respond to the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In November 2005, we

participated in a meeting of several organizations doing community work in New Orleans. They allemphasized the difficulty of working in New Orleans, the complexities of working with evacuees and

returnees, the losses that their own organizations had suffered and the overall lack of funding forcommunity organization in the wake of the hurricanes.

In December 2005, The Gulf Coast Relief Fund supported a team to spend several weeks in New

Orleans mapping the community organizations work there. The team spoke with organizations on the

ground about the work they were doing, the challenges they faced and their needs for capacitybuilding.

The organizational mapping done by the team shows that there is really very little funding going intothese organizations which have lost personnel, equipment and records. We found the teams work very

useful our own programmatic funding framework in New Orleans. By mid-January, we decided tocontinue to support a two person team, Jainey Bavishi and Rachel Wilch, on the ground for several

months. Their objective was to continue to work with groups on the ground, chart out where groups onthe ground needed new support and produce a series of three reports to share with other funders and

groups working on New Orleans.. At the end of April, our conclusion is that there is still far too littlefunding and support for these groups, particularly in the face of the widespread institutional failure to

respond to the needs of the most disadvantaged populations from the city.

We would like to share with you the two report that have been completed, the March report,NewOrleans post Katrina Community organizing landscape; current efforts, unmet needs; and the April

ReportNew Orleans Post Katrina Community organizing landscape; From Action to Policy. Both ofthese can also be found on the UUSC website www.uusc.org underKatrina Reliefand on the Unitarian

Universalist website www.uua.org under Gulf Coast Relief Fund. We hope you will find this useful inyour work; please let us know if you would like to receive the third and final report.

Sincerely,

Martha ThompsonProgram Manager for Rights in Humanitarian Crises

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

130 Prospect Street Cambridge, MA 02139

617-868-6600 (tel.) 617-868-7102 (fax) www.uusc.orgUUSC advances human rights and social justice around the world


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New Orleans Post-Katrina Community OrganizingLandscape:

Current Efforts, Unmet Needs

Prepared for the UUA-UUSCand the larger Funding Community

by Jainey Bavishi and Rachel Wilch

March, 2006


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We want to acknowledge the support and trust from the Unitarian Universalist Association-Unitarian Universalist Service Committee that made this community organizing mapping projectpossible. We also want to acknowledge Leigh Graham and Susana Williams for theircontributions to the first phases of this project. We would like to recognize our local partner and

primary community liaison, Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, Inc. (NHS), whohelped us to establish and build relationships, through an overview of the community organizinglandscape, an extensive geographic tour of the destruction, and numerous introductions tocommunity organizers. Lastly, we would like to thank all the community organizers and groupsthat took time out of their extremely busy schedules to share their stories, explain their work andallow us into their communities.

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At the time of this writing, more than six months after the storm, the recovery process in New

Orleans still seems long and slow. Even in the most operative neighborhoods that did not endure

flooding, stop signs replacing dysfunctional traffic lights cause congestion on major city

corridors, piles of sheet rock and other trash sit on the sidewalks waiting to be picked up, and

fallen limbs litter street medians. In the most devastated neighborhoods, bulldozing has begun,

bringing new energy to the clean up process, but also grim reminders as the bodies of hurricane

victims are uncovered in the rubble. The celebration of Mardi Gras brought life back to the city

for a short time, attracting tourists and residents, alike. Neighborhoods, even in some of the

flooded areas of the city, felt lively as neighbors reconnected and people watched the festivities

from their front stoops. But with the end of the celebrations, the emptiness returned and the

devastation reappeared. As the election approaches, there is a great deal of concern about who

will be able to exercise their right to vote; those who will possibly be excluded are also the ones

most affected by the storm. The race and class dimensions that overlay these groups bring up

major questions about who this city is being rebuilt for and who will be able to come home.

The remainder of this report will classify and describe the organizations working to rebuild this

city, outlining the needs identified in our interviews with them.

ORGANIZING LANDSCAPE

The possibility of shrinking the citys footprint has been a predominant issue in theredevelopment of New Orleans. If the most devastated neighborhoods do not redevelop

adequately to justify the services needed to support them, they are in danger of being reduced or

eliminated. In January, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission recommended that the City

Council implement a neighborhood planning process through which residents would participate

in the creation of plans for the future of neighborhoods. That process has not yet been formally

initiated and is already a month and a half behind the proposed schedule. With or without

residents input, it is certain that some neighborhoods viability is in question, and eventually a

judgment will be made about whether or not those neighborhoods will survive.

There are also neighborhoods, located on higher ground, that suffered little or no damage from

the hurricane and subsequent flooding, yet the communities occupying these neighborhoods face

the danger of being forced out. It is important to note that Hurricane Katrina destroyed some

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wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods and did not destroy all working class,

predominantly black neighborhoods. Therefore, in a city without rent control, poorer

neighborhoods, largely unaffected by the storm, are at great risk of being completely changed by

gentrification as developers look for areas to relocate the affluent displaced populations.

Many communities are mobilizing to reclaim their neighborhoods. In affected communities,

individuals and neighborhood associations are striving to prove the viability of their

neighborhoods. This involves rallying displaced residents and creating conditions for them to

return, finding spaces for residents to meet and organize, reopening neighborhood institutions,

organizing support networks for the debris removal and the rebuilding process, and working with

planners and architects to produce neighborhood plans. In unflooded areas, communities are

working to defend their neighborhoods from gentrification. Some communities are focusing on

creating a public presence on the street to present themselves as a formidable obstacle to big

developers. In other neighborhoods, groups are helping community residents stay in their

neighborhoods by working to help them fix their homes from storm damage and providing first-

time home buyer counseling.

Providing support for these initiatives may require a paradigm shift on the part of funders, as

many of these neighborhood anchors do not fit the description of traditional grantees.

Historically, community organizing in New Orleans poor or otherwise marginalizedcommunities has taken place on non-institutional grassroots levels. Community groups are often

lacking 501c3 status and a formalized process for development, grant writing, and funds

management. However, local organizations as well as nonprofits in other parts of the country

have demonstrated a willingness to serve as financial intermediaries in order to make the

provision of funding to these groups possible. Supporting neighborhood based efforts not only

helps to directly respond to the effects of Hurricane Katrina, but is also an investment in deciding

who is a part of the citys long-term future.

Larger organizations or coalitions of organizations that function on the city scale, serving many

neighborhoods rather than a single area, are also responding to support neighborhoods. Some of

these groups act as clearinghouses for a wide range of services and information needed by

residents, serving as a one-stop shop for post-Katrina concerns. Their work may include gutting

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houses for residents as the first step to coming home, communicating with community networks

to disperse information about pending city plans, or addressing other emerging community

needs. The Common Ground Collective, for example sponsors a pro-bono house gutting

program, a free health clinic, a legal aid center with regular drop in hours, an emergency housing

and eviction telephone hotline, and a public computer lab with internet access. Similarly, the

Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee functions as a coalition operating

through 14 working groups ranging in focus from workers rights to arts and culture. Other city-

wide organizations work in a more focused but no less important arena, whether it is supporting

homeownership in neighborhoods with high percentages of renters, building community centers

as meeting and organizing spaces for residents, or advocating for public housing tenants.

There is also a group of organizations that are striving to reconnect residents, both displaced and

at home, to the unique culture and heritage of New Orleans. A Studio in the Woods, the

Neighborhood Story Project, and the Finding our Folk Tour are just a few of the organizations

working to reclaim the citys rich artistic traditions, to give New Orleanians a chance to tell their

stories in their own voices, and to bring New Orleans music and culture to people whove

returned and ho those still evacuated. These organizations occupy a special niche in the

organizing landscape, helping to remind communities of the unique creativity of New Orleans

and the inspiration and empowerment it fosters These groups also play an important role in the

healing process occurring after Katrina by creating different outlets of expression to addresswhat happened and by providing a sense of what things were like before the storm.

A list of the organizations that were interviewed for this report and brief descriptions of their

activities can be found in the appendix that follows. The next section discusses the overarching

needs of the organizing community and the specific needs of individual organizations.

UNMET NEEDS

After talking with nearly two dozen organizations working on a variety of areas, we identified

three central areas of unmet need. They are as follows: staffing, space and programming and

outreach. A brief description of each general type of need, followed by a list of specific

organizations' needs are included below.

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Staffing

As a result of city funding cuts and displacement of workers following the storm, many

organizations are operating with severely limited capacity at a time when community needs are

the greatest. At a recent meeting, Steve Bradberry, head organizer for ACORN's New Orleans

office, pointed to staffing as his organization's most urgent need. Prior to Katrina, ACORN

employed nine organizers, one each to mobilize the city's nine membership chapters. After

the storm, as ACORN struggles locate evacuated staff and reconfigure operations to meet its

members' enormous communication, housing, construction, labor, voting rights and legal

advocacy needs, only three organizers are working to cover the same area. ACORN's situation is

not unique. Across the board, there is an immediate and enormous need for organizational

capacity building in the form of funded positions for professional and administrative staff,

programming staff, organizers and consultants with expertise in strategic planning,

information technology, accounting and legal support.

The UUA-UUSC is taking steps towards meeting these needs by funding two full-time positions

each for Neighborhood Housing Services, PICO, New Orleans Network and The Advancement

Project. An additional four positions are in the proposal phase. Even with these resources,

organizations need additional support. Generally, organizations describe needing from one to

five staff positions each. Given an increased post-Katrina cost of living and the challenges

associated with recruiting and retaining quality staff members, proposed salaries ranged from$28,000-$35,000 plus benefits for an entry level organizer or administrative staff position, to

$45,000-$55,000 plus benefits for more experienced professional staff or executive director

positions. Consultants bringing legal, technical, accounting or other types of expertise are

typically paid hourly or per contract; the costs of these services vary.

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Organizations' stated staffing needs are as follows:

Organization

One or Two FullTime Organizers,Entry Level Staff

Members

Three to Six FullTime Organizers,Entry Level Staff

Members

Legal,Accounting, or

Technical Support

Full TimeSpecialist,

ExperiencedOrganizer, and/ orProgram Director

ACORN xA Studio in theWoods x xCommon Ground xDouglass CommunityCoalition x xGert Town RevivalInitiative, Inc. xFinding Our FolkTour x x

IAF-Jeremiah Group xMy HouseCommunity LearningCenter x x x

NeighborhoodHousing Services xNeighborhood StoryProject xNew Orleans HousingEmergency ActionTeam (NOHEAT) x xNew OrleansNetwork x xPeople's HurricaneRelief Fund andOversight Committee x

Vietnamese Initiativefor EconomicTraining (VIET) x x

Space

There is a profound need for space on the part of organizations seeking to resume their pre-storm

operations and for those working to meet the new and emerging needs of their communities. In

the near term, organizations need resources to rent office and programming space in dry

neighborhoods; in the long-run, organizations need support to construct new or renovated spaces

in neighborhoods where constituents are.

Rebuilding spacesjust like rebuilding organizational operationsoffers an opportunity to re-

envision the scope and mission of an organization. Doug Anderson is the executive director of

My House Community Learning Center, an after school and literacy program which operated out

of a 22,000 square foot building (which the organization owned) in the Mid City neighborhood

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prior to Katrina. During the storm, the neighborhood was flooded by four feet of water,

inundating the first floor of My House, but leaving the second floor untouched and the building

structurally sound. Following the storm, Anderson recognized that his constituents (children

from the neighborhood) were absent, his pre-storm programming was obsolete, and that My

House's biggest remaining resource was its building. Since October, Anderson has been working

to shape a dynamic non-profit incubator and community center to be located in the building. The

incubator portion of the complex will house from five to ten small non-profit organizations and

will be structured as a collective with shared conference rooms, meeting spaces and support staff

such as grant writers, accountants, attorneys and information technology specialists. The

community center will house public spaces for meetings and programming, a daycare center, and

other community resources. Through a practical analysis of its post-Katrina resources, My

House has decided on an organizational restructuring that will best meet the changed needs of

the neighborhood and of the city's struggling non-profit organizations. At present, My House

continues to refine the redevelopment plan for its Mid City location, and is looking for an interim

office to rent during the construction process.

Since Katrina, the price for office space has risen sharply while its availability has plummeted.

Rents vary by neighborhood, but most organizers describe prices that fall between $1 and $2.50

per square foot. Programming spaces are in similarly short supply; prices depend on the owner,

and on the size and nature of the space. However, some organizations have expressed anewfound interest in sharing both office and programming spaces with other groups; exploring

this possibility could cut down on total rental costs. The costs of renovation and new

construction are attached to the needs of the builder and the current condition of the location.

Individual organizations' construction budgets should be consulted when making funding

decisions.

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Organizations stated needs for space are as follows:

Organization

Interim orPermanent Office

Space

Community Spacefor Meetings,InformationCenter, and

Activities

Funding forRenovations orConstruction

Concerned Citizens of AgricultureStreet Landfill x

Douglass Community Coalition xMy House Community LearningCenter x xNew Orleans Network xNew Orleans Housing EmergencyAction Team (NOHEAT) x xPeople's Hurricane Relief Fund andOversight Committee x

Porch Community Center xVietnamese Initiative forEconomic Training x

Programming and Outreach

Organizations need support to resume, and in some cases redevelop programming, and to

conduct outreach activities to get in touch with constituents. Resuming pre-storm programming

and tailoring new programming to the changing needs of residents helps make New Orleans a

more realistic option for return. Support for outreach activities addresses the challenges

associated with organizing and serving the still scattered population of New Orleans.

The Porch Community Center is in the planning phase at present, but already, artist in residence,

Willy Birch is organizing programming for the future space. Well aware of the forthcoming city

mandate for neighborhoods to prove their viability through a variety of means including a visible

presence on the street, Birch and his neighbors are planning a community center with a large,

open air 'porch'. This sheltered space will be clearly visible from the street, housing a tool

library and an active woodworking gallery. Birch is also working to create a calendar of arts

happenings in the neighborhood ranging from visual arts workshops to participatory performance

arts events where residents reclaim their neighborhood; their first actiona community treeplantingtook place a few weeks ago.

Programming and outreach are obviously highly unique to a given organization, and as such are

hard to typify. Organizations' stated needs have ranged from funding to make photocopies of a

monthly newsletter to support for gutting a thousand flood-damaged homes. Currently, the

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UUA-UUSC is funding NOHEAT (the New Orleans Housing Emergency Action Team) to

create outreach materials that will help residents of public housing stay informed about lobbying

activities and demonstrations. Many other areas of need exist, and new programming and

outreach needs are emerging constantly.

Organizations' stated programming and outreach needs include:

Organization

Outreach/ResourceMaterials

YouthProgramming/

CurriculumDevelopment

Equipment &Materials for

House Gutting

Artistic/Cultural

Programming

ACORN x

A Studio in the Woods xCommon Ground x

Finding Our Folk Tour x

House of Dance and Feathers xNew Orleans HousingEmergency Action Team(NOHEAT) xPeople's Hurricane Relief Fundand Oversight Coalition (PHRF) x x

Porch Community Center

Students at the Center xYouth Inspirational Connection,Inc. xVietnamese Initiative forEconomic Training (VIET) x

CONCLUSION

This report provides a snapshot of the current activities and needs of the organizations we have

interviewed thus far. It is an incomplete picture of the organizing landscape, but does paint in

broad strokes some of the responsibilities and constraints facing organizations in New Orleans.

For a more nuanced impression of the status of the rebuilding effort, and for more up to date

information about the operations and needs of given organizations, we recommend foremost a

firsthand visit to the city, and second, direct contact with head organizers and executive directors

who can provide the most current information in this ever-shifting landscape. Most

organizations' contact information is available online; for further questions about how to reach

organizations or for help planning a trip to the Gulf Coast, please feel free to contact the authors

of this report.

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APPENDIX

I. DESCRIPTION OF ORGANIZATIONSACTIVITIESNeighborhood Anchors:Concerned Citizens of Agriculture Street is a community advocacy group representingresidents living above the former Agriculture Street Landfill. Prior to Katrina the group wasengaged in a legal battle with the city over issues of environmental health and justice. The storminundated the neighborhood with five to six feet of flood water, causing even more toxin fromthe landfill below to seep into the homes and yards of residents. Now the group is pressingenvironmental officials to declare the site uninhabitable and to support residents to relocateelsewhere.

The Douglass Community Coalition came out of pre-Katrina efforts to improve FrederickDouglass High School in the Upper 9th Ward. After the storm the coalition broadened its focus,working to bring a farmers market, health clinic, teen recreation center, community center,housing, and improved educational facilities to the community. The coalition includes dozens ofpartner organizations.

The Gert Town Revival Initiative emerged as a response to the health and environmentalhazards posed by a now closed pesticide manufacturer in the Gert Town neighborhood of NewOrleans. Although the factory is gone, the health risks remain and have been exacerbated byKatrina-related flooding. Now, GRI is lobbying for resources to clean the land and housesbefore residents return, and for additional services to support the return of senior citizens andother vulnerable populations who make up a high percentage of those living in Gert Town.

The House of Dance and Feathers is a New Orleans Cultural museum located in the Lower 9thWard. Run out of an addition to the curator's home, the House of Dance and Feathers had asingular schedule of cultural programming and a preeminent collection of local artifacts andmemorabilia including Mardi Gras Indian feather and bead work. Although much of thecollection was spared from the flood, the building was heavily damaged. The House of Danceand Feathers is now working to expand its collection and to rebuild and reopen its doors on thesame location in the Lower 9th Ward.

My House Community Learning Center in the Mid City neighborhood ran after school andliteracy programming prior to Katrina. During the storm, the center's 22,000 sq. ft. building wasflooded along with the neighborhood around it. As a result, the center has shifted its focus fromprogramming to redevelopment of the space into a non-profit incubator and a full servicecommunity center with a daycare and community meeting and programming spaces.

The Porch Community Center is a collaborative project between Seventh Ward residents,

Tulane University and NHS. The proposed center will be a part of NHS's emerging network ofcommunity centers, consisting of a carpentry workshop and tool library to help residents learnthe skills to work on their homes, housing and homeownership counseling from NHS, andregular visual and performing arts programming as a means of creatively reclaiming theneighborhood.

The Vietnamese Initiative for Economic Training (VIET) is based out of the largerVietnamese community concentrated in New Orleans East. Prior to the storm, VIET was

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involved in a variety of advocacy and job training programs as well as offering an annualsummer day camp for kids. IN the wake of Katrina, VIET has broadened its focus to includeadvocacy and support in navigating the bureaucracies of insurance, taxes, FEMA aid packagesand absentee voting. VIET has been extremely successful at mobilizing residents in this hard hitneighborhood; now the organization is trying to expand its tax and legal support programs,reopen its summer day camp and establish a recreation center for neighborhood youth.

City-wide Organizations and Coalitions:ACORN is a grassroots membership-organization working for social justice and equality. SinceKatrina, ACORN's semi-autonomous New Orleans chapter has been involved in lobbyingWashington for federal funding for rebuilding, anti-bulldozing class action lawsuits on behalf ofresidents in the Lower 9th Ward, organizing residents to prepare for the neighborhood planningprocess, and wide scale pro-bono gutting of flooded houses belonging to ACORN members fromacross the city.

Common Ground Collective emerged in the weeks following Katrina and now consists of morethan forty full-time volunteer organizers working on a range of rebuilding issues. Common

Ground has been particularly effective at pro-bono gutting of flooded homes in the Upper andLower 9th Ward and at legal defense of tenants' rights.

IAF-Jeremiah Group is a consortium of local churches organized before the storm. Post-Katrina the Jeremiah Group has worked to help pastors locate evacuated parishioners andidentify and meet their needs. The Jeremiah Group is currently exploring homebuilding andhomeownership programs for its members.

Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) was founded to help move low and moderate incomeresidents from rentals to homeownership. Post-Katrina NHS's focus has expanded to includedevelopment of a network of interconnected community centers offering a variety of socialservices including housing and homeownership counseling.

New Orleans Network emerged post-Katrina as an information sharing tool for organizers andcommunity members. Housed on the internet, the New Orleans Network's function is to providea community calendar and database with information on organizations, services, events andfundraising.

New Orleans Housing Emergency Action Team (NOHEAT) is a public housing and tenantadvocacy coalition that brings together public housing and rental tenants, activists and attorneys.Since Katrina, NOHEAT has been fighting for the reopening of New Orleans' public housingprojects, for eviction protection for renters and FEMA hotel voucher recipients.

People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee (PHRF) is a broad-based coalitionwhose activities are spread across fourteen working groups and whose stated focus is on theneeds and perspectives of marginalized, poor, African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina.Currently PHRF is engaged in developing affordable housing, opening a center forreconstruction workers, and developing a 'Peoples' Plan' as a response to the city's officialneighborhood planning process.

Organizations Promoting Artistic Expression:

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A Studio in the Woods, located in Lower Coast Algiers on the fringe of Orleans Parish, is anon-profit dedicated to preserving bottomland hardwood forest and providing within it a peacefulretreat where visual, literary and performing artists can work uninterrupted. Post-Katrina theStudio has expanded its pre-existing artists residency program to help New Orleans artists returnto the city, healing themselves and their communities through artistic expression. The Studio isalso working with an environmental educator and a botanist to develop a youth curriculum on theecological effects of the storm.

The Finding Our Folk Tour is traveling between evacuee hubs across the nation to bring artists,musicians and activists to young New Orleanians in exile. The tour functions as an opportunityfor New Orleans youth to tell their stories, reconnect with friends, and enjoy the artwork andmusic unique to their city. It offers youth the chance to stay connected to New Orleans, itspeople and its singular culture, while still waiting for the chance to return.

Neighborhood Story Project (NSP) is a community documentary program. Before the storm,NSP worked with public high school students to author their own stories, publishing the finishedproducts as bound books. Despite funding shortages and upheaval in the public school system,

NSP is back working on writing with local middle and high school students and othercommunity members to make their stories heard.

Students at the Center (SAC) worked before the storm with public high school students toproduce original writing and film. A focus on helping young people tell their own stories hasexpanded post-Katrina to processing and creating narratives of the storm and evacuation. SAC isback working with students in New Orleans, and is also traveling to evacuee hubs to holdperiodic conferences of youth in exile.

Youth Inspirational Connection, Inc. was founded in 1975 to support youth organizing andinvolvement in the arts. Since the storm, YIC has been working to revive its annual youth-organized, youth-run music festival which was held every October for the last 16 years untilKatrina. The festival, which typically employed an event planning staff of 30 high schoolstudents, and brought together over 4000 musicians, brought musical traditions from around theworld to the people of New Orleans.

II. AUTHORS BIOSJainey Bavishi is a first year Masters candidate at the Department of Urban Studies andPlanning at MIT from Charlotte, NC, focusing on international development and regionalplanning. After graduating from Duke University in 2003 with an AB in Public Policy Studiesand Cultural Anthropology, Jainey spent a year in the town of Cuttack in Orissa, India, an areastill recovering from a deadly super cyclone in 1999 that killed more than 10,000 people and leftover 1.5 million homeless. Her work focused on creating advocacy materials for a movement tostart daycare centers in communities below the poverty line through documenting the voices andvisions of poor working mothers. Jainey spent the last year working as a research assistant at theFannie Mae Foundation. She researched lessons and best practices from domestic communityrevitalization work.

Rachel Wilch was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She received a BA from ReedCollege in Portland, OR where she studied labor movement narratives through the lens of

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cultural anthropology. Her interests focus on economic justice and alternative approaches toaffordable housing. She grew up in, and later worked on establishing low-income mutualhousing cooperatives. She is currently pursuing her MCP (Masters of City Planning) in theDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is excited for the adventures andopportunities she is finding across the country, though she is eager to eventually set up shop backin the great Northwest.

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New Orleans Post-Katrina Community Organizing

Landscape:

From Action to PolicyPart Two in a Three Part Series

Prepared for the UUA-UUSC and

The funding communityby Jainey Bavishi and Rachel Wilch

April, 2006


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe want to acknowledge the ongoing support of the Unitarian Universalist Association-

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee that allowed an initially small project blossom into

this more comprehensive series. We would like to recognize our local partner and primary

community liaison, Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, Inc. (NHS), who has

supported our work from the very beginning, and continues to help us navigate the intricacies of

New Orleans complex organizing landscape. We also want to acknowledge Tony Pipa for his

tireless editorial and advisory assistance. We would like to thank readers of the first report who

have passed it on to other interested parties. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to

the organizers, advocates and residents who so generously offered their time, information and

experiences, and who gave this series of reports their substance.


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CONTACT INFORMATION

You may contact the authors of this report by email or telephone:

Jainey Bavishi

[email protected]

704-293-3320

Rachel Wilch

[email protected]


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INTRODUCTIONThis report functions as the second in a series of three reports on the status and needs of

community organizing efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans. The first report, entitled New

Orleans Post-Katrina Organizing Landscape: Current Efforts, Unmet Needs, provided a general

overview of the types of groups currently involved in organizing and community initiatives in

New Orleans, and the basic categories of need present across the board. To briefly summarize

the findings, groups were divided into three types: those serving the needs of an individual

community or neighborhood, those serving the entire city, and those working on the cultural and

artistic dimensions to rebuilding. The needs of these organizations also fell into three broad

categories: staffing, office and meeting spaces, and programming and outreach.

This report departs slightly from the previous organizational categories, shifting instead towardsan exploration of the relationship between community-based action and policy. It attempts to

highlight instances where city, state and federal policymakers are adopting official policy and

protocols based upon the work of grassroots organizers. It centers on three particular areas: the

neighborhood planning process, housing and education; the categories of needs remain the same

as those in the last report. This report is not intended to replace the first report, but to build upon

it, acting as an update/addendum. Some organizations featured in the first report are outlined

again here for their particular relevance to the three areas of policy focus. New organizations,

met with since the distribution of the first report are also included. We encourage recipients to

read the two side by side: an electronic copy of the first report, New Orleans Post-Katrina

Community Organizing Landscape: Current Efforts, Unmet Needs is available through the both

the UUSC website online at www.uusc.org and on the UUA website at www.uua.org.

Research for this series was funded by the Unitarian Universalist Association-Unitarian

Universalist Service Committee; these reports are intended for both internal use within the UUA-

UUSC, and for the information of the broader funding community. The UUA-UUSC encourages

recipients of this report to pass it on to anyone else who might be interested.


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UPDATE

As this report goes to print, nearly eight months have passed since levee failures following

Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans with floodwater. Although visiting politicians quip at

the progress being made here and the specter of an upcoming mayoral election has prompted

some visible improvements, life for most New Orleanians remains a waiting game. FEMA

building elevation recommendations were released this week, but the impact of this information

is unknown as the city has yet to revise building permits to reflect the changes. The

neighborhood planning process to determine the rebuilding agenda for individual neighborhoods

recommended by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB) was slated to begin on

February 20, but the city government has taken no steps towards initiating this process. While

New Orleans residents wait in cities like Houston and Baton Rouge to hear the fate of their

communities back home, the rental market in New Orleans continues to tighten with low

vacancy rates and climbing rents. This uncertainty, combined with a maze of red tape from

insurance companies and utility providers, an eviscerated public education system, non-existent

public health facilities, crumbling city infrastructure and service provision, massive municipal

layoffs and unknown environmental hazards make return to New Orleans impossible for many

residents.

Reviving and repopulating this city requires not a silver bullet but a gradual, simultaneous

rebuilding of all facets of New Orleans. What follows is a particular analysis of the

neighborhood planning process, housing and education. These three areas of focus were chosen

from the many components of the rebuilding process for their exemplification of the

intersections of policy and actions on the part of organizers, advocates and residents. This report

especially works to examine the cooption of community based methods, efforts and

achievements, by governmental and policy actors struggling to craft a viable and economical

rebuilding strategy. This report does not claim to provide a fully comprehensive perspective, but

given limited time and space, the categories do offer a useful cross section of particular aspects

of the rebuilding process.


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Neighborhood Planning

In January, 2006, the mayor-appointed Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) redevelopment

commission made recommendations to the city council about issues relating to urban planning.

With regards to rebuilding neighborhoods, the BNOB commission suggested that the city

sponsor a city-wide neighborhood planning process, through which residents help to create

redevelopment plans for their neighborhoods. The process, initially scheduled to take place

during a three month period between February 20 and May 20, in time to provide

recommendations for the federal budget allocation process this summer. No other details were

provided during the BNOB commissions presentation of their recommendations, nor are they

available on the BNOB website, where citizens were directed to find more information. The

information that was presented also lacked a clear statement of how the neighborhood plans

would be used. At the time of the recommendations, it was suspected that one of the outcomes

of the neighborhood planning process would be to determine whether or not neighborhoods will

have a future at all.

Now more than two months after the city government was supposed to begin the process was

supposed to have begun, funding has still not been secured for such an effort. In the meantime,

rumors about the process have prompted communities to begin mobilizing out of fear that their

neighborhoods will targeted for redevelopment as parks or wetlands. Some neighborhood

groups such as the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association have engaged in their own

neighborhood planning process. Other organizations such as ACORN are reaching out to

neighborhoods that may not have the resources and connections to hire their own planners to

engage residents in planning meetings and encourage them to give input on the future of their

neighborhoods. The Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee is working to

develop a Peoples Plan, an all encompassing neighborhood plan in response to the Bring New

Orleans Back Commissions recommendation. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Neighborhood

Development Collaborative is hoping to connect neighborhoods to existing neighborhood

planning efforts. The explosion of grassroots neighborhood level planning activity has sparked a

great deal of coalition building and information sharing between organizations across the city

and within neighborhoods. At the same time, different communities within the same geographic

areas are striving to preserve their own interests through separate plans. Eventually, these


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7

disparate plans will have to be consolidated across racial and economic divisions within

communities.

Following failed negotiations with FEMA for funds to facilitate the city-sponsored planning

process, both public and private dollars have recently been committed to consolidate and support

ongoing grassroots neighborhood level planning activities. The result is a process that favors

neighborhoods with resources to hire experts, bring people back to the city, and engage in their

own planning. This serves as an example of a grassroots movement now adopted as the citys

official mechanism to gain resident input for neighborhood planning. Now more than ever,

neighborhood groups and organizations working to support neighborhood planning are in need of

resources as it is not likely that the city will provide adequate support for a participatory

neighborhood planning process but will rather depend on neighborhoods to initiate their own

processes. A list of neighborhood organizations can be found in the appendix of this report.

Housing

New Orleans is currently facing a severe housing shortage as residents from damaged areas and

an influx of construction and aid workers crowd into limited housing stock in the un-flooded

sliver by the river. This reorientation of housing and population in the city has driven rents up

dramatically, leaving lower-income New Orleanians without the possibility of returning home.

Official plans for rebuilding assistance focus on homeowners, rather than renters. This leaves

not only the very poor, elderly and the disabled, but also the full sixty percent of New Orleanians

who rent rather than own, without adequate support to rebuild their lives here.

Organizations and activists must be supported in advocating for this enormous segment of the

population. UUA-UUSC has already shown a commitment to support affordable rental housing,

low-income home ownership programs and advocacy on behalf of vulnerable renter populations.

In its first round of grant making, UUA-UUSC funded the interfaith coalitions PICO and IAF-

Jeremiah in their shifts towards affordable home building. UUA-UUSC also provided grants for

Neighborhood Housing Services to hire a housing counselor to help prepare low-income renters

for home ownership. Finally, UUA-UUSC provided a grant to C3/Hands Off Iberville, a public


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8

housing advocacy and activism group, to support its work on behalf of the rights of displaced

public housing residents.

Despite this generosity, the task of meeting needs and defending the rights of nearly two-thirds

the citys population remains an enormous task. A recent study conducted by the Greater New

Orleans Fair Housing Action Center found that in post-Katrina New Orleans, African-American

renters were racially discriminated against 77% of the time. And even in less overt situations, the

lack of accessibility in available housing is serving to prevent disabled and elderly New

Orleanians from returning. At a recent meeting Sharon Alexis and Zeenat Rasheed lamented the

lack of accessibility, medical and transportation services, and dependable hurricane evacuation

plan as major barriers for the return of elders and disabled residents. With support, Alexis and

Rasheed hope that their organization, Katrinas House of Care will come to consist of an

elderly/disabled residential care center located just north of the city in an area less vulnerable to

storms, as well as a home-ownership training and support center for low-income families.

The myriad work around rental housing can be loosely organized into three categories. The first

category consists of groups working on housing policy and advocacy, such as the New Orleans

Neighborhood Development Collaborative, ACORN, Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action

Center, and C3/Hands off Iberville/NOHEAT. The second category consists of groups working

on resident education and skill development; this category includes GNO Fair Housing Action

Center, Neighborhood Housing Services, and Katrinas House of Care. The third category

consists of groups working on the actual refurbishment or development of homes for re-

habitation, rent or sale to low or moderate-income residents; this category includes Common

Ground Collective, ACORN, Katrinas House of Care, Humanitas, and Neighborhood Housing

Services.

Education and Youth Programs

With only three public schools open in the city along with a mere sixteen other charter and

alternative schools, the lack of space in publicly accessible, geographically proximate schools

remains a major barrier preventing displaced families from returning home. A total of fifty-six

school facilities are expected to open to meet the 2007 demand, but as the Board of Education


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and FEMA struggle to accurately measure the demand for schools, the difficult question arises of

what must come first in the recovery process, the community or the school? Currently, 107 of

New Orleanss schools are under the control of the State of Louisianas Recovery School

District, a body that oversaw five Orleans Parish schools before Katrina because of low

performance, and took over an additional 102 after the storm. The schools are slated to be under

this Recovery School District for five years at which point administration of the schools will be

reevaluated. Additionally, many auxiliary educational programs for children, such as after

school centers and tutoring services, have lost public funding since the storm. These programs

were important in supplementing public education and educators before Katrina and are even

more critical now that children are experiencing interruptions in their schooling and loss of

activities and peer groups.

As displaced families consider returning home at the end of the academic year, programs for

children and youth will be extremely important in helping to provide safe spaces for young

people to learn, play, interact, and express themselves while parents find time to work on their

houses. Programs for children and youth can be grouped into four categories. The first category

consists of organizations that are working to create spaces for youth to hang out, recognizing that

most places in the city where young people previously spent time, such as malls and movie

theaters, remain closed post-Katrina, such as the Vietnamese Initiative for Economic Training

and the Douglass Coalition. In the second category, the Youth Inspirational Connection, Inc. and

the Finding Our Folk Tour are working to involve young people in the production of cultural

events in New Orleans and in evacuee cities, respectively, in order to provide them with

leadership opportunities as well as relief from the day to day stress of living in the post-disaster

world. The third include programs that are working to provide outlets for youth expressions

while enriching their skills, such as Students at the Center and the Neighborhood Story Project.

Finally, the Finding Our Folk Tour and A Studio in the Woods are also working to help young

people understand the causes, experiences and effects of Katrina through structured curricula.

An outline of unmet organizational needs, as well as specific descriptions of each organization

mentioned in the above categories can be found in the following section and the appendix,

respectively.


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UNMET NEEDS

While organizational needs are many and varied, in general they can be organized into three

broadly defined categories. Organizations interviewed all identified some combination of

staffing, office and meeting space, and programming and outreach needs. The first UUA-UUSC

report, available on the UUA-UUSC websites at www.uua.org and www.uusc.org provides a

more thorough description of each category of unmet needs, and some analysis of why these

particular needs have emerged in the wake of Katrina. Tables outlining the specific needs of the

organizations discussed in this report can be found below.

Staffing

Organization

Stipends for

Neighborhood

Watch and

Graduate

Interns

One or Two

Full Time

Organizers,

Entry Level

Staff

Members

Three to

Six Full

Time

Organizers,

Entry Level

Staff

Members

Legal,

Accounting,

or

Technical

Support

Full Time

Specialist,

Experienced

Organizer,

Program

Director

ACORN x

A Studio in the Woods x xDouglass Community

Coalition x x

Finding Our Folk Tour x x

Holy CrossNeighborhood

Association x x

Humanitas x

Greater New Orleans

Fair Housing ActionCenter x x

Neighborhood Housing

Services xNeighborhood Story

Project xNew Orleans

Neighborhood

DevelopmentCollaborative x

Katrina's House of Care xPeople's Hurricane

Relief Fund and

Oversight Committee x xVietnamese Initiativefor Economic Training x x


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Space

Organization

Interim/Permanent

Office Space

Community Space

for Meetings,

Information Center,

and Activities

Funding for

Renovations,

Construction and

Land AcquisitionDouglass Community

Coalition xGreater New Orleans Fair

Housing Action Center xHoly Cross Neighborhood

Association x

Katrina's House of Care x xC3/Hands Off Iberville/New

Orleans Housing Emergency

Action Team (NOHEAT) x xVietnamese Initiative for

Economic Training x

Programming

Organization

Outreach &

Marketing

Youth

Programming/Curriculum

Development

Equipment &Materials for

House Gutting

Artistic/Cultural

Programming

ACORN xA Studio in the

Woods x

Common Ground xFinding Our Folk

Tour xGreater New Orleans

Housing Action

Center x

Students at the Center x

Youth InspirationalConnection, Inc. xVietnamese Initiativefor Economic

Training x


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CONCLUSION

This report provides an exploration of the intersections between community action and policy,

through examination of the following three areas of rebuilding: the neighborhood planning

process, housing and education. As the landscape of rebuilding continues to shift, the

relationships and activities of organizations will evolve as well. For the most accurate and up to

date perspectives on the rebuilding process, and associated action and policy, we recommend

contacting organizers directly. The contact information for most organizations is available

online; for further questions about how to reach organizations or for help planning a trip to the

Gulf Coast, please feel free to contact the authors of this report.


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APPENDIX

I. DESCRIPTION OF ORGANIZATIONS ACTIVITIESACORN is a nationwide grassroots membership organization working for social justice and

equality. Since Katrina, ACORNs semi-autonomous New Orleans chapter has been involved in

lobbying Washington for federal funding for rebuilding, anti-bulldozing and voting rights classaction lawsuits on behalf of city residents, organizing residents to prepare for the neighborhoodplanning process, and wide scale pro-bono gutting of flooded houses.

A Studio in the Woods, located in Lower Coast Algiers, on the fringes of Orleans Parish, is a

non-profit dedicated to preserving bottomland hardwood forest and providing within it a peacefulretreat where visual, literary and performing artists can work uninterrupted. Post-Katrina, the

studio has expanded its existing artists residency program to help New Orleans artists return tothe city, healing themselves and their communities through artistic exploration. The studio is

also working with an environmental educatory and botanist to develop youth curriculum on theecological effects of the storm.

C3/Hands off Iberville and New Orleans Housing Emergency Action Team (NOHEAT)

form the nucleus of a public housing and tenant advocacy coalition that brings together publichousing and rental tenants, activists and attorneys. Since Katrina, the coalition has been fighting

for the reopening of New Orleans public housing projects and for eviction protection for rentersand FEMA hotel voucher recipients.

The Common Ground Collective emerged in the weeks following Katrina and now consists of

more than forty full-time volunteer organizers working on a range of rebuilding issues. CommonGround has been particularly effective in its pro-bono gutting of flooded homes, and in providing

legal defense of tenants rights.

The Douglass Community Coalition came out of pre-Katrina efforts to improve FrederickDouglass High School in the Upper 9

thWard. After the storm the coalition broadened its focus,

engaging on larger issues of educational policy, and working to bring a farmers market, healthclinic, teen recreation center, community center, housing, and improved schools to the

community. The coalition includes dozens of partner organizations.

The Finding our Folk Tour is traveling between evacuee hubs across the nation to bring artists,musicians and activists to young New Orleanians in exile. The tour functions as an opportunity

for New Orleans youth to tell their stories, reconnect with friends, and enjoy the artwork andmusic unique to their city. It offers youth the chance to stay connected to New Orleans, its

people and its singular culture, while they wait for the chance to return.

The Holy Cross Neighborhood Association is a community group from the Holy Cross sectionof the Lower 9

thWard. The association was active both before and since the storm; it is

currently working with professional planners to conduct a participatory neighborhood planningprocess. The association is exploring creative ways of protecting the historic neighborhood, and

of bringing together geographically dispersed residents around planning and action.


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Humanitas is a faith based non-profit operating in conjunction with the Mount Tabor BaptistChurch in the Gentilly neighborhood in New Orleans. The organization has a long history

advocating for the housing concerns of low-wealth, elderly and disabled New Orleanians, andis currently involved in developing affordable housing in Gentilly and throughout the city. Post-

Katrina, the organization has provided housing for 51 families.

Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center was founded in 1994 through a FairHousing Initiative grant from HUD. The center advocates for fair housing practices and renters

rights through legal enforcement work and through landlord and tenant education outreach.Following Katrina, the massive shuffling of renters and rental properties has inundated

GNOFHAC with complaints of unfair housing. The center has a policy of turning no one away,but lacks the capacity to deal with its current workload.

Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) was founded to help move low and moderate income

residents from renting to homeownership. Post-Katrina NHS focus has expanded to includepartnering on nonprofit homebuilding and the development of a network of interconnected

community centers offering a variety of social services including housing and homeownershipcounseling.

The Neighborhood Story Project is a community documentary program. Before the storm, the

Neighborhood Story Project worked with public high school students to author their own stories,publishing the finished products as bound books. Despite funding shortages and upheaval in the

public school system, the Neighborhood Story Project is back working on writing with localmiddle and high school students and other community members to make their stories heard.

New Orleans Neighborhood DevelopmentCollaborative is a coalition of public, private, non-

profit and community based organizations working with New Orleans neighborhoods to supportand expand affordable housing. Before and since Katrina, NONDC has worked to provide

technical assistance, policy advocacy and neighborhood based demonstrations for residents andorganizations working to support neighborhoods.

Katrinas House of Care is a new organization providing immediate, short-term emergency

assistance to Katrina victims in need of help with returning to New Orleans and cleaning up andrebuilding their homes. The group, which has applied for expedited 501c3 status, also plans to

provide long term housing and holistic support necessary to help the most vulnerable populationsof New Orleans, including the elderly, the disabled, low-income individuals and families, and

youth.

Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee (PHRF) is a broad-based coalition

whose activities are spread across fourteen working groups and whose stated focus is the needsand perspectives of marginalized, poor, African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Currently PHRF is engaged in developing affordable housing, opening a workers center, anddeveloping a Peoples Plan as a response to the citys call for a neighborhood planning process.


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Students at the Center worked before the storm with public high school students to produceoriginal writing and film A focus on helping young people tell their own stories has expanded

post-Katrina to processing and creating narratives of the storm and evacuation. Students at theCenter is back working with students in New Orleans, and is also traveling to evacuee hubs to

hold periodic conferences of youth in exile.

The Vietnamese Initiative for Economic Training (VIET) is based out of the large Vietnamesecommunity concentrated in New Orleans East. Prior to the storm, VIET was involved in a

variety of advocacy and job training programs as well as offering an annual summer day campfor kids. In the wake of Katrina, VIET has broadened its focus to include advocacy and support

in navigating the bureaucracies of insurance, taxes, FEMA aid packages and absentee voting.VIET has been extremely successful in mobilizing residents in this hard hit neighborhood; now

the organization is trying to expand its tax and legal support programs, reopen its summer daycamp and establish a recreation center for neighborhood youth.

Youth Inspirational Connection, Inc. was founded in 1975 to support youth organizing and

involvement in the arts. Since the storm, YIC has been working to revive its annual youth-organized, youth-run music festival which was held every October for the last 16 years until

Katrina. The festival, which typically employs and event planning staff of 30 high schoolstudents, and brings together over 4000 musicians, brings musical traditions from around the

world to the people of New Orleans.

III. NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATIONS

The following list of neighborhood improvement groups and resident councils is a combinationof neighborhood group listings predating Katrina, and those founded since the storm. This is a

working list, bringing together the resources available to us at the time of publication. Because ofits piecemeal nature, it is uncertain which groups are active at this time. Nevertheless, it

provides a good starting point for funders interested in working within a particular neighborhood,and also a good sense of the wide scope of civic involvement both pre- and post-Katrina.

West Bank

Algiers Council of Neighborhood residentsAlgiers Neighborhood Improvement Association

Algiers Point AssociationAlgiers Riverview Association

Aurora Civic AssociationAurora Gardens Community Association

Aurora Oaks, Hyman, Kabel Civic OrganizationAurora West Civic Association

Behrman Heights AssociationEnglish Turn Civic Improvement Association

English Turn Property Owners AssociationTall Timbers Owners Association


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Uptown and Carrollton123 Walnut Street Association

Audubon Area Zoning AssociationAudubon Boulevard Neighborhood Association

Audubon Boulevard Neighborhood Association

Audubon Riverside Neighborhood AssociationAudubon Street Neighborhood AssociationBaronne Street Neighborhood Association

Broadmoor Improvement AssociationCalhoun-Palmer Neighborhood Association

Carrollton Avenue Preservation AllianceCarrollton-Earhart-Monticello-Palmetto Neighborhood Association

Citizens of Upper BroadmoorCouncil of Carrollton Residents Associations

Greater Carrollton Neighborhood AssociationFontainbleau Improvement Association

Holly Park ApartmentsHolly Park Civic Association

Hollygrove Improvement OrganizationJefferson City Improvement Association

Maple Area Residents, Inc.Newcomb Boulevard Association

Old Carrollton Neighborhood AssociationPalmer Park Residents, Inc.

Palmetto-Dixon Neighborhood AssociationSoniat Square Association

Uptown Neighborhood Improvement, Inc.Uptown Triangle Association

Upper Audubon AssociationUpper Carrollton Residents Association

State Street Driver Improvement AssociationState-Palmer-Calhoun Association of Neighborhoods

Versailles Boulevard Commission

Central City and Garden DistrictBienville-Conti-Tulane Neighborhood Collaborative

Central City Renaissance AllianceColiseum Square Association

Garden District AssociationIrish Channel Neighborhood Association

Jackson Avenue FoundationJackson Avenue Task ForceLower Garden District Coalition

Treme District Civic AssociationTreme Neighborhood Association

Faubourg TremeEsplanade Ridge/Treme Civic Association


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Lafitte Resident CouncilOld Elysian Fields Neighborhood Coalition

Marigny, Bywater, Desire, St. Claude and St. Rock

Bywater Neighborhood Association

Desire Area Resident Council/Desire Community Family CenterDelachaise Neighborhood AssociationFaubourg Delachaise Neighborhood Association

Faubourg Franklin AssociationFaubourg Lafayette Neighborhood Improvement Association

Faubourg Marigny Improvement AssociationFaubourg St. John Neighborhood Association

Faubourg St. Roch Improvement associationHistoric Faubourg Lafayette Association

History Faubourg St. Mary Corp.

Vieux CarreEsplanade Preservation Association

French Quarter Citizens for PreservationFrench Quarter North and South

Vieux Carre Property Owners, Residents, & Associates, Inc.Upper Decatur Association

St. Peter Street Neighborhood Improvement Association

GentillyGentilly Heights East Neighborhood Association

Gentilly Residents Neighborhood AssociationGentilly Sugar Hill Residents Association

Gentilly TerraceGentilly Terrace and Garden Improvement Association

Lower Gentilly Neighborhood Development AssociationMirabeau Gardens Neighborhood Association

Pontilly Association

LakeviewCity Park Neighborhood Association

Lake Forest Estates Home Owners AssociationLake Marina Towers Condominium Association

Lake Oak Civic AssociationLake Oaks Subdivision Improvement District

Lake Vista Property Owners AssociationLake Willow Homeowners Association

Lakeshore Property Owners Association

Lower Ninth and Holy CrossHoly Cross Neighborhood Association


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Lower Ninth Ward Homeowners AssociationLower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Council, Inc.

Florida Boulevard Community Improvement Association

East End

Eastover Residents AssociationLake Catherine Neighborhood AssociationVenetian Isles Civic and Improvement Association

Village de LEst Improvement AssociationHuntington Park Homeowners Association

Lake Bullard Homeowners AssociationPress Park Homeowners Association

Seabrooke Neighborhood Association

Central Business and Warehouse DistrictsRiverfront Civic Association

Downtown Neighborhoods Improvement AssociationLafayette Square Association

III. AUTHORS BIOSJainey Bavishi is a first year Masters candidate at the Department of Urban Studies and

Planning at MIT from Charlotte, NC, focusing on international development and regionalplanning. After graduating from Duke University in 2003 with an AB in Public Policy Studies

and Cultural Anthropology, Jainey spent a year in the town of Cuttack in Orrissa, India, an areastill recovering from a deadly super cyclone in 1999 that killed more than 10,000 people and left

over 1.5 million homeless. Her work focused on creating advocacy materials for a movement tostart daycare centers in communities below the poverty line through documenting the voices of

poor working mothers. Jainey spent the last year working as a research assistant at the FannieMae Foundation. She researched lessons and best practices from domestic community

revitalization work.

Rachel Wilch was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She received a BA from ReedCollege in Portland, Oregon where she studied labor movement narratives through the lens of

cultural anthropology. Her interests focus on economic justice and alternative approaches toaffordable housing. She grew up in and later worked on establishing low-income mutual

housing cooperatives. She is currently pursuing her MCP (Masters of City Planning) in thedepartment of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is

excited for the adventures and opportunities she is finding across the country, though she is eagerto eventually set up shop back in the great Northwest.


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June 30, 2006

To whom it may concern:

The Unitarian Universalist Association and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee formedthe Gulf Coast Relief Fund to respond to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In November 2005, weparticipated in a meeting of several organizations doing community work in New Orleans. Theyall emphasized the difficulty of working in New Orleans, the complexities of working withevacuees and returnees, the losses their own organizations had suffered, and the overall lack offunding for community organization in the wake of the hurricanes.

In December 2005, The Gulf Coast Relief Fund supported a team that spent several weeks in

New Orleans mapping community organizations work there. The team spoke with organizationsabout the work they were doing, the challenges they faced, and their needs for capacity building.

The organizational mapping done by the team shows there is very little funding going into theseorganizations. We found the teams work very useful for our own programmatic fundingframework in New Orleans. By mid-January, we decided to continue to support a two-personteam, Jainey Bavishi and Rachel Wilch, for several months.

The product of our team's research has been compiled in a series of three reports. The first twosummarize the status of New Orleans and the current needs of community organizers. This thirdand final report in the series, entitled, Building Relationships to Rebuild New Orleans is basedon follow-up interviews with representatives from organizations with which UUA-UUSC hasalready formed funding partnerships. These interviews delve into the specific ways in whichfoundations and national organizations are already contributing to New Orleans, and ways inwhich this support might be more effectively directed.

PDF files of all three reports are available for download on the UUSC website, www.uusc.org,underKatrina Reliefand on the Unitarian Universalist Association website, www.uua.org, underGulf Coast Relief Fund. We hope you will find this information useful in your work; please feelfree to pass these resources along to others.

Sincerely,

Martha ThompsonProgram Manager for Rights in Humanitarian Crises


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New Orleans Post-Katrina Community Organizing

Landscape:

Building Relationships to Rebuild New OrleansPart Three in a Three Part Series*

Prepared for the UUA-UUSC andthe Funding Community

By Jainey Bavishi and Rachel Wilch

June, 2006

*This report is the final of a three part series entitled, New Orleans Post-Katrina OrganizingLandscape. Research for this series has been funded by the Unitarian Universalist Association-UnitarianUniversalist Service Committee (UUA-UUSC). The first two reports of this series, Current Efforts,

Unmet Needs, serving as a general overview of the types of groups involved in organizing and

community initiatives in New Orleans and presenting the basic categories of needs of those organizations,and From Action to Policy, exploring the relationship between community-based action and policy, can

be found on the websites of the UUA (www.uua.org) and UUSC (www.uusc.org). The UUA-UUSC

encourages the wide distribution of these reports to all those interested.


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to acknowledge the Unitarian Universalist Association-Unitarian Universalist Service

Committee, whose ongoing support, flexibility and openness have made it possible for this

information to be widely shared. We would like to once again thank Neighborhood HousingServices of New Orleans, Inc., our local partner and main community liaison, who was

invaluable in helping us to navigate the complex terrain of New Orleanss community organizing

through the duration of this project. We would like to thank the readers of our first two reports

who have helped us to pass them along to others who are interested. And finally, we would like

to express our gratitude to the organizers interviewed for this report, who have consistently

shared with us their time and perspectives to help us make this project possible.


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CONTACT INFORMATION

You may contact the authors of this report by email or telephone:

Jainey Bavishi

[email protected]

Rachel [email protected]

206-714-2318


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INTRODUCTION

So, how is it going down there?

More than nine months have passed since New Orleans levee system failed, inundating 80% ofthe city with Hurricane Katrinas flood waters. Nine months is a long time to wait for phone

service to be restored to your undamaged home, a long time to live in an out-of-town motel,

waiting to return to a home that did see flood water. Nine months is notsuch a long time if

youre a bankrupt city administration, trying to rebuild a municipal infrastructure from the

bottom up, or if youre a construction firm contracted to design and build the kind of levee that

will save lives, rather than wash them away.

Depending on who you ask, and where you go, So, how is it going down there? has as many

answers as there are people in New Orleans (and Houston, Baton Rouge, Atlanta...) To

understand New Orleans and its current needs, one cannot dismiss the diversity of perspectives

as mere confusion, but rather one must embrace it as representative of the piecemeal, often

lopsided process that is taking place, a process where a step forward in one area, can mean one or

even three steps backwards someplace else.

*****

Walking the streets of the French Quarter, it is easy to forget that a hurricane washed through

New Orleans at all. The sidewalks are still choked with sunburned tourists, the carriage drivers

still water their mules in front of Jackson Square, and the ubiquitous daiquiri stands still vend

daiquiris, margaritas, and the blood-red drinks known as hurricanes. Walking behind a crowd of

visitors on Esplanade Avenue one afternoon, we overheard a wife remark to her husband, I

dont know what everybodys complaining about. New Orleans looks better than ever to me.

Citywide, some visible progress has been made in the form of towed cars, restored traffic lights,

and regular mail delivery, but if one spends much time anywhere but the French Quarter, it is

easy to see what everybodys complaining about. Insects breed in standing water leftover from

the flood. Soggy houses continue moldering in the sun. Potholes the size of VW bugs checker


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thoroughfares, while blocks that were high and dry during the flood are now threatened by

broken water mains and debris clogged sewers. With paradoxes in plain sight all over the city, it

is hard to make a single statement that summarizes thestate of New Orleans.

As the city haphazardly dedicates its eviscerated municipal agencies to the tasks of rebuilding,

there are simply not enough resources to go around. When recovery progresses, everyday

maintenance falls by the wayside and vice versa. The race, class and geographic boundaries

along which services were unevenly distributed prior to the storm become ever more apparent.

The sight of city cleanup crews trimming grass and picking up litter along the abandoned St.

Charles streetcar tracks contrasts absurdly with the heaps of uncollected household trash in the

repopulated Seventh Ward and with the un-passable graveyard of cars now occupying the

Claiborne Avenue neutral ground.

Into this social and physical geography of paradoxes, community organizers seek to create

parity. Despite personal and professional losses, displacement and trauma, people doing

community work continue to wake up everyday to champion their neighbors, most who are still

struggling to come back home. It is through often tenuous, often new relationships with funders

that this work is possible. And it is through funders and organizers willingness to understand

each others situations and to meet each other half way that this support will be most effectively

marshaled.

*****

This report, a compilation of interviews with representatives of seven grassroots and community-

based organizations funded by the Unitarian Universalist Association- Unitarian Universalist

Service Committee (UUA-UUSC), is intended to contribute to an ongoing conversation between

organizers and funders about how to effectively work together in partnership. Each interviewee

was asked the same set of six questions relating to foundations and the various national

organizations working to provide resources and support to local players in the rebuilding process,

and then given time to provide additional comments; the questions were:


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o What resources could national foundations provide, in addition to grant money, to make

the money easier and more efficient to spend?

o What role have you seen national organizations and foundations taking so far? What

roles could or should they be playing?

o How could national foundations most effectively encourage collaboration?

o What is your ideal funder grantee relationship?

o What is your organizations timeline? What will you be focusing on in the next three

months? Six months? One year? Five years?

o What would success look like? How would you measure it?

The small group of organizers interviewed for this report certainly does not represent the full

spectrum of work that is being done at the grassroots level in New Orleans; however, the

diversity of their responses is a testament to the larger range of perspectives on these issues.

Short biographies of those interviewed and profiles of the organizations they represent can be

found in the appendix of this report.

INTERVIEWS

Additional Resources

In each of our seven interviews with UUA-UUSC partner organizations, we started by asking,

What other resources could foundations offer, in addition to funding, to make a grant easier or

more efficient to spend? Shana Sassoon, of New Orleans Network and Neighborhood Housing

Services of New Orleans, Inc. (NHS) detected, in the heart of this question, the impatience on the

part of funders about why organizers have failed to spend quickly the money that they had

delivered quickly. People arent using it, but it doesnt mean that they wont use it. It just means

that its slower, Shana explained. I feel like theres a certain amount of angst over that from

the funding community, which I can understand. But at the same time, you know, were nine

months out from the storm. From the funding community, Shana asked foremost for patience,

trust and a set of expectations adjusted for this unprecedented situation. This request was echoed

by other organizers who almost across the board asked for an individuated approach that took

into account the unique state and capacity of each organization and the very real constraints to

speeding progress.


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Beyond this, organizers ideas for non-financial forms of support varied. Jay Arena of C3/Hands

Off Iberville said that his group had had no trouble spending the money granted them, whereas

Cyndi Nguyen of the Vietnamese Initiative in Economic Training (VIET) noted that funding for

supplies was difficult to spend in part because local stores lacked the products her organization

needs. She asked foundations to donate the physical supplies (computers, generators,

construction equipment), rather than the money to purchase them. Similarly, Jackie Jones of the

Jeremiah Group discussed the difficulties of managing money once it has been granted. She

requested that the occasional services of a bookkeeper/funds manager be donated along with

funding. Shana added that networking help was always useful, and went on to acknowledge the

fleeting nature of funding in New Orleans and the need for relationship building and for strategic

planning sessions to ensure fiscal sustainability, even after philanthropic attention shifts

elsewhere.

With an eye to New Orleanians right to return, Khalil Shahyd of the Peoples Hurricane Relief

Fund (PHRF) asked for technical training for organizers and residents both back home and in the

diaspora, to enable them to participate in the planning and zoning discussions taking place.

Lauren Anderson, also of NHS, and Shana Sassoon suggested centralized clearinghouses located

both in New Orleans to manage the flood of donated goods and labor, and located in evacuee

hubs to help connect displaced New Orleanians to jobs, training, and housing back home. Steve

Bradberry of ACORN stated his organizations needdespite the constant flow of university

students and church groupsfor interns and organizers ofcolor, and also for donations of skilled

workers and crew leaders to expand the organizations existing house-gutting program.

Finally, a number of organizers discussed the challenges of self-care in this post-Katrina

landscape. Lauren Anderson noted the lack of mental health care available in the city, and Shana

agreed with her about the near inevitability of mental collapse for so many of the critical folks in

New Orleans. In addition to bringing counseling services to the city, Lauren and Shana echoed

an idea we first heard from Steve Bradberry, suggesting that foundations might organize retreats

for people doing community work in New Orleans. These retreats would be both an opportunity

for rest and relaxation, and a chance for more focused interaction between organizers who

typically only encounter one another in harried professional contexts.


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We found as many different ideas for non-funding support, as there were organizations. While

organizers did not speak with a unified voice as to any specifics that might guide funding

decisions, the diversity of responses does speak to the need for an individualized approach.

Relationship building, and the cultivation of what Shana Sassoon referred to as fewer, but

deeper relationships would seem to be key to providing funding and the ancillary support

needed to spend it.

Roles Taken By Foundations and National Organizations

Like the question about additional resources, when asked, What role do you see national

organizations taking so far? What could/should they be doing? organizers responded with a

variety of answers. Some organizers discussed the process by which foundations and national

organizations were involving themselves with local players and local issues in New Orleans,

while others discussed particular programming or initiatives that could be undertaken at a

national level.

From the beginning of relationships between foundations and local organizations, organizers are

often asked not only to guide funders through their own projects or programs, but to function as

event planners, taxi drivers, tour guides to the city's attractions and destruction, entertainment

directors and educators about community histories and relationships, in another city that

would be called consulting, Shana Sassoon of NHS and New Orleans Network pointed out.

And in another context it would be understood that that shouldnt be for free. Her challenge to

foundations: Pay for peoples time! You can figure out a way to write that into your budget,

and you can figure out a way to justify itYou dont even have to pay people personally. You

could just make donations [to their organizations]. Lauren Anderson of NHS added but these

are very different circumstances right now. It's hard. I don't say no to it [requests for destruction

tours, etc.]. ..it's really important for people from the outside to bear witness to what's happening

here. But it's a tremendous amount of our time.

Shana went on to note that foundations and national organizations have also tended to take over

work that could be done by local players who are more familiar with the social and political


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landscape in New Orleans. Jackie Jones of the Jeremiah Group elaborated on this point,

describing the awkwardness generated by national players foisting collaborations upon New

Orleans organizations, without any real knowledge of the personal and professional politics, and

the established organizational processes unique to every group working on the ground. On the

other hand, however, both Shana Sassoon and Jay Arena of C3/Hands Off Iberville saw

connecting organizations to potential partners, collaborators and allies as a central role for

national organizations and foundations, through clear and transparent expectations are a

prerequisite to cultivating such cooperation. Finally, Steve Bradberry of ACORN worried about

the current lackof involvement on the part of national political movements.

The progressive community has been lackluster, Steve said. Where has been the outcry about

voting rights nationally? You know everybody knows about it, right? But how many people are

picking up the telephone and letting their congressmen and senators know that they want money

to send to New Orleans to get it back on track instead of, you know, shooting out to Iraq?In

terms of this whole

Documents

2006 | Post-Katrina Community Organizing Landscape