Letter From the President
President's Letter
It’s been a little more than two years since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, altering the lives of over one million people. As of this writing, many hundreds of thousands have not been able to return home. 60% of New Orleans’ residents have returned, but the remainder — primarily renters and people of low income — have yet to make it back. Those who did face reduced services. Hospitals and medical clinics remain closed, and the single public school system has been divided into three — a Recovery school district, a New Orleans school district, and one for Charter Schools. In addition, the city’s municipal infrastructure to dispense what relief and aid are available remains sparse because administrators and civil servants wrestle with the same challenges to resuming normal lives as their constituents.
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Issue at Hand: Public Housing
A discussion of public housing in New Orleans is no mere rhetorical exercise. What happens to the thousands of displaced poor and working-class people can be an indicator of what that city is going to become through the rebuilding process.
What then are the priorities among the power brokers and decision makers? Do their plans include the tens of thousands of displaced residents who want to return home but lack the financial resources to buy or rent in the current real estate market? After the hurricanes, there were only a meager 7,100 units of public housing available — nearly 2,000 of which were held vacant awaiting demolition. Of 5,146 families who lived in public housing, approximately 1,100 families have been permitted to return.
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In June 2006, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would demolish 5,000 public housing units to be replaced under their existing Hope 6 mixed-use housing program. They believe this strategy will offer the most effective use of available financial resources. This provoked a class-action suit, which was brought in the federal Eastern District Court of Louisiana to make certain that the rights of displaced residents would not be ignored. Anderson v. Jackson was filed through the combined efforts of the Advancement Project, Loyola Law Clinic, and attorney Tracie Washington with the firm of Jenner & Block LLP. This legal action served as a catalyst for Congresswoman Maxine Waters to introduce legislation to aid residents in the “Right to Return” and to preserve endangered affordable housing in New Orleans.
Seeking proper redress through the courts is a key strategic weapon, but it is important to keep the issue on the radar of the public so they will maintain pressure on their elected representatives. This is because there is ample evidence that the disaster provided cover for long-held plans to diminish public housing and allow the market to dictate the cost of real estate by developers along with local and state officials in the area. On August 28, 2007, the Advancement Project, the New Orleans Survivors Council, and the People’s Organizing Committee, among others, organized a protest at the offices of Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to demand that a percentage of the units of public housing that were undamaged by the storms and remain livable be re-opened. This would offer some displaced families the opportunity to come home and contribute to the rebuilding of their communities. It should be noted that there are signs on many of the apartments stating that if residents are seen trying to enter their dwellings, they will be escorted away by the local police and face possible charges of criminal trespassing, and that HANO reserves the right to sue them simply for attempting to come home.
Since it was clear that HANO would lose any battle for public opinion if such a confrontation took place, they chose to close down their offices that day. In response, residents planned to organize an occupation of the Lafitte Housing Projects, one of the public housing projects currently closed. It was chosen because a number of participating families call it home — no matter what the bureaucrats and power players say.
Knowledge and Connectivity Inspires Action
When you arrive at the Praxis Project’s Katrina Information Network website, there is one brief fragment of a sentence that truly says it all:
“look beneath the surface…”
These four words serve both as metaphor and as warning because appearances can be deceiving, especially on the Gulf Coast. There are some locales that appear to be relatively untouched and even prosperous two years after the storm, yet vast stretches still look ravaged. In both cases, there is more to the image than meets the eye. That is why this web portal, which provides access to information and initiatives designed to help guide people nationwide toward direct action, is so important. The Katrina Information Network’s primary goal is to create an infrastructure to facilitate “coordinated communications and advocacy strategies to keep Katrina on the public agenda.”
Based in the nation’s capital, the Praxis Project understands how to engage those elected and selected to oversee the federal government. Their experience in this area helped guide their efforts leading to, for example, the “Take Five” Campaign, which asks visitors to the website to take five minutes to sign up to become “KIN Folk” and then take action by sending an e-mail message to responsible authorities. They also encourage municipalities to pass “selective contract resolutions” preventing local governments from doing business with companies who have not lived up to the terms of their Hurricanes Katrina and Rita–related contracts. In this way, every citizen can have a positive influence on what is happening on the ground in the recovery effort. 21CF supports this effort because it promotes civic engagement and it works!
Many people have gotten passionately involved in this struggle because they saw others facing down tremendous hardship with resilience and determination. Voices from the Gulf is a website where survivors of this catastrophe share their stories with the world without fear of being censored by anyone for any reason. We encourage you to take a moment to listen and bear witness to these stories, which need to be heard.
An Update from the Gulf South Allied Funders (GSAF)
By Tracy Hewat, Steering Committee Member
In the fall of 2005, nine white donors, horrified by the devastation in the Gulf and outraged by the lack of government response, sought to be meaningful allies with the people most affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They felt that only under intense and organized community pressure would the government support the people, and saw sustained funding for community organizing as urgent.
In 2006, those initial Gulf South Allied Funders (GSAF) members partnered with the Twenty-First Century Foundation (21CF), and began building a network of donors to provide a minimum of three years of funding for the Hurricane Katrina Recovery Fund. GSAF members saw supporting organizing efforts through 21CF as imperative, since 21CF was the only explicitly Black foundation working in the region, and communities of color were, and continue to be, disproportionately affected. Overall, GSAF volunteers have given and raised $2,038,000 for the Katrina initiative.
Today, GSAF is made of individuals from many different communities, multiple foundations, and three networks of donors: Resource Generation, Threshold Foundation, and the Women Donors Network. More than 400 people have made financial contributions, with individual donations ranging from $2 to $200,000.
With a fall trip to the Gulf, briefings in New York and California, many exciting house parties, and a fundraising dinner in San Francisco, we are looking forward to providing more learning opportunities for donors and more money for grantees in the Gulf than ever before. Please join us — the needs in the Gulf continue to be urgent.
VIST US ONLINE AT WWW.21CF.ORG
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