mardi gras, baby!

yes, we decorate for mardi gras...











my apologies, this post won't really be about mardi gras, but i find those two words catch folks' attention in a special way. it really is the biggest, baddest party in the universe, even if it does distract our volunteers for a couple of days, but, hey, they work hard for nothing most of the time, so let 'em party, i say!

at any rate, we had a pretty great mardi gras season in the lower nine, for reasons that had little or nothing to do with carnival. i arrived back in january and was greeted by project coordinator, matt sheard, who was holding up the certificate of appreciation we'd just received from the holy cross neighborhood association. this is a great bunch of people, and a group with which we are developing an increasingly important working relationship by the day, so, to be honored by them was truly seen by us as a recognition of our place in the neighborhood.

matt sheard and matt grigsby (project manager), with the rest of our long-term volunteers and about a dozen short-termers, had gotten our plumbing and rough electrical inspections done, and had 80% of our headquarters building sheetrocked in a little over two weeks - an amazing feat for a group of mostly amateurs. part of what spurred them on was the presence of bob and mel, volunteers from wisconsin with a ton of building experience, who pretty much ran a sheetrock bootcamp while they were with us. and that's the way it goes most of the time. just when the skilled members of our staff feel like they have just as many unskilled volunteers as they can possibly train and supervise, someone shows up with skills and tools and pitches in and energizes projects and leaves feeling like he or she has really accomplished something. and we have that much more work done on a resident's house and moving in day comes that much closer.



mel and bob in miss eula's house










the good news kept coming in the following days, we were on a roll. first we received word that we would be receiving a grant that will allow us to hire contractors to re-wire and re-plumb 50 houses in the coming year. these are the trickiest jobs for us to get done, as they require licensed contractors to apply for the appropriate permits and, then, in order for us to get the work done cost-effectively, we have to find contractors who will allow our staff and volunteers to do as much of the work as they think we can safely undertake. but, we've found a couple of contractors who are committed to helping us get the work done and things are looking hopeful that we'll be able to deliver the 50 houses. the money's not in the bank, yet, but we're ironing out the details as i write this, and we have contractors standing by waiting to get to work. of course, a grant of that size was contingent upon us having our 501(c)(3) status, which readers of this blog will know we've been trying to obtain for some time now. but, as of january 28th, we are now officially certified, sanctified and legally a tax-exempt organization! that means, when you go to our web site and click on the make a donation button , you will be able to claim a tax-exemption for that contribution, so, really, there's no excuse for not doing it right now . and, if you don't feel comfortable making a contribution online, just mail us a check or leave a large satchel of cash inside the door of 6018 el dorado street when you're in town...



we hit a double this last week in public relations when we had an article appear on the metro section front page of sunday's new orleans times-picayune, while also being featured thursday night on wwl-tv. while neither of these press reports has compelled a single person to contribute a dime to the effort, it certainly shows that we are making progress in terms of being taken seriously as a group that is doing worthwhile work in the community. so, if you're reading this blog, please pass it along to anyone you know who might be able to send a little gelt our way. i know, i know, i keep mentioning money, and it's rude, but i gotta tell you, we're in a position right now to get so much more work done in the next months and years, and the more money we raise, the more families we can get back in their homes - faster and more affordably. it's that simple. more homes rebuilt means more families living in the neighborhood, means the city has to provide more services (schools, hospitals, police and fire stations) for more people, means businesses will start to come back, means more people will move back, etc.. your contribution to this effort, however small, will help this community come back to life, and that's the truth. end of fundraising plea, i promise...

oh, and one last big thing, which may not seem like such a big deal to most folks, but we have rented a three-bedroom apartment for our half-dozen or so long-term volunteers. this means they don't have to sleep on cots in a houseful of short-termers, have their own bathroom and can make a midnight snack, if they so choose, without waking up said houseful of short-termers. they have promised to keep it clean and vermin-free, and we owe a debt of gratitude to our neighbor, antoine turner, for letting us know he had an apartment for rent (among other things!), and to jeff osborn for agreeing to come up with six months worth of rent to make it happen (among other thing, also).

other than those big highlights, the work just proceeds apace. we now have 79 home rebuild applications on our waiting list - 6 in progress and three more to start as soon as we get the grant money for the systems work. in addition to matt and matt, our volunteer coordinator, lauren smith, is helping us keep track of the short-term volunteers, who will be flooding into the city in the next couple of months for various schools' february vacations and spring breaks. we've come up with an organizational flow chart, courtesy of matt s., and are getting rather scarily organized for what must look like to most folks a pretty motley group. our headquarters building is within a couple of weeks of completion, the telephone and internet service will be installed the middle of this month, and we even managed to fix the mysterious leak in the roof that defied us for a while. all in all, things are looking pretty good (which phrase makes me picture larry david saying it, "pre-tty, pre-tty, pre-tty gooood!")





that's it, stay tuned and good night, little indian red...

fundraising ideas

How about a Hunks of the Lower Ninth Ward calendar?

Matt, Mr. October >

Darren, Mr. April




or Hot Chicks Gone Wild with Tools?






Well, they're just ideas, after all, anyone got any suggestions?

i'm back (and forth)

As it's a new year, I've resolved not to feel badly about posting so sporadically to the old blog. Things are what they are and my life is crazy these days, but crazy in a good way, I guess.

Since my last post, I've been back and forth to New Orleans twice, maybe three times, and spent a little over a week out of the country visiting family over the holidays. In the Lower Nine, here's what's happening:

As of the first of the year, Emergency Communities has officially ceased operations in the Lower Nine, which brings a feeling of sadness to see the former community center closed and empty, while at the same time we've inherited a great group of long-term volunteers and lots of tools and equipment which will make our work easier to do. Our headquarters building on El Dorado Street is in the final stages of getting re-wired and we're working on the plumbing right now, with the help of local contractor Bill Caron. We got our logo painted on the side of the tool shed with help of happy volunteers Genevieve, Jaclyn and Jennifer, and we put up street signs so that now resident can finally find us!



In addition to Matt Grigsby, our project manager since last October, we now have Matt Sheard working with us in the same capacity. Matt S. is the former site manager of the E.C. center in the Lower Nine, with almost 2 years of experience working in post-Katrina New Orleans, so we're lucky to have his help and expertise. Our old friend Darren McKinney is also pitching in to continue offering the help and guidance he's been expending in our behalf for the last year, and perseveres in his quest to single-handedly rebuild the neighborhood. And, he looks good in those funky sunglasses!


Darren is a true Lower Nine superhero, and everyone involved with lowernine.org thanks his or her lucky stars every day that he's on our side.
Right now we've got three houses awaiting electrical inspections, one of which is almost finished, the others waiting for us to get in and insulate and put up sheetrock. Our list of residents asking for our help gets longer by the week, and we are hoping to be able to finish 20 homes this year to the point where families can return. Of course, this means we need money, and while fundraising has been proceeding at a modest pace, we are still waiting for the IRS to grant us our 501(c)(3) status so we can begin fundraising and grant-writing with a vengeance. Our application has finally landed on the desk of someone with a name, and if the three pages of clarifications, emendations and questions we received last week is any indication, it may be a while before we are deemed worthy. If you have perused this blog in the past, you may notice that there are certain links missing, which I had to delete to satisfy the IRS case manager's fear that traffic might be directed from this blog to for-profit businesses, which, as they were links to sites of people who have donated their time and efforts to creating our web site, I figured was only good form. So, there's a learning curve here, is what I'm saying.

With any luck, some of our long-term volunteers may be talked in to adding their two cents worth here in the near future, so we should be able to keep pictures and posts more up to date, which would be a good thing.

Life goes on, the work goes on, and everyone is invited to come down and help us out, which is about all I have to say for this cold winter's evening...

survivors! warriors!

You know how something can bug you? And for long periods of time, it can just be a nagging sort of feeling in the back of your mind, because you've never really stopped to examine it - what it is, what bugs you about it? Well, I had that nagging sort of feeling over the last few months, didn't pay much attention to it, sort of forgot about it, but, then, I read something the other day that not only reminded me that something was bugging me, but named it, clarified it and solved the problem, all in one swell foop, to quote Roy Blount, Jr..

The thing that had been nagging me was people all the time referring to the folks we're working with in New Orleans as "victims." I never paid much attention to it, just sort of accepted the characterization and moved on, intent on helping folks and not worrying about labelling them one thing or another. But, then, just the other day, Barbara gave me a copy of a sermon by a minister named Davidson Loehr, pastor of the First U-U Church in Austin, TX (Barbara's a seminary student, so she can do things like say, "Here, you might find this sermon interesting.")

Although the sermon was about something else, though not entirely, he talks about how the liberal, progressive, socially-conscious person approaches the world often from the perspective of an outsider who is going to step in and help a "victim." Whether the person in need of help is "victim" of patriarchal oppression; or racial bigotry; or economic forces beyond his or her control; or sexual repression; or religious intolerance, whatever! The point is, many people, in order to feel they are doing something meaningful and socially positive in the world, have to put themselves into the role of the "saviour" (my word, not his).


But, if you think about it from the point of view of the so-called "victim," despite what may have befallen you in life, what you are, in fact, is a survivor! If you are a survivor, you have strength. You may need help to overcome certain obstacles that remain in your path, but you've already proven your ability to weather the storm, so to speak.

This idea immediately struck a chord with me, defined that nagging, bugging thing in the back of my mind, and served to reinforce the feeling that has been growing in me since I undertook this work over a year ago. I have never felt anything other than that I was working alongside equals (in many cases, betters) while we continue to tackle the work that needs to be done to rebuild the Lower Nine. I work alongside people who spent two, sometimes three days, on the roofs of their houses in the heat and without water before the powers that be felt it might be a good idea to bring them inside to something like shelter inthe aftermath of the storm. People who resisted the government's best efforts to get them on planes and ship them to the middle of nowhere, who are back in their native city, if not their homes in their neighborhoods, and who are working every day to return, rebuild and restore hope, where sometimes hope seems beyond the human heart's reach.

Reverend Loehr goes on to point out that, not only are these people survivors, many of them are, in fact, "warriors!" For what else can you call someone who survives something as devastating as Katrina/Rita/U.S. government incompetence and criminal neglect, and continues to fight for his or her home and neighborhood and city? And these warriors let me stand alongside them, every day, and allow me to bring whatever resources I can to the struggle!

So, thank you Davidson Loehr, for the words, and Barbara Prose for bringing them to my attention. But, most of all, thank you to Darren McKinney and Ward McClendon and a host of others whom I won't name here for fear of leaving someone out, but, thank you all for being warriors and for allowing me to fight the good fight with you.

the latest trip (and a short rant)

Okay! Not sure if I’m coming or going dealing with this little project anymore, but things seem to keep moving ahead, so I guess I’m going...

Just came back from another ten-day sojourn in the City That Government Forgot, and things are definitely looking brighter, even if only in terms of the little things we are managing to accomplish. Our rebuilding program just got a whole lot bigger with the addition of the houses underway and the waiting list that we inherited from Emergency Communities last week.

For those of you who don’t know, Emergency Communities is a non-profit that has been working in South Louisiana since not long after the storm. Their mission was primarily the feeding of residents and providing them with community centers, which could then be used to distribute clothing and anything else that people needed in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. They opened their last center in the Lower Ninth Ward just about the time we got active in rebuilding in the neighborhood, and with help from us, they set up a program to help get folks back into their homes by providing volunteer labor for reconstruction. We’ve been working closely with them ever since – jointly working on projects, housing and feeding volunteers, providing tools and other support - but they made the decision a few weeks ago to cease their operations, mostly due to a lack of reliable funding sources, and Thanksgiving saw them serve their last meal to residents of the neighborhood.

Which means, we now have taken over responsibility for seeing their projects through to completion, and we are folding their list of qualified residents into ours, so we have approaching fifty families depending upon us to help them return home, as of yesterday. We all will be sad to see E.C. go, but, in the last few weeks, another organization has stepped onto the stage and is attempting to fill the hole that the absence of E.C. will open in the community. Spearheaded by a Lower Nine resident, Ward McClendon, a group calling itself The Lower Ninth Ward Village, has taken over an old machine shop on Alabo Street, and is attempting to create a community center which will address the needs of the area’s youth and older residents. We at lowernine.org have been giving them every bit of help we can spare in the last few weeks to try and see that dream become a reality for the people in our adopted neighborhood and, if spirit and determination and will have anything to do with it, “Mack” is the guy to get it done!
So, stay tuned for developments there.

We had, at one point, 28 volunteers helping us this last week, and we got stuff done all over the neighborhood, from helping clean out junk and build walls at the Village, to knocking down a dangerously decrepit shed at Mr Howard Foster’s house. Our volunteers sheetrocked, painted, did light carpentry, hauled debris, cleaned up a playground, installed toilets and generally made themselves as useful as can be, which is what volunteers always do when they know they’ve only got a certain amount of time to spend in the city and they see the enormity of the work that still remains to be done.

I’m wondering, though, if the rest of the country realizes how devastated South Louisiana still is, New Orleans in particular? I’m wondering why I don’t hear sound bites coming from the presidential debates about doing something about this mess (I don’t watch TV, so sound bites on NPR are as close as I get to what the politicians have to say)? I’m wondering what it means for us, as a nation, if life goes on for most folks, while tens of thousands of our fellow Americans will spend their third Christmas in a row far from the homes they love, and a few hundred thousand more will spend their third Christmas in a row surrounded by evidence of the greatest failure of government in their lifetimes?

By all means, let’s bring the troops home and let peace reign throughout the world! But let’s also remember that the most culturally important city in our country still lies in pieces, and until that horrible fact is addressed by the powers that be in some coherent way, there will be no peace for those of us who are up to our necks in it. Amen!

start me up! (part 2)

Okay, I know the thing about blogs is you have to post something every day if you want to get folks to read the damned things, but life has been so full for the last month, it just didn't happen. So, if you're reading this, maybe check in every couple of weeks then i won't feel so bad.
Oh, and this won't even be part 2 of the previous post, because here's what's been happening:
I left Maine on the morning of October 14th, bound for Philly, towing an 18' utility trailer loaded with donated tools (trailer also donated!). Generous donors had agreed to give us a 33 foot RV to use as temporary office and living space until we get the new house up and running. The new house is also being donated, but more about that later.
Arrived in West Chester, PA in the evening, where said generous RV donors had paid for a motel room for yours truly, and they arrived shortly thereafter to take me out to dinner. The next day, we ran around getting paperwork transferred to lowernine.org, then we had to drive into the city to pick up the $3,000 worth of scaffolding which had been, you guessed it, offered to us by another generous donor.
It was after 4 p.m. by the time I got back on the road, headed to Cincinnati, where I was to pick up my friend Paul and his son, Kyle, who were making the trip down with me. The last time I'd driven a vehicle as big as the RV was maybe thirty years ago, and it didn't have a heavily-laden trailer behind it, so I gained a much greater respect for long-haul truckers on this trip.
I met Paul and Kyle at their house, took a shower and we hit the open road, in a pretty steady rain. We were headed first to Jackson, TN, where we were to take possession of a 1996 Ford 12-passenger van that I had bought on Ebay two weeks previously, with money from a generous donor. As it turns out, it's a good thing that all these donors were so generous, because we burned about $700 worth of gas between the two vehicles on the trip (so keep those checks coming!). The highlight of that leg of the trip was seeing the look on Paul's face when I told him we would be spending the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I had read somewhere that Wal-Mart actually encouraged this practice, but he thought I was pulling his leg. He sang another tune when we got to Wal-Mart and he saw that not only were we not the only RV in the parking lot, some people had satellite dishes set out and were having a pretty good time. Wal-Mart's open 24 hours, so we had a bathroom and could buy anything we needed right there. You gotta love this country!
The guy we bought the van from met us in the morning, and after handing over the papers, we headed out of Jackson, into Mississippi and on down to New Orleans (again, in a driving rain). We arrived around 8 p.m. and spent the night behind the Emergency Communities center in the Lower Nine, all safe and sound.
And now, we're here - in the most neglected and forgotten spot in the country. If you don't believe that, then I encourage you to email me and agree to volunteer with us for a week or so. You'll be totally amazed by the energy of the volunteers who are trying to put this neighborhood back together, but you'll also be shocked and appalled by the inaction of the so-called leaders of the greatest nation on earth.
Since arriving, joined by my friend Matt and my brother and sister-in-law, we've been finishing up a rebuild project we started in the spring; consulting on other projects and lining up future rebuilds; meeting, along with Bill Robertson who is on my board of directors, with directors of other community organizations to find out how we can all work together; and, learning a little about the ins and outs of dealing with Louisiana bureaucracy. Oh, and there's always the not insignificant problem of trying to get my wife to understand why this is so important to me at this late stage of my life.
So, keep those cards and letters (with checks enclosed) coming, and I wasn't kidding about volunteering so you can come down and help us do this job - it'll change your life...

start me up! (part 1)

This post may have to be done in a couple of installments, as I find myself torn in a dozen different directions these days, by the buzzards of economic neccessity, to name but one force competing for pieces of my flesh. (Now, there's a catchy opening line, if a bit, shall we say, overwrought).
The big thing I'm in the middle of, the reason for this blog, is setting up lowernine.org as a functioning entity to carry out the work we've begun in New Orleans. This requires patience, a little money and a bunch of people behind you who keep saying, "Yeah, this is a good thing to do, Rick, so keep up the good work." For those of you who might be considering doing something similar, I'll detail the steps we've taken so far, for what it's worth.

First of all, never mind the fact that a bunch of us have been working on this idea, committing our time and money to trips to the Lower Ninth Ward, for months. That was all unofficial, just a group of do-gooders doing good things, in a fairly organized, but unfocused way. To make things official, the first step you have to take is becoming a corporation recognized to do business by the state in which you incorporate. This is fairly easy, as it turns out, you file some paperwork with the state and they either accept or reject your application. But, be warned, the paperwork includes things like a mission statement, by-laws, names of directors, and a few other things they asked for along the way, which I forget now. So, get your directors on board before you try and incorporate, get the mission statement written and fantasize a budget, two years worth, even though you have not a nickel to your corporate (you hope) name.

For the next step, all I can say is, hire a lawyer, if you can afford it, because after incorporating you need to file your application with the IRS to get non-profit, tax-exempt status. This application is many, many pages long, and if all the little spaces aren't filled out to the IRS's satisfaction, you'll be supplying them with supplemental information until the cows come home. A lawyer who has experience filing these applications can save you time by letting you know up front just what kinds of additional documentation you should provide, and time in this case means money, because you can't start hitting people up for tax-exempt donations until you get your approval letter. Also, the IRS changes the rules every couple of years, and a good lawyer should know what the current requirements are.

While you're in that in-between stage - you have your incorporation, but not your 501(c)(3) - you should start talking up your newly-formed organization with everyone you know, in the hopes that you can raise enough scratch to start putting infrastructure in place to get the program off the ground, even if only in a modest way. Explain to potential donors that you don't have tax-exempt status yet (very important! if the IRS thinks you have misrepresented yourself to donors, you'll never get approved and may go to jail), but ask them if they're willing to make a small donation to help you get the thing going. If you're lucky, you'll know someone, or meet someone, who has enough money and doesn't need the tax write-off, who can make a substantial donation. But, at any rate, ask everyone you know for money, without exception. An interesting little-known fact about non-profit giving is this: 85% of all charitable donations come from households or individuals who make less than $50,000 per year. This percentage has remained constant (with the income level adjusted to reflect current wages/prices) as far back as figures on charitable giving have been tracked, which, I believe started in the 1930s. So, ask everybody!

In part two of this post (see, I told you I'd have to run off somewhere and do something) I'll talk more specifically about where lowernine.org is today in terms of what we've managed to raise so far, and how we're going to get it all to New Orleans, so stay tuned!