PTP Blog

This hurricane has presented a challenge to community organizing - how to reach all the people dispersed by the storm and create or re-create democratically-led organizations that can respond to the government and private interests that will control the rebuilding of the cities and towns. This is a big challenge for community organizations that usually are struggling to survive and barely made it through the hurricane themselves.

This is a critical moment for developing power for low income survivors - Some national organizations (PICO network, Jobs With Justice) are using their Washington connections to bring the voices of the communities directly to the federal government. These and others are organizing in the evacuation housing sites. Houston’s The Metropolitan Organization - affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation - has formed a survivors’ leadership group which is developing a set of demands (Another article.) ACORN is organizing evacuee groups in Baton Rouge and Houston. According to Madeline Talbott of ACORN, they brought computers to the Houston Astrodome to give ACORN members a way to register with FEMA on-site.

These national groups have some visibility, but the unaffiliated local and regional organizing groups are also engaged in noteworthy, if unsung, efforts. Randy Stoecker over at the U of Wisconsin has put together a rudimentary list of organizations that meet this list of criteria:

1 Its pre-Katrina address was in an affected community.
2 It is governed by the people it serves.
3 It is currently involved in relief efforts (including organizing efforts)

Please check it out and support groups on it. Add to it if you know of more groups.
Groups that PTP has engaged with in the area: Southern Echo in Mississippi, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Working Interfaith Network in Louisiana. There is also an impressive philanthropic organization at the Southern Partners Fund, which has set up a special fund for recovery. With its board made up of staff from community-led organizations, Southern Partners Fund is well connected throughout the region. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of community organizing.

Even as the local community organizing groups are struggling to put together a forum for power, the online organizing networks have mostly focused on relief issues by using computer systems to track missing and safe evacuees or to match housing requests. With so many people displaced, the internet hasn’t been much help in bringing the displaced back together. Most of the low income people in the hurricane’s ground zero weren’t on the net anyway. While there has been some interesting techniques used - I like the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) as an interesting technology application - generally speaking these are tools for the portion of the population on the net. The internet hasn’t a offered good substitute for a coordinated on-the-ground organizing effort. As usual, its greatest benefit to organizing has been as a fundraiser, but most of the funds are going towards individual survival and not yet towards strengthening the organizations that help communities as a whole survive. Our organizing community sorely lacks a robust fundraising system for community-led organizing. PTP has set a goal to develop a solution to this problem and we will write about it in the near future.

In the meantime, it sure looks like the “times they are a changing” again. Let’s make the most of it.

With a daughter in school there, we have visited New Orleans a half dozen times in the last 5 years. It’s a city of stunning poverty side by side with tourist glitz and wealth. With typical northern naivete, we’ve been shocked by the lack of city infrastructure. And that was in good times before Hurricane Katrina hit.

The failure of emergency responders to anticipate and repair breaches in the dikes around New Orleans has turned a natural disaster into a city-extinguishing catastrophe. The people that couldn’t get out of the city are now being inundated. The poorest areas were hit first, but water ignores privilege and now middle and wealthier neighborhoods have gone under.

There’s another connection that is important to all of us concerned with community organizing: ACORN’s national headquarters is located not far from the flooding Industrial Canal. They are starting a Hurricane Relief Fund. The commonweal was not the highest priority for the State of Louisiana (or Mississippi and Alabama, for that matter. Mississsippi had the idea that building tourist- and worker-attracting casinos on the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast would be a steady cash cow for the state. Now Governor Barbour has been quoted as saying this will cost 500,000 a day in lost tax income - lost just when it’s most needed), so the State’s ability to respond is severely limited. Television reports show helicopters rescuing people from rooftops, but the heroic efforts of first-responders can’t make up for decades of neglect. Our donations will be a poor substitute for a healthy political system that looks out for the interests of all, but it’s very important and necessary.

You can donate to ACORN’s hurricane relief fund from their web site www.acorn.org or go directly to their secure donation page on groundspring with this link here.

A technical note: The GIS people at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center just published an elevation map of New Orleans. It’s interesting to compare it to the corresponding poverty map of the city. The elevation map is a handy tool for evacuees trying to determine from afar the liklihood that their home is flooded. Kudos to the map maker.

There are also some interesting computerized storm surge predictions from LSU’s Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes