Mardi Gras is now officially over. Today, March 1, is Ash Wednesday, which for Catholics marks the beginning of Lent. I am in the process of emotionally disentangling myself from the Catholic Church, but I am still going to follow through on the Lenten project I posted about here a few weeks ago.
Katrina hit about eight months ago now. The first rush of support is long over, but the need persists; and the massive injustices and inequities revealed by the hurricane are beginning to reassert themselves. Indeed, the need is about to get worse, because many Katrina survivors are being evicted from their temporary housing. So, for every day of Lent, I will post here and in my livejournal a link to an organization that is still working to help people and places come back from the devastation of Katrina, and to help rebuild our sadly devastated country into something that would do better by its people.
I want to say this up front: all I am doing here is trying to make people aware of the opportunities out there. Whether you decide to financially support any of these organizations or to get involved with them is up to you and you must trust your own judgment. I am not from the area and have not personally dealt with any of these organizations; I am just using the information available to me on the web. If you decide to make a major investment of either time or money in any of these groups, you would be well advised to do further research on your own. If you know more about these organizations than I do, by all means post your comments and describe your experiences with them, or post links to media reports and such, so that people who visit this post will be able to learn more.
So, I would like to kick off the
40 Days in 40 Ways project with a very interesting and, perhaps, controversial organization: the
Common Ground Collective.
The CGC's motto is "Solidarity not Charity," and that's why I'm starting with it. Formed by a group of local political activists and based in New Orleans's 9th Ward, the Common Ground Collective is focused on empowering their local community as well as distributing basic resources, doing home cleanup and repair, providing legal assistance to people facing eviction or reporting police brutality, and essentially making it possible for the displaced residents to return to and rebuild one of the poorest and hardest-hit areas of New Orleans. I say "perhaps controversial" because if you spend enough time on their site you recognize many of the hallmarks of a Marginalized Radical Leftist Organization. The most obvious one, to me, is the fact that their "media" section indicates that they have received very little mainstream media coverage, which is one of the reasons I'm profiling them here. The most obvious reason I can think of for this is that their work, while built around the basic corporal acts of mercy (feeding the hungry, healing the sick, stripping and de-molding the...uh...waterlogged), is fundamentally political: the objective is to help the (largely African-American and poor) survivors take ownership of their community, which puts the CGC in opposition to developers, to some of the city, state, and federal plans for rebuilding, and to the basic assumption that underwrites a lot of white liberal charitable giving, which is that we will always be the More Fortunate.
The other reason I'm leading with CGC is that they are organizing a time-sensitive project in which some of you youngsters may be interested:
Spring Break in New Orleans. Though it's billed as "the second Freedom Ride," it is not actually a 'trip' per se because you are responsible for getting yourself to New Orleans; but once there,
"students will assist in the rebuilding of the area's most devastated communities. Specifically, volunteers will be gutting, cleaning, and repairing houses, as well as distributing food, water and clothing to residents. Students will be able to apply studies in law, medicine, and other specialized courses of study towards the rebuilding needs of the community through work with Common Ground's legal team, medical clinic, and construction crews. Students of any and all backgrounds and skill levels will find opportunities to contribute towards the rebuilding effort and will have a spring break that is incredibly rewarding as well as enjoyable.Workshops on social justice issues will be offered as well as tours of cultural and historical sites. All you have to do is provide your own transportation to New Orleans, and Common Ground Collective and Voices of Katrina will take care of the rest."The best piece of outside reporting that I could find on the Common Ground Collective was this article from Mother Jones about their efforts to bring basic health care to the community in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane:
The Street SamaritansIt is a very interesting piece about how CGC emerged from the wreckage, and most interesting to me is the account of the ways in which the extremity of the need actually broke down some of the barriers that keep politically committed radicals isolated from people who are frightened by anything that looks radical but actually share a lot of their priorities and convictions. Anyway, for me, here's what this is all about:
For many of Common Ground’s patients, the clinic is a relief not just from Katrina and the healthcare vacuum that followed—suddenly there were no doctors or hospitals in New Orleans, and neither the Red Cross nor FEMA seemed able to provide any—but from a quieter, long-term emergency. According to Rahim, 85 percent of the men in Algiers are uninsured, “and for many of them, the last time they saw a doctor was in prison or in emergency at Charity.”
Common Ground has found itself serving some unexpected needs too. During its first month, its medical teams gave immunizations to hundreds of laborers employed by subcontractors for the likes of Shaw Inc. and Halliburton—companies that left their workers, many of them Latino immigrants, to figure out for themselves which shots they needed and where to get them. When Rita flooded hundreds of square miles in the bayou town around Houma, Louisiana, Common Ground fielded the only relief team to visit the area; neither the Red Cross or FEMA ever made it, according to Dr. Rantz and three other volunteers who went.So, that's the first day and the first way. Tune in tomorrow for something completely different.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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