Day 15, Way 15Continuing the search for non-Christian faith-based organizations involved in Katrina relief, we turn today to the pagan-American community. The LJ folks, as I might have expected, provided me with a few starting points back when I asked for volunteers in Februrary, so here we go.
Part of the difficulty with researching this is that the pagan community is not as centralized or highly organized as, say, the Catholic Church is. In terms of online research this translates into a lot of broken links, ambiguity about who's in charge of what, and sites which may or may not be 'dead' (i.e., no longer being maintained). However, the most popular starting place seems to be
Starhawk's Tangled Web. Starhawk is one of the more widely-published and well-established leaders of the American pagan community, and has become the hub of a number of pagan activist groups and initiatives. Her
A Pagan Response to Katrina is an attempt at understanding the Katrina disaster through the lens of pagan theology, and makes an interesting read. At the bottom of the page you can find a number of links to pagan resources, including
The Blanket Project, which is about getting handmade or hand-altered blankets to people who need them. It sort of combines the AIDS Quilt idea with the standard food/supplies distribution effort. Great idea, but from the state of the
Browse the Blankets page it appears that nobody is maintaining the site--or at least nobody has been given the job of eradicating or blocking the massive amounts of spam that have found their way into the comments. I would email one of the
contact people and find out the status of the project before you commit money and time to it.
There's also a link that takes you to the site for the
Officers of Avalon, a group founded by and for pagan cops and firefighters. That site, at least as viewed through Internet Explorer, is quite frankly a train wreck, but you will have better luck at
Avalon Cares, a separate site established by the same group to coordinate charitable giving. It started as a response to the tsunami and was revived after Katrina. Their most recent update about their relief efforts is from
January 2006, so they are evidently still active. Like many of the other pagan relief efforts I found, Avalon Cares
passes much of the money they collect on to larger organizations, including the Red Cross.
If you are more about going down to the scene of the devastation and getting your hands dirty, you may be interested in
The Pagan Cluster, which is raising money and mobilizing volunteers to
"maintain a presence" on the Gulf Coast. They are coordinating with the Common Ground Collective in a long-term effort at
bioremediation, which basically means trying to "use nature's organic processes" to clean up the toxic mess left behind by Katrina. As you might expect, bioremediation is an idea that resonates with the pagan world view, and
Starhawk can tell you all about how that works.At
Pagan.com it looks as if their relief page was put up in the immediate aftermath and not updated since; the auction link is broken and the campground link just takes you to the site for a pagan campground. However, for those of you who are taking a trust but verify approach to online donations, Pagan.com does have a list of
Problematic Pagans, by which they mean individuals or groups who have been publicly accused of plagiarism, fraud, or sexual misconduct by other members of the pagan community--according to
Pagan.com, anyway.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
Remember, you can find all the Ways & Days at my spiffy new DU Journal!
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
