A Destructive Storm Gives Birth to a Charity Leader

My parents came from Alabama, but I was born in Biloxi. My mother was an only child and my father was one of 13, and together they had the six of us. When I was growing up in Biloxi there were a lot of mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street: My parents owned the Kitty Kat Restaurant, and all

Sharon Hanshaw Age: 53 First professional job: Owner, Sharon’s Unlimited, Biloxi, Miss. Current Job: Executive director, Coastal Women for Change, Biloxi

of us kids worked there as soon as we were teenagers. But my father was really called by God to be a man of the cloth. He preached in the streets, as well as in a tent that was next to the restaurant. There is a street named after him in Biloxi.

At the time, we lived in the housing projects, and during the 1960s my father was involved in the civil-rights movement. Back then African-Americans were not allowed on the public beach in Biloxi, which we saw as a human-rights violation.

Nonetheless, my parents always told us not to judge people by their race, but to see who they were inside. We also heard that we always had to tell the truth.

I owned a beauty salon for 20 years, until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. At the time I was in Aberdeen, Miss., which is about a five-hour drive inland from the coast. I was attending a funeral, and everyone was talking about the hurricane. I called my kids to tell them to get into the car and to get away from the coast. Their attitude was, “Mom, we’re used to hurricanes, we’ve been through this before. We’ll be OK.”

But we knew this hurricane was different. Finally they agreed to drive to Aberdeen. It was five days before we returned to Biloxi.

When I returned, I discovered that I had lost everything. Biloxi was like a war zone. People were walking around in a daze. There was no food or clean water, and it was very unsafe. People were numb — more than 500 people in Biloxi died as a result of the hurricane. Now we have about 14,000 residents, but before Katrina the population was probably three times as great.

I went to stay with a daughter in Gulfport, then I went to Houston, and then I finally found a temporary job in Gautier, which is near Biloxi, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was a temporary three-month administrative job where I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

After that I went back to Biloxi, where I was invited to become involved with a group of women who were dealing with a number of post-Katrina rebuilding issues that were being addressed at the local level of government, primarily building affordable housing for those who had lost their own homes.

We found ourselves partnering with the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. We needed to come up with a name for our new group. One night I was at one of my granddaughter’s basketball games and was asking everyone sitting around me for ideas. Afterward, I took all of the suggestions back to the group, and in January 2006 we all agreed to become Coastal Women for Change.

CWC women went to sit in on the mayor’s committees to let them know what we wanted, and five of our members found seats on four subcommittees: affordable housing, land use, education, and finance. I went to all the meetings and became pretty much the unofficial executive director.

We knew housing was key and that we had to get people out of the trailers — which have since been discovered to have formaldehyde in them — and into permanent housing. If you have to leave a trailer, you are even more homeless than when you are in one. The longer there was not affordable housing, and the longer displaced people from Biloxi stayed in Jackson or Atlanta or wherever they had gone in Katrina’s aftermath, the more likely it is that they will not ever return.

We went to Washington to ask for money to build affordable homes. In Washington, we testified before a Senate housing coalition.

CWC also went to the state capitol in Jackson to urge the governor’s office to provide more funds and a greater concentrated effort to make affordable housing available. The result of our efforts was recognition by the office that increased attention to residents was required.

In May 2006, Coastal Women received a $30,000 seed grant from the Twenty-First Century Foundation. We began the process of becoming a nonprofit organization, and I was officially named as the executive director. Today we have about 25 volunteers who range in age from 18 to 80. They are black women, Vietnamese women, and a few Latino volunteers.

In late 2006, Oxfam America gave us seed money for overhead, as well as money for an in-home child-care program and a program for the elderly.

We’ve tried to keep most focused on housing and have been pushing for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be held more accountable. A lot of money that should be going to affordable housing was getting diverted elsewhere. For instance, casinos and condominiums were getting this money, rather than it being put back into the poor and indigenous communities. What’s really kept us going as far as the housing issue is concerned are the efforts of the local churches and Habitat for Humanity.

I have an administrative assistant. I really need more people. Because our staff is so small, sometimes we really have to scramble.

For example, I might get a phone call on Monday that says we need to have a petition in Jackson the next day. In my dream world, I would have a grant-proposal writer, two outreach people, another administrative assistant, and two other people to help keep things going.

In spite of the destruction from Katrina, the hurricane did have at least one blessing. I’ve been able to meet many people who truly care about others, and now women are able to see how much of a difference becoming involved in city government can mean.

My father only had a fifth-grade education, but that still didn’t stop him from being an entrepreneur. I’m now a community leader, and I certainly did not have the educational background for this.

However, that is changing. Oxfam America has helped me by providing organizational and leadership training, teaching me how to prepare a business plan, how to deal with the mayor’s office, and how to mentor other women. I want this to be a well-run organization.

Now I’m doing a lot by listening to my heart. I often think about my mother and father and all the obstacles they faced in order to own a business and a home, but in the end they won. Now I’m just following God’s script for me with Coastal Women for Change and its mission to empower women to be leaders.