Rebuilding Block by Block

Neighborhood groups shine in New Orleans recovery effort

On the second Wednesday of every month, the parking lot at 801 Harrison Avenue — a main

commercial corridor in the neighborhood of Lakeview — is transformed into a vibrant open-air market. Vendors sell lush produce, fresh seafood, and local crafts. Couples dance to the sound of a live swing band.

The Beacon of Hope Resource Center — a charity that sprang up after Hurricane Katrina to help Lakeview residents with recovery efforts — started the market last summer for reasons both practical and therapeutic. At the time, nearly two years after the levees broke in New Orleans, Lakeview still didn’t have a grocery store. But more than just bringing fruits and vegetables into the neighborhood, Beacon of Hope wanted to give neighbors a place to socialize and a respite from the grind of rebuilding.

“We were concerned about the mental health of our residents,” says Jackie Richard, the group’s director of development and marketing. “They chose to come home as our pioneers, the first ones back, and they were still dealing with blight, debris, and all of that. We just wanted to have a fun escape.”

Across New Orleans, neighborhood organizations like Beacon of Hope have stepped up to help this city rebuild. Some of the groups serve as information hubs to help residents navigate the maze of postdisaster assistance programs and vet contractors. Many have developed sophisticated programs to harness the energy of college students, religious groups, and other out-of-town volunteers. And some have taken on particularly challenging projects, such as starting schools and dealing with abandoned properties.

Growing Pains

More than 270 such neighborhood groups are now working in New Orleans. Some existed before Hurricane Katrina, and others have formed since the storm, according to City-Works, a New Orleans planning group.

As these organizations take on projects that are more and more ambitious, some are formalizing their operations by adding paid staff members and bolstering their fund raising. But the transition isn’t always easy.

And while neighborhood organizations have been one of the few bright spots in New Orleans’s recovery story, nonprofit officials say helping these groups share information and collaborate better is going to be critical moving forward.

“Part of the challenge is that so much of the planning effort could conceivably pit one neighborhood against another,” says Melissa S. Flournoy, former chief executive of the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations, who in mid-May will become the new director of the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute.

“So as much as it’s good for people to be mobilized in small geographic areas, we need to weave these neighborhoods together,” she says.

The stakes are high.Keith G.C. Twitchell, president of the Committee for a Better New Orleans/Metropolitan Area Committee, believes the activism by resident groups has the potential to change the city for a long time to come.

“The people here are really leading the recovery,” he says. “That makes it slower. It makes it frustrating. Sometimes it makes it downright agonizing, but assuming that we the people pull this off, ultimately it will make the city much stronger.”

Home-Grown Starts

Many of the groups that are driving the recovery began as small, deeply personal efforts.

Beacon of Hope got its start on February 14, 2006, when its founder, Denise Thornton, and her husband, Doug, opened their Lakeview home to their neighbors so they could use their phone, laptop computer with Internet access, and fax machine — tools that at the time were hard to find in post-Katrina New Orleans — to get information, communicate with insurance companies, and apply for recovery assistance.

“The next day there was a line out the door of people just needing to know what was going on,” says Ms. Thornton. “They didn’t know where to go for information.”

In time, Beacon of Hope developed into a network of Lakewood residents who volunteered their homes — and in at least one case their FEMA trailers — as sites where neighbors who had questions about rebuilding could go for answers and emotional support.

With an early donation, the organization was able to buy lawn mowers and weed trimmers that residents could borrow to work on their yards. The equipment also meant that Beacon of Hope could begin to take advantage of the large numbers of volunteers who were traveling to New Orleans.

In 2006, the organization worked with 3,000 volunteers. The number climbed to 5,000 in 2007.

As the recovery in Lakeview has picked up steam, Beacon of Hope is reaching out to neighborhood organizations in Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward — areas of the city whose recovery efforts lag behind Lakeview’s — to help them create similar centers.

Throughout the city, neighborhood groups are focusing greater emphasis on working together and learning from one another.

In several parts of the city, groups whose neighborhoods border one another have formed coordinating councils to help improve communication among organizations and to work together on projects of common interest.

Coordinated Effort

Right after the storm, 21 neighborhoods in the Gentilly section of New Orleans came together to form the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association.

The neighborhood groups that make up the association have a stronger voice together than they do separately, says Laurie Watt, president of her neighborhood organization in Mirabeau Gardens and a board member of the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association.

“If there’s an issue in the area, we want to stand as a larger group, instead of one neighborhood trying to deal with it alone,” she says.

After the disaster, City-Works compiled a list of all the neighborhood groups working in New Orleans — something that hadn’t happened in decades, according Jim Livingston, the organization’s executive director — and used the data to create an interactive map that included information about the groups and where they work.

City-Works will soon publish a paper about the role of neighborhood groups in recovery work and an update of the map on its Web site.

Meanwhile, the Neighborhoods Partnership Network acts as a clearinghouse to help groups learn about one another’s work, share advice, and create relationships between organizations in different parts of the city.

“Our vision is to make all New Orleans neighborhoods great places to live,” says Timolynn Sams, the network’s executive director. “We don’t want to see Broadmoor come back and not have Melia or to have a NorthWest Carrollton but not have a St. Roch. We need them all.”

The organization publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter and a monthly magazine, organizes volunteer and social events in different parts of the city, and holds forums for neighborhood leaders to talk about specific rebuilding issues.

At a meeting in January, the Irish Channel Neighborhood Association gave a presentation about its efforts to combat blight.

While the small neighborhood on the banks of the Mississippi River didn’t flood after the levees broke, the disaster has still had a profound effect. Some residents who lost jobs have left, but many more people from wet neighborhoods have moved in.

Abandoned homes were a problem before Hurricane Katrina, and had those homes not been blighted, they could have been put to good use after the storm, says Edward McGinnis, president of the Irish Channel Neighborhood Association. “They still are needed,” he says.

Since the hurricane, members of the neighborhood association canvassed block by block, photographing and making notes about deteriorating homes, researched the ownership and legal standing of the properties, and then collated its data with sometimes out-of-date lists from city agencies.

The group worked with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, the city agency in charge of acquiring and then reselling vacant or abandoned properties, to determine which properties had the fewest legal entanglements and had the best chance of speedy redevelopment.

The redevelopment authority in April issued a call for proposals from 13 abandoned properties it has acquired in the Irish Channel, and the neighborhood association was able to persuade the agency to include a provision that calls for some of the homes to go to people with low or moderate incomes.

And while the decision on which bids to accept still rests with the city, the agency has asked the association to provide feedback on the proposals that come in.

The neighborhood association was conscious that the process it was developing could be useful to other groups, especially those working in areas that flooded, where abandoned property is a serious problem, says Mr. McGinnis.

“Almost every neighborhood, one of the first things they do is go through and canvass the blocks,” he says. “But I’m not sure that we all know what to do with the information — or at least we didn’t know what we’d do with it initially.”

The scope of challenges neighborhoods face as they rebuild means the range of problems brought to local groups is equally wide.

The Holy Cross Neighborhood Association in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward is spearheading an effort to encourage residents to use green-building techniques as they renovate their homes.

During the organization’s two-week Historic Green project in March, timed to coincide with spring break, more than 350 volunteers helped put in insulation, replace traditional light bulbs with energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, and install radiant barriers, which help reduce heat loss, in residents’ attics.

But members of the neighborhood association and some of the volunteers also worked on a very different type of construction project: boarding up a vacant home that neighbors suspected was being used for drug deals.

A woman who lives next door to the building with her two children turned to the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association for help after several calls to the police didn’t lead to any action.

While boarding up a drug house is an unusual request for the group, helping residents work through problems is not, says Charles E. Allen III, president of the association. Rebuilding is a tough and frustrating process, he says, so a portion of the association’s weekly Thursday night meetings is set aside for residents to ask for help and advice.

The forum gives residents an opportunity to air their frustrations, says Mr. Allen, “so that people are not grappling and dealing with their issues alone. You have a neighbor here to help you. You have a community to turn to.”

New Jobs

As neighborhood groups take on ambitious recovery and rebuilding projects, some have been approached by grant makers and other donors who wanted to offer support. But as time passes and the disaster fades from the national spotlight, groups are trying to focus more attention on raising money.

“We’ve done very little active fund raising, and it needs to happen,” says Ms. Richard, of Beacon of Hope.

To carve out the time to seek gifts, the organization has restructured its leadership. The role of executive director — a position that was created only in January 2007 — has been split between two co-directors, one focusing on operations, the other on marketing and fund raising.

But Beacon of Hope may be an exception. Too few grass-roots groups are hiring employees dedicated specifically to fund raising, and that’s a mistake, says Carey Shea, a senior program director at the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “There are millions of dollars that are not making it to these organizations because they don’t have the capacity to apply for the money and shepherd the grant-making process,” she says.

Program officers at national foundations, says Ms. Shea, have come to her and said they really wanted to make a grant to a particular group but that the organization either didn’t respond to their request for a proposal or sent a proposal but didn’t answer the foundation’s follow-up questions.

“Meanwhile, I see the completely harried executive directors running around, going to all the meetings, a million requests being made of them, and they’re too damn busy to take the two hours and write that proposal,” says Ms. Shea. “It’s because it’s no one’s full-time job to do it.”