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Campaign to Mobilize 5,000 Youth to Rebuild New Orleans: Interview with Katina Parker

By Political Affairs
Archives - Dates and Topics PA Interviews click here for related stories: economy

10-16-07, 9:10 am

Additional coverage:
PA Radio: Rebuilding New Orleans and Bush's Politics of Genocide
PA: What inspired you to make “New Orleans: A Labor of Love”?

KP: “New Orleans: A Labor of Love,” is actually a public awareness campaign to get 5,000 volunteers into the Gulf Coast during 2008. There is a film – right now it is one film, but ultimately it will be a film series, so the film will be a key component in promoting awareness about the ongoing need for volunteers. The proceeds will also be used to support a clearinghouse where interested volunteers can connect with information about volunteer assignments, travel resources, entertainment in the city, and so forth.

Basically our goal is to bring order to the chaos of disaster relief and also to inject some new energy into the relief effort. The embedded relief groups down in the Gulf Coast have now been going for 2 years strong and folks are starting to get tired. Also the awareness that volunteers are still needed is waning, because the media coverage has changed. On the 2-year anniversary of Katrina, we saw George Bush at a memorial service handing a key over to a Habitat for Humanity home recipient. But you didn’t see a whole lot of what the rest of the city looks like. A good portion of the city still needs to be rebuilt. Most houses literally look the same as they did a week or two after the water subsided. Only 30% of the city is up and running or back in residence. So there is a lot of work to be done. Just within the last 6 months, I have seen the temperament of residents change from being hopeful and optimistic. Right at the 2-year mark, I think it really hit home for people that this is taking longer than it has any right to because of the hoops they have to jump through in order to get money from the various programs that are available, and also because of all the hoops that city and state governments have to jump through in order to get money from the different entities they are trying to get money from.

PA: Do you think that Americans generally are saying, “Well, Congress threw a bunch of money at it. We feel bad, but somebody else is taking care of it?”


KP: I think the initial week-long coverage we saw of post-Katrina relief caused Americans to give in ways in which they have not given in the past. People were shocked by the President’s slow and lackluster reaction. They were shocked into giving. So you had big givers like Oprah, who has given millions, and all of these other celebrities who were pouring in money, because the government couldn’t get its act together. They gave money to organizations like the American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and many others. And while those groups have done some great work down in the Gulf Coast, I also think a lot of people felt tricked, because they gave in record numbers with the expectation that their money would go to specific types of relief. People gave money that really just wanted their money to go to rebuilding New Orleans, and there were people who gave money who really just wanted their money to go to rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Instead, a lot of the money they gave went into the general funds of these organizations and was used to swell their bank accounts. So people are disappointed and frustrated with the giving process. They feel a little tricked, basically.

PA: What is the movie about and what can people expect to see?

KP: The “New Orleans: A Labor of Love” documentary follows a group of Los Angeles Valley College students who volunteered earlier this year in New Orleans. It documents their experience from the time they get off the plane to the time they get back on. You see these young people go from being curious about what they’ll find outside the airport door, thinking that the media coverage may not be accurate in terms of what is happening in the city, and wanting to know how much work really needs to be done. They were very excited about gutting and tearing things down. You see them going from that place to where, over the course of the first few when they toured the city and saw the wall-to-wall destruction, you see them trying to digest the epic nature of the amount of work that needs to be done in the city. You also see them become really committed to the cause of rebuilding the city. Many of the students have made plans to return and do more work. They also adopted a couple of families that we built homes for, to help them get furniture when their homes were finished, and also to connect them with resources.

There were some people that stopped by while we were building and asked for help, who weren’t in any of the programs. We tried to help them, but they actually needed more services than we were able to offer, because none of the students were actually housing contractors, and none of them knew how to gut homes professionally. But they were able to connect some of the families with services. For instance, Mr. Gilbert, a 64-year-old man living in a FEMA trailer with his wife, tries to make it on $590 dollars a month from Social Security. He had a duplex house before Katrina. Half of it was totalled, but the other half is still standing. Because he had such a difficult time rebuilding the whole thing, his idea was to gut half of it and rebuild that half, since the other half was in pretty good condition. But any grant available requires him to level the whole thing and build from scratch.

What inspired the making of this film and also inspired our public awareness campaign, was seeing these students come up with practical solutions for problems that nobody else had come up with solutions for, and realizing that we could take modern technology to fill in some of those gaps. For instance, Mr. Gilbert needed help filling out his application for a house-rebuilding grant. It’s a 10-page document! It’s an intimidating process. I myself have a master’s degree and have worked in various professional realms, but I wouldn’t want to have to fill this document out, because it is such an incredible hassle. Mr. Gilbert asked us to fill it out for him. He entrusted us with all his personal information. On the one hand that is scary, because of identity theft, but, on the other, he really didn’t have much to lose at this point. So we did that for him.

He is one of many senior citizens in need of that type of assistance. Part of our work is going around the city and identifying where the gaps are, where people are being slowed down in the rebuilding process, because there is a specific service that they need. These people can be helped by volunteers, such as having a group of people that senior citizens and non-English-speaking citizens can go to and get assistance from with filling out their paperwork.

PA: Your role in making the film is as director and producer? Please tell us about that.

KP: I should explain that it’s a very small crew, because it started as a pod cast. It started initially that it was just going to be video-cast put up on our website and posted on YouTube, basically to just create awareness about the need for volunteers. And once we got there and I started shooting, I realized that there needed to be a more direct approach. In addition to having this virtual grassroots approach, there needed to be the approach of sending this film out to schools, churches, and organizations and having them screen it, because it is very compelling material, to see all these people motivated to volunteer. Of course, they were then going to go through the 6 or 7 months of ups and downs.

We were now trying to organize a volunteer trip for a much larger group of people. So the question became how can you make that easier for people, to encourage them to go and volunteer? That is where our public awareness campaign and creating user-supported resources comes in. At this point there have been 50,000 volunteers who have gone through the Katrina relief effort. Many of those groups organized independently of one another, but now that so many people have gone, we can streamline the effort. For instance, all the university professors who have put together disaster relief curriculums, all of that can now be housed in one place. There will also be toolkits available for churches and schools to organize trips. All that can be housed in one place so that people can just go and get the information, so that they can spend a month organizing a trip instead of six.

PA: It sounds like Katrina really exposed a lot of problems in American society – racism, problems with the government’s failure to take care of people, problems with the charities. But at the same time it really brought out the best in a lot of people.

KP: With respect to New Orleans, the things that residents are most grateful for are the volunteers and for some aspects of the private sector that have come in and reinvested. I say aspects, because there are plenty of people who have come in and been opportunistic. But there are also businesses that are coming in and investing and giving people jobs, and moving the rebuilding and redevelopment process forward. Folks in New Orleans are extremely grateful for the volunteers, because that is one of the few sources of help that they can trust, and it is one of the few sources of help that is immediate. It also matches the spirit of the people, because the people at this point are like, “You know what? My grant hasn’t come; it’s been 2 years. I will learn how to rebuild my house on my own.” So folks go to work and they come back. They spend their evenings building. They spend their mornings building. They go to work and they come back, and they just keep doing it. So if you are in that mode and some volunteers show up, and they can help expedite your ability to return to some normalcy, then it’s really a beautiful thing. People are very grateful for volunteers, and Katrina definitely has in many ways brought out the best in people, but it also has brought out the worst in people. It has been one of the most powerful examples of opportunism we have seen in a long time. New Orleans could be a model for a different type of opportunism. Instead of people who already have money making significantly more money, it could instead be that all of the unskilled population who are living in New Orleans could be acquiring new skills. People should be being trained as contractors, educators, and so forth. It is really an opportunity for folks there to come up – if things were structured that way. Right now they are not.

PA: Finally, how can people see the movie? How can they volunteer and whom are you trying to reach out to? What is your target audience?

KP: Our target audience is primarily student volunteers, because students typically have the most time to give and they generally are in the best health. They are just a great population to work with. They are very idealistic and very gung-ho. But anyone can volunteer. That’s the reality. Absolutely anyone can volunteer, and so even though most of our focus is on recruiting on college campuses, we are also working with churches and with organizations that are looking for service projects in the Gulf Coast. A number of folks have already agreed to take people down in 2008. Right now, in order to support “New Orleans: A Labor of Love,” we are in the midst of fund raising to make sure that we can meet our goals. On a personal level, I have been doing this out of my own pocket, waking up at 3 a.m. and doing this before I go to my day job, and doing it again when I get home. I need to be able to do it full time in order to really implement the infrastructure that will allow us to get a minimum of 5,000 people down into the Gulf Coast. In order to view the trailer, folks just need to go to www.nolaboroflove.com. where there is whole bunch of information about the work we are doing. In order to view the actual film, folks need to donate, so that we can stop focusing on fundraising and actually focus on completing the film project. We will be going back several times next year and shooting additional installments. There will be a section that specifically focuses on how the disaster relief effort has affected children in the city. For instance, you hear all these claims about violence, particularly among youth in the city, but few people are talking about the fact that only 30% of the schools are open. There are a lot of kids who are not even enrolled in school. Many of the children who lived through Katrina have all types of post-traumatic stress. There are very few libraries open. There aren’t any bookstores open really. Only a few of the parks are open, and there is also an opportunistic drug trade that has moved in. That is a recipe for self-destruction, among the youth population in particular. Because you have young people who aren’t in school and have a lot of idle time. So we will be doing a piece about that, and about what is being done there in terms of volunteer arts programs and things like that have been brought into the community.

We are going to do another piece about how disaster relief has affected the elderly population and also about how it has affected the musical culture. So this is ongoing. The rebuilding effort will take 3-5 years minimum from this point. Some people say as long as 10 years. I think 3-5 years is reasonable, especially now that it seems like some of the federal assistance is going to come through more quickly than it has been coming through. I think that we will see some acceleration in the rebuilding effort, and since next year is an election year, this is surely going to be a big election year issue.

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