After the storm struck, myself and a few others started a grassroots non-profit called
Emergency Communities. The organization was started due to our frustrated efforts to volunteer after the storm, and the lack of community-based disaster groups we found once getting on the ground. A few weeks after we started, I
diaried about the new group here on DKos, and recieved great support for you Kossaks. So on this anniversary of the storm, I would like to tell you about how we've progressed, what it's like down here, and how Emergency Communities has grown to have a massive impact on Gulf Coast.
What started as a few people trying to build community based relief grew faster than we could have imagined. In the landscape of an apocalypse, all people wanted was a safe, warm, and fun space to come to and eat good food and find free distribution. Our site grew and grew:
Soon we began serving over 2,000 residents at every meal. We offered three hot meals a day, grocery and baby supply distribution, live music, first aid, homeopathic medicine, even massage! By May, we had the largest relief site in the Greater New Orleans area (we were in Arabi, directly east of NOLA). In July, the Washington Post sent a reporter down to stay with us, and described our operations:
The operation moved to New Orleans in December 2005, and by March was serving 2,000 meals a day. During my week-long stint in the Arabi zone, my fellow volunteers were an eclectic bunch: dreadlocked hippies, clean-cut high schoolers, businesspeople, schoolteachers, homeless people, college students and a miscellaneous selection of camp followers with bandanna-wearing dogs.
Despite the motley coalition of volunteers, the Arabi operation was a slick one -- like a MASH unit but without the uniforms. The dining tent was set up in a parking lot, along with an intricately laid out kitchen and dishwashing tents, dry goods and kitchen supply areas, trailers for old foods and supply distribution centers. A "healing tent" offered tetanus shots and Reiki massages. The security detail was called the "peace patrol," and the recycling center got a steady stream of material for composting. Portapotties, solar-powered showers and an open-air sink with a marvelous collection of shaving gear created a large outdoor bath area. Volunteers lived in tents perched on abandoned storage pallets, as the ground was, and is, too contaminated to pitch a tent.
By July, Emergency Communities had opened two new sites on the Gulf Coast, on in Buras, LA, where the eye of Katrina struck, and another in Violet, LA, both of which remain completely devastated. These were taken in the last two weeks, one is our volunteers gutting:
With the support of people like you Kossacks, EC has become a widespread, open-source style of grassroots relief. We take any and all volunteers and find work they can do. We remain completely non-hierarchical, with democractic decision making that allows us to be extremely flexible. We have served over 250,000 meals on the Gulf, and provided all types of entertainment, clothing, food, and fun to the local residents.
We hope to continue our work in to the future. We are taken our cue from open-source work to build on this movement. It is only with the help of people, without the limitations of bureacracy, that actual accomplishments can be made and the Gulf rebuilt better than it was.
There is hope down here, we breathe it everyday. But so much needs to be done, and it is blatantly clear we can't rely on this, er, (we're a non-political non-profit, so i have to be careful here), current governmental procedures to do such a thing.
Maybe, on this anniversary, you will consider helping by volunteering or donating?
Thanks for reading.