Let us bring forth Still Waters of Rest & Renewal.
Let us bring forth Shining Waters of Joy & Happiness.
Let us bring forth Storm Waters of Grief & Loss.
Let us bring forth Rushing Waters of Transition & Change.
-Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Marking the Third Anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
This Gulf Coast Update is a joint project of the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist (GNOUU), the New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. We apologize if you receive more than one version of this email.
If you would like to receive further updates on the Gulf Coast, click here to subscribe.
Click here to ask your Representative to co-sponsor H.R. 4048!
HR 4048, The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act would create 100,000 jobs for Gulf Coast residents to rebuild their communities. The civic work jobs proposed would pay prevailing wages and give workers the right to join unions. Local communities would decide which structures would be given priority to rebuild. If the legislation were made a reality, the jobs created would be open to all who lived in the Gulf Region pre-Katrina or can show 90 days of residency. Ask your Representative to co-sponsor H.R. 4048 today!
Three years after the Storm, the New Orleans area is slowly recovering. Lack of housing, the biggest hindrance to growing our population and caring for returnees, is being rectified through rebuilding--although some experts estimate it will take ten years or more to replace all we lost. The three churches in the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist (GNOUU) cluster, First UU New Orleans, Community Church New Orleans, and North Shore UU, are working hard to rebuild. In our nationwide three-year capital campaign, officially launched at General Assembly, GNOUU has received almost $770,000 in pledges and donations, closing in on 30 percent of our total goal of $2.7 million.
Our Third Annual Katrina Anniversary Memorial Dinner, based loosely on the Passover Seder ritual, will be held at First UU on August 30th, with congregations participating from South Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulfcoast. At the dinner, we will both celebrate our successes and grieve our losses. Community Church, which recently had to demolish their gutted original building and sanctuary, will hold a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral on September 6th, with a "second-line" gathering of local UUs to mourn the loss and look ahead with hope to the rebuilding.
The folks at GNOUU send their love and gratitude to all those who have pledged and/or donated to the campaign, who have come to New Orleans to volunteer, and who are working for the full recovery of our city and our congregations. It's not over yet!
At this summer's General Assembly, management of the most successful and extensive volunteer program in the history of the Unitarian Universalist denomination was transferred from the UUA &UUSC to a coalition of the UU churches of New Orleans. The coalition, Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists (GNOUU), is placing the volunteer program under the stewardship of their own New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center, located in First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans and directed by Quo Vadis Breaux.
To date, the program has placed about 2,000 volunteers in Louisiana and Mississippi to help with rebuilding and recovery efforts. The need for volunteers is still pressing. Both individual volunteers and groups are welcome, but groups are preferred since it takes the same amount of staff's time and effort to facilitate volunteering for one person as it does for a dozen people. There are still many slots open for volunteers in September. The Rebirth Center is encouraging people to put groups together and come on down!
To schedule a volunteer trip, contact Quo Vadis Breaux at 504-866-4170 or email qvbreaux [at] yahoo.com
One year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, the UUSC published a Hurricane Katrina Anniversary Quiz on their website, testing peoples' knowledge of the extent of the damage and progress made in rebuilding one year after the disaster. Now a brand new Quiz has been released for the third anniversary, with up-to-date statistics. Take the challenge and see how well you do in the Hurricane Katrina Third Anniversary Quiz. Try the First Anniversary Quiz, too.
Hurricane Katrina Third Anniversary Quiz (Link will be posted on August 28th! In the meantime, take a look at UUSC's other Katrina resources.)
Excerpt: "The good news is that 6 in 10 Katrina survivors say that their lives are almost or largely back to normal, and most see recovery moving in the right direction. The bad news is that 4 in 10 respondents say their lives are still disrupted, and more than 7 in 10 see little or no progress in making housing affordable or in controlling crime, which they view as the city's top problem."
Review from National Low-Income Housing Coalition: "Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Trouble the Water is directed and produced by Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The film tells the story of an aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning. It's a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes that takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen."
Excerpt: "Evans said he realized, as the second anniversary of Katrina was approaching in 2007, that it was "not only the slow pace of the recovery and all its pieces" that bothered him. "What was in my craw was [that] these powerful and truthful stories about that recovery [were not] getting out to the world. The national media wasn't telling the stories, or telling them well. And no one had pieced together a master narrative about the economic housing cultural crisis that hit four states."
Read Deb Weiner's interview with Derek Evans to learn how one activist found a unique way to share the Gulf Coast's stories of recovery with the world.
I thank you and thabk Derek Evans for all he has done and still doing for the gulf coast recovery.
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gulf coast relief fund grantee
latifa woodhouse — 10:06 AM Sep 04, 2008
I thank you and thabk Derek Evans for all he has done and still doing for the gulf coast recovery.