40 Ways in 40 Days: Remembering the Survivors of Katrina (Day 10)

Day 10, Way 10

By the way: all of these Katrina posts are being collected in my spiffy new DU journal! w00t!

Yesterday I got a very nice card in the mail from the Common Ground Collective, which was the first organization I profiled here on 40 Ways. I donated to them last Wednesday and I guess they were excited to get the money. In keeping with the Solidarity Not Charity theme, the Ides of March brings you another grass-roots New Orleans community-based action group which probably includes a lot of the same people who are running the CGC:

The People's Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition

This group is basically an offshoot of Community Labor United, founded in 1998 when a group of progressive organizations from the New Orleans area got together on the campus of Dillard University and decided to join forces. The CLU, and therefore the PHRF, represent a wide range of constituencies, including the Nation of Islam, The Hip Hop Caucus, and the Coalition to Free the Angola 3 (whoever they may be). However, their common goals, as articulated in the CLU mission statement, are things everybody ought to be down with:

We are community leaders, labor leaders, and cultural workers committed to ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples everywhere.

We believe that all people have the right and responsibility to determine their destiny.

Our organizations and unions are committed to building a society where the realities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation are not barriers to human progress.

We are committed to building a society where the bottom line interests of corporations and the rich are not balanced on the backs of workers and the poor.

We are committed to building local, regional, national, and world economies that are democratic, just, ecological, and do not exploit labor, culture, and natural resources.

We are committed to building an organization of organizations and individuals, focused on educating, organizing, and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and communities from the bottom up.

We believe in the prospect of multiracial and trans-generational efforts to develop our communities.

What's not to love? Anyway, the PHRF did direct relief work in the months following the hurricane but at this point they mainly seem to be focused on political action, and specifically in ensuring that the community has a voice and a vote throughout the process of reconstruction. They also have a Women's Caucus, though their page doesn't seem to have been updated lately.

After poking around the PHRF site for a while I finally found an actual project which, if it is still ongoing, looks very interesting: the Reconstruction Working Group is trying to organize volunteer workers from the building trades for a large-scale demolition & reconstruction project. They are also looking for people to donate tools & equipment as well as time, so if you belong to a union that would be interested in pitching in, the PDF tells you what they're looking for, or you can call the PHRF hotline at 1-888-310-PHRF or email volunteer@communitylaborunited.net and ask about the Reconstruction Working Group. I personally would call and get more information before writing a check because there's not very much on the PHRF site to tell you when this effort is going on or for how long or who's running it. The "interim coordinating committee's" emails are all right here; see if you can get more detailed info out of them.

Trying to figure out which of the PHRF's component organizations might be in charge of the Reconstruction Working Group, I happened across this interesting site: Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. If you are at all that way inclined, check it out; among other things they are running a prison building boycott, trying to get architects etc. to pledge not to help build any more prisons on the grounds that "with our total imprisoned population now over 2,000,000, we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country that publishes statistics on prisons, even Russia." Happy thought. Anyway, they have also launched a Katrina Task Force and put out a PDF of their Principles for Just Rebuilding, though it does not look so far as if any actual action has yet been taken.

Beware the ides of March,

The Plaid Adder

but Hey! I was born on the Ides of March! And I'm 29 today ;)

Sure you're 29. Just like you were last year...

The Plaid Adder

and here is another kick :kick:

:bounce:

Kick!