-JEN HERRMANN
Seven us worked at the POC. It was divided into three different projects. Two were more traditional legal research projects, which have been written about below. I, however, was working on their third project: community organizing. Organizing is crucial to the POC because its mission is to be run by the community: instead of the organizers telling the community what it wants/needs, it aims to do what the community wants.
Organizing has to be done in the evening, since that's when most people are home, so I spent the morning gutting a house. Teamed with college students from Wilberforce and Florida A & M, we pulled, ripped, swept, and wheeled everything out of a house that was completely upside-down inside. It was almost impossible to think that at some point that mess was somebody's home, so first it was only a destruction project, purely physical. As we pulled things out, however, the lives of the people who lived there began to take shape. By the end of the week, we knew that older folks lived there, the husband a pastor. One of them taught science, it seemed, because there was evidence of a miniature classroom. A teenage or college-aged guy lived there; we knew which room used to be his bedroom. We knew a lot about them...but what we didn't know is whether they were alive or dead.
The houses in the 9th Ward were all like this--a few were gutted but most of them were just as Hurricane Katrina left them in August 2005. The home ownership rate in that neighborhood was extremely high (80-90%), and now (former?) homeowners are scattered around Louisiana and Texas, most of them in trailers.
There is a trailer park in Baker (outside of Baton Rouge) called Renaissance Village. It has 600 trailers with 1,600 evacuees. It's pretty much a refugee camp. Supposedly it's temporary housing, but the POC and the residents with whom I spoke thought no attempt was being made to get people home. It seems to be an impossible situation: Add 1,000 adult evacuees to a town of just under 14,000, set them up in a trailer park on a cow pasture 90 miles from home with limited transportation, and expect them to be moving out in 18 months. As much as people want and need to get home (I can't describe survivors' passion to get home), how can they? How do you rebuild with no money? (We're talking about poor people here, whose most valuable asset was their homes, which are gone.) How do you make money with no job? How do you get a job when your neighbors are cows and you have no car?
Our job at Baker was to go from trailer to trailer and talk to people. Not talk, rather listen. After hearing their stories, we invited them to the Baker Survivors' Council meeting, where the POC would find out what survivors want/need.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Common Ground
-DAN STEFANIDES
I spent the week working at Common Ground, along with Jack, Eli, and Tom. I spent my time working on a number of different tasks including writing a demand letter in a landlord/tenant dispute, gathering signatures for a pettition that would limit the amount that landlords could raise the cost of rental units from pre-Katrina levels, and writing a brochure about the risk of foreclosure
I also spent a lot of time working through the red tape that is FEMA to attempt to help people recieve some of the benefits that they are entitled to. The main project that I worked on in this area was working with the Corporate Lodging Corporations (CLC) Dissaster Assistance Program (DAP). The CLC is a private company that recieved a contract from FEMA to implement the DAP. DAP is a housing assistance program that instead of giving money to the disaster victims it pays the money directly to the landlord. Many residents want to sign up for this program because it makes it much easier for them to recieve the aid. However, to be eligible for this program the tenant needs to have the landlord sign up and many landlords are relunctant to do so for whatever reason. My job was to write a memo to give to landlords that explains the process in plain language so it is easier for the landlords to sign up for the program and the for the tenants to recieve the aid that they are entitled to.
I spent the week working at Common Ground, along with Jack, Eli, and Tom. I spent my time working on a number of different tasks including writing a demand letter in a landlord/tenant dispute, gathering signatures for a pettition that would limit the amount that landlords could raise the cost of rental units from pre-Katrina levels, and writing a brochure about the risk of foreclosure
I also spent a lot of time working through the red tape that is FEMA to attempt to help people recieve some of the benefits that they are entitled to. The main project that I worked on in this area was working with the Corporate Lodging Corporations (CLC) Dissaster Assistance Program (DAP). The CLC is a private company that recieved a contract from FEMA to implement the DAP. DAP is a housing assistance program that instead of giving money to the disaster victims it pays the money directly to the landlord. Many residents want to sign up for this program because it makes it much easier for them to recieve the aid. However, to be eligible for this program the tenant needs to have the landlord sign up and many landlords are relunctant to do so for whatever reason. My job was to write a memo to give to landlords that explains the process in plain language so it is easier for the landlords to sign up for the program and the for the tenants to recieve the aid that they are entitled to.
H-2B visas
-EMILY WALSH
I worked with Elisa researching H-2B visas through the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. As a first year student still looking for a career niche, I was happy to get to research this issue, which involved both employment and immigration law, and is also an area of law that is very politically relevant. Although I knew guest worker visas were controversial and had heard discussion about them on NPR, I didn’t know very much about them before coming to New Orleans. I quickly learned of the extensive problems associated with guest worker visas, and the horrific problems faced by those who enter the country hoping to stay here only temporarily, to make money for their families and return home. Because the structure of guest worker visas ties a worker to an employer, the worker is completely at the mercy of the employer who brought them into the country. This is obviously problematic and creates a situation of unequal bargaining and is conducive to worker exploitation. Company representatives lure workers in from all over the world, with promises of a high salary and a forty-hour work week. Most take out thousands of dollars in loans to pay for their visas. The reality when these guest workers arrive is often quite different from what they were promised. They are given few hours of work per week and are charged for housing and food. They are then unable to pay back their loans, unable to earn money through other employment, and often their passports are taken, making them unable to leave.
There are thousands of workers in this situation, and yet there is almost no case history. It was great to work on a project for such an underrepresented population, and I hope to read about positive progress with these lawsuits.
On a broader level, seeing the lower ninth ward, and spending time with the Workers' Center for Racial Justice was an intense experience. We spent a lot of time "debriefing" with this group. In many of the sessions I noticed that nearly every person described their experience as "interesting." This is not one of my favorite words, and is one I tried to hammer out of student writing in my limited experience teaching composition to high school students at summer school. Yet, when I came back and people asked me about my experiences, I found myself saying "it was interesting." I used it because it's a hard experience to describe and while my experience was certainly not bad, I can't say my work experience was overwhelmingly positive either. I enjoyed the research I did, and love New Orleans, but it is difficult to spend essentially four days (day one was orientation) getting into an issue, only to leave it. It seems this is a serious problem or New Orleans right now, as volunteers come and go, and there seems to be a dearth of solid, consistent leadership that might be able to tie individual volunteer efforts into a more constructive whole.
Even in our involvement with the Worker's Center, just as the 12 or so law students Elisa and I worked with got into our research, we would be asked to stop and go to a debriefing to reflect on our experience. I appreciate the value of reflection, but these sessions were often angry racially fueled airings of grief, rather than reflections on progress and work. The sessions themselves took three or more hours out of our workday, making them a direct impediment to progress. I certainly understand the level of anger, especially for the people in the lower 9th, and as Professor Quigley told us, New Orleans is at the anger stage in the grieving process right now. However, while anger can be used as a tool for community organizing, it does not seem like the best method to achieve positive progress, especially with outside volunteer efforts. This worries me because New Orleans is still very much a wounded city, and there is a real question as to whether the minority population will ever return, and as to whether the lower ninth ward will be rebuilt. Volunteer efforts seem to be an essential part of rebuilding, but right now there is more anger than there is leadership and direction. There is significant controversy as to the direction of New Orleans, and who will get to choose that direction. It is difficult to organize volunteers to work towards a goal without a plan or framework to work within, and I know of other volunteers who relocated to the area to help, only to leave frustrated. I'm glad I went to New Orleans and do feel like I was able to contribute to a solution to a problem that can be significantly ameliorated by a court outcome. While it is a small part of the problem New Orleans faces, the judicial system has a clear framework and rules to follow and I hope the outcome of the case helps the currently powerless guest worker population in Louisiana.
I worked with Elisa researching H-2B visas through the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. As a first year student still looking for a career niche, I was happy to get to research this issue, which involved both employment and immigration law, and is also an area of law that is very politically relevant. Although I knew guest worker visas were controversial and had heard discussion about them on NPR, I didn’t know very much about them before coming to New Orleans. I quickly learned of the extensive problems associated with guest worker visas, and the horrific problems faced by those who enter the country hoping to stay here only temporarily, to make money for their families and return home. Because the structure of guest worker visas ties a worker to an employer, the worker is completely at the mercy of the employer who brought them into the country. This is obviously problematic and creates a situation of unequal bargaining and is conducive to worker exploitation. Company representatives lure workers in from all over the world, with promises of a high salary and a forty-hour work week. Most take out thousands of dollars in loans to pay for their visas. The reality when these guest workers arrive is often quite different from what they were promised. They are given few hours of work per week and are charged for housing and food. They are then unable to pay back their loans, unable to earn money through other employment, and often their passports are taken, making them unable to leave.
There are thousands of workers in this situation, and yet there is almost no case history. It was great to work on a project for such an underrepresented population, and I hope to read about positive progress with these lawsuits.
On a broader level, seeing the lower ninth ward, and spending time with the Workers' Center for Racial Justice was an intense experience. We spent a lot of time "debriefing" with this group. In many of the sessions I noticed that nearly every person described their experience as "interesting." This is not one of my favorite words, and is one I tried to hammer out of student writing in my limited experience teaching composition to high school students at summer school. Yet, when I came back and people asked me about my experiences, I found myself saying "it was interesting." I used it because it's a hard experience to describe and while my experience was certainly not bad, I can't say my work experience was overwhelmingly positive either. I enjoyed the research I did, and love New Orleans, but it is difficult to spend essentially four days (day one was orientation) getting into an issue, only to leave it. It seems this is a serious problem or New Orleans right now, as volunteers come and go, and there seems to be a dearth of solid, consistent leadership that might be able to tie individual volunteer efforts into a more constructive whole.
Even in our involvement with the Worker's Center, just as the 12 or so law students Elisa and I worked with got into our research, we would be asked to stop and go to a debriefing to reflect on our experience. I appreciate the value of reflection, but these sessions were often angry racially fueled airings of grief, rather than reflections on progress and work. The sessions themselves took three or more hours out of our workday, making them a direct impediment to progress. I certainly understand the level of anger, especially for the people in the lower 9th, and as Professor Quigley told us, New Orleans is at the anger stage in the grieving process right now. However, while anger can be used as a tool for community organizing, it does not seem like the best method to achieve positive progress, especially with outside volunteer efforts. This worries me because New Orleans is still very much a wounded city, and there is a real question as to whether the minority population will ever return, and as to whether the lower ninth ward will be rebuilt. Volunteer efforts seem to be an essential part of rebuilding, but right now there is more anger than there is leadership and direction. There is significant controversy as to the direction of New Orleans, and who will get to choose that direction. It is difficult to organize volunteers to work towards a goal without a plan or framework to work within, and I know of other volunteers who relocated to the area to help, only to leave frustrated. I'm glad I went to New Orleans and do feel like I was able to contribute to a solution to a problem that can be significantly ameliorated by a court outcome. While it is a small part of the problem New Orleans faces, the judicial system has a clear framework and rules to follow and I hope the outcome of the case helps the currently powerless guest worker population in Louisiana.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Screening of Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" at Villanova
Hurricane Katrina: When the Levees Broke
On Sunday, April 1 and Monday, April 2, there will be a showing of Spike Lee's Documentary "When the Levees Broke" in the Villanova Room from 7-9 pm. Sunday will show parts 1 & 2, while Monday will show parts 3 & 4. Students, staff and faculty are greatly encourage to show up for as much of the showing as they are able to, doors will remain open throughout the entire showing. On Monday, there will be an open forum after the film to discuss building on the efforts of the Villanova community in relation to Hurricane Katrina, including the recent 190 Villanovans who traveled to the area over Spring Break. Please come watch part of the film and help us spread awareness and compassion for so many people who are still in need of our help.
If you have questions, please contact: abigail.kupstas@villanova.edu
On Sunday, April 1 and Monday, April 2, there will be a showing of Spike Lee's Documentary "When the Levees Broke" in the Villanova Room from 7-9 pm. Sunday will show parts 1 & 2, while Monday will show parts 3 & 4. Students, staff and faculty are greatly encourage to show up for as much of the showing as they are able to, doors will remain open throughout the entire showing. On Monday, there will be an open forum after the film to discuss building on the efforts of the Villanova community in relation to Hurricane Katrina, including the recent 190 Villanovans who traveled to the area over Spring Break. Please come watch part of the film and help us spread awareness and compassion for so many people who are still in need of our help.
If you have questions, please contact: abigail.kupstas@villanova.edu
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