NEW ORLEANS SURVIVOR COUNCIL / CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION AND REBUILDING
Bad Neighbor Commission
Contact Information: 504-872-9591
July 30, 2007

Bring Our People Back Home!
Residents of Public Housing Plan Anniversary Activities
July 27, 2007

Residents of Public Housing (RPH) met yesterday at Guste High Rise Community Center. Twenty-eight residents came from several public housing neighborhoods, including Iberville, Guste, St. Bernard, Lafitte, B.W. Cooper and Desire. With the second anniversary of Katrina only a month away, residents discussed plans for the anniversary.

“Bring Our People Home” Block Party

On August 28, RPH will sponsor a block party outside the HANO/HUD office on Touro Street, starting at noon. At the block party, we will be presenting HANO and HUD with a list of units the community needs them to reopen now.

Funeral Procession and Memorial Service

On August 29, we are having our funeral procession and memorial services for those from the public housing community who lost their lives during the Katrina tragedy. We will be starting our processional and memorial services at the St. Bernard Housing Development at 10:00 AM, and doing services at St. Bernard, Lafitte, B.W. Cooper and Guste, and C.J. Peete. We are looking for financial support to provide buses to enable residents who are still outside New Orleans to come home for these events.

Please help us with these events. Click the “Donate” link on this page so public housing residents who are still in exile can come home to commemorate the losses they suffered and continue to suffer since Katrina.

REPORTS FROM NEW ORLEANS SURVIVOR COUNCIL DELEGATIONS TO VENEZUELA, INDIA AND WASHINGTON, DC: CREATING INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCES, SEEKING RESTITUTION

When: Saturday, June 16, 2007, 11am-1pm
Where: Old Pathway Baptist Church, 1908 Alabo St. (2 blocks off N. Claiborne) Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA
Contact: Ishmael Muhammad, 404-664-3009

Members of the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC) have been seeking alliances and support both internationally and nationally; their reports on their travels, observances, and sources of support will be presented at a meeting on Saturday, June 16th. Members from each of the delegations will be in attendance, offering strategies for garnering support and translating it all into opportunities for survivors to return home and rebuild their homes, families, lives and communities.

A delegation of 4 NOSC participants went to Venezuela (see full information below) to garner moral and financial support from the Communal Councils (neighborhood people’s organizations) and the Venezuelan National Assembly to help poor, black New Orleaneans in their attempts to reclaim their city. Both the Communal Councils and National Assemblymen promised ongoing support to the survivors and expressed outrage that the money they had previously sent to New Orleans never reached the poor, most affected people in the disaster.

Immediately after returning from Venezuela, two of the members of that delegation, Bobbie Hammond and Gloria Williams, went to Washington, DC to meet with Senator Mary Landrieu to press her to support legislation that would re-open public housing in New Orleans and allow them to return to their units to which they hold leases. Landrieu has refused so far, and, in response, Hammond and Williams, along with others, are participating in a sit-in in that senator’s office right now.

Another delegation traveled to India, where they met with survivors of their tsunami and discussed each of their experiences with “disaster capitalism” that benefits the multinational corporations and contractors much more than the victims. The NOSC participants explained to the people of India how rejected and attacked our people have been by the governments on all levels—New Orleans, Louisiana, and US Federal.

Representatives of each of the delegations will be present at the meeting for reports, questions and answers, and interviews.
 

Dear Friend:
We are writing to you to seek your support and bring you into our dialogue. We are the members, organizers, participants and supporters of the New Orleans Survivor Council and its organizing committee, the People’s Organizing Committee. Collectively, we have been practicing a ‘bottom-up’ grassroots organizing and decision-making approach to empowering the poor black survivors of the Katrina tragedy. In the wake of this horror, we have been presented with some amazing opportunities for transformation and for testing out this important ‘bottom-up’ approach. We have put the needs and interests of the people first in everything we do. And, even with almost no financial resources, we have been remarkably successful. We have:

• organized public housing residents to re-occupy their homes
• organized former renters to take over blighted houses, repair them and move in their families
• taught the building trades to survivors so they can rebuild their homes and be qualified for skilled employment
• organized low-income homeowners to rebuild their homes, with the help of hundreds of volunteers
• attempted to rebuild schools, churches, clinics, day care centers -- and the levee surrounding the 9th ward
• organized an anti-slavery movement which has challenged unscrupulous contractors and built unity between blacks and immigrants
• begun an international solidarity movement, having just visited Venezuela and received a visit from Venezuelan officials
• begun a leadership training institute to train poor blacks in the skills needed to run and manage their own organizations and to implement large development projects
• organized residents of the concentration camps where 175,000 poor black residents are still living trapped in trailers in more than 20 locations outside the city

Even with all these accomplishments over the last year and a half, our organizations are still the least funded (to date, we have received only $40,000 in foundation grants) and the least supported. We are targeted because we have made the poor our priority; we are hated because the poor people themselves manage all the funds we raise; we are hated because the poor have the power over all our projects and programs; we are hated because we challenge the powers and demand the right of return for the poor black community.

When lawyers and researchers in New Orleans need information from poor people, when they need real access to poor survivors, they turn to us, to the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC) and the People’s Organizing Committee (POC). When funders and social planners wonder why so little has been accomplished on the ground in New Orleans, even with progressive foundation dollars, we feel it is because too many of the groups operating in New Orleans really have no roots here, no close and repeated contact with the poor black people of New Orleans. They cannot produce because they are outsiders, outsiders by geography, by class, by race. We are the people ourselves; we do not need to figure out how to “make contact” with the people: we are the people.

Certainly, we do not expect much support from the privileged, yet we know that we cannot continue to reap great achievements and continue building our future without some outside help. We look back to the experience of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, in which “Friends of SNCC,” mostly middle class, often white, often Northerners, raised awareness, publicity and funds to support the work of SNCC organizers. Through conversations with our participants and organizers we have discovered that we are ambivalent about this kind of support today. On the one hand we see the potential for transformative organizing before our very eyes here in New Orleans. What is happening here could have a profound impact on poor folks from New Orleans and on other movements for progressive social change. More resources are needed for this. On the other hand we do not want to be overwhelmed or overtaken by those who may share some of our ideals but may not truly support a bottom-up, grassroots, democratic process that keeps poor people in the leadership.

We would like to be able to support many organizers to spread this important work, to reach out to the tens of thousands of survivors strewn across the nation. We would like to create a movement powerful enough to fully bring those survivors home, rebuild homes, create jobs, open schools and clinics and rebuild the levee in the Lower Ninth Ward. We also want to create an international organizing school that would share organizing strategies and methods across the world, particularly in the Americas, that would strengthen our collective capacities—a kind of more updated and international Highlander School.

To do this we must expand our capacity to do our work. We ask you to help us think this through, to offer your insights, your voice, your contacts, and your networks. We need you to be a "Friend of the NOSC," to help us -- and ask your friends to help us -- to raise the ongoing support that is essential to keep our work going. Your generous financial contribution lets us know that you believe in the power of the people themselves to transform the world. And your concrete support makes you an active part of this ongoing transformation.

We turn to you because we see you as an ally: you have the knowledge, experience and sympathies that could support our efforts forward. Please read the enclosed statement that was written through a collective process in our group. We see this as a sample “op-ed” piece that might be used in an effort to gain support from reluctant foundations and others. Since we insist upon keeping the power, including control of the budget, in the hands of the poor themselves, and not with a board of professional overseers, we may appear frightening or challenging to some. We believe that we are the genuine article, the real organizers of and by the poor. While some would find this frightening, others may find this an important and necessary step forward.

We ask you to participate in our dialogue, to meet with us; we invite you to visit us in New Orleans and to help us chart our course. We seek a conversation to begin with, and to see where our dialogue leads us. We look forward to this work together.

In struggle,
The New Orleans Survivor Council

PS We are glad to let you know that we recently cleaned out a high school in the Lower Ninth Ward and have collected many boxes of textbooks in anticipation of its reopening. Your generous support helps make this work possible.

Donations to IFCO/NOSC are tax deductible.

Please make checks payable to IFCO/NOSC

We are in the middle of genocide of black people, people of African descent. This is not the sort of genocide that we have been alert to in the past, where millions of people are decimated over a relatively short period of time in a small geographic and political region. No. This genocide is moving along at a steady, relentless pace, moving faster and faster with many focal points. But make no mistake: there is a “systematic program of action intended to destroy a whole racial or national group” (Webster’s New World Dictionary). Hundreds of millions of people of African descent are being killed before our eyes.

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