New Orleans as a city seems to be healing. Potholes in our streets are slowly being filled, blighted houses slated for demolition are disappearing, and schools are re-opening. We are winning lawsuits that protect our citizens’ rights while recovery agencies are rehabilitating parks and playgrounds overrun by drugs. And yet the people of New Orleans are broken.
As a housing specialist at UNITY New Orleans, Becca Waxman works directly with homeless clients to help them find permanent housing. Photo by Mario Tama, Getty Images, http://www.tulanelink.com/tulanelink/homeless_box.htm
Struggling with this single issue has driven my desire to maintain an active role in the nonprofit sector, a group of institutions reminding the masses that there are people sleeping on those mended streets, living in and furnishing the 65,000 abandoned buildings and overrunning our children’s playgrounds. My Avodah placement last year, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, asks the public to consider the lives of the disenfranchised: people of color, women, those raising a family and living with a disability. Then they ask, “Why are people poor?” I wonder, because of the deteriorating streets, the abandoned homes or the failing schools? Because society identifies them as an underprivileged minority? They pose this uncomfortable question and it makes us ponder whether people want to be poor, and to what degree it is their choice. Our streets and schools are undoubtedly in need of repair, but how does a city where every single citizen at one point in time was displaced from their home ignore its most vulnerable and growing demographic: those who spend their nights in places no human deserves to sleep? These are questions I deal with on a daily basis in my current position with UNITY of Greater New Orleans.
Two years ago I didn’t think about these questions. I had not yet developed a vocabulary centered around affordable housing, youth organizers, protected citizens, and public defenders. Two years ago I unknowingly built relationships with others based on similar religious and class backgrounds. Up until then it was simple. I made friends by spending time with people who I enjoyed and who enjoyed similar activities. Today I know the effectiveness of the nonprofit sector, and I am able to spend my days and nights with this most vulnerable population because last year, what stemmed from this evolving analysis of oppression was a group of strong friends.
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Rachie Lewis’ placement, the Orleans Public Defenders office, was featured on WWL TV because of their decision to refuse new cases over the legal caseload limit.
For more on OPD, check out this article from The Gambit.
Outside of New Orleans, Mardis Gras is perceived by most as a time of debauchery, gluttony and a poisonous materialism. This image certainly reflects what I expected this past month to be prior to arriving here. Yet recent experience has convinced me that this is a rather inaccurate depiction of a very complex tradition. The aforementioned hedonism exists on one street and primarily in the lives of tourists who perpetuate a self-fulfilled prophecy that has little to do with the spirit of this city. Rather, throughout the season, all over New Orleans, there was something much deeper happening; something palpable that I would argue turned most Mardi Gras myths on their heads.
Current Corps Members festooned in Mardi Gras beads.
The party started a little early this year when the New Orleans Saints won their first Super Bowl in 43 years. Unique hints of this city’s beauty emerged in the pure joy every New Orleanian experienced and shared with each other. Rather than burn cars and initiate riots, everyone high-fived anyone in sight, honked their horns in elation and second-lined down the streets. And soon after watching one of the best games of football I have ever seen, on a plane with twenty exuberant natives who came together to cheer on the Saints while suppressing a deep frustration with their lack of foresight (who books a flight during the Super Bowl when your team is undefeated? Thankfully Jet Blue is tech savvy and we were able to watch the game), it was clear that the party was only getting started.
"While the wastefulness of this season is grossly apparent in the countless resources exhausted on crap...this season is not simply about consumption."
As my housemates, some other friends and I stood in the cold for hours at the Saints parade two days later, we were warmed by the presence of 800,000 others (which is pretty impressive since New Orleans proper has around 300,000 residents) who lined the streets of the whole city to celebrate with one another and express a deep gratitude. For hours, ecstatic Saints riding on floats from upcoming Mardi Gras parades shared their joy and accomplishment with all of us, throwing beads at onlookers and dancing to the musics of local brass bands. During the few week long Mardi Gras celebration, the Saints players and the Super Bowl trophy became staples and the scale of their victory started to sink in. While I have become skeptical of how sports impact our culture in recent years, I think that these athletes understood the magnitude of their collective victory and could admit the humility of their role in bringing joy to a city that both desperately needs it and knows exactly how to cultivate it. This win did not signify the successful rebuilding of New Orleans as some have ignorantly suggested, but it did give a forgotten population something to feel proud of and a chance to show the rest of the country how to throw a good party. continue reading » »
It’s the end of February in New Orleans, and the magnolia trees are blooming. As I bike along the city’s potholed streets, the purple flowers are my unlikely guarantors that the wet chill of New Orleans winter is finally over.
"Minutes after the last float rumbles by, a line of men in orange sweatshirts or fluorescent yellow vests advances, armed with shovels and heavy-duty bags."
Turning onto St. Charles Avenue, a different bloom catches my eye; vibrant multicolored beads droop from the branches of the boulevard’s live oaks. One week after Mardi Gras, this alien bloom is all that remains of the city-wide celebration and round-the-clock revelry.
During the two weeks of parades that lead up to Mardi Gras, an estimated $1 million worth of beads are bought and thrown. New Orleans natives will tell you that it’s bad luck to pick up beads that land on the ground. In the wake of each parade, then, as the crowds drift away with their booty around their necks, the streets are piled high with discarded beads and beer cans. This is what remains of the “greatest free party on earth”, in the words of Sgt. Lesley Hill-Peters.
Hill-Peters is spokesperson for the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office. According to her, “someone picking up after you” is all part of the fun; revelers are required to do nothing but have a good time. So who cleans up the city’s messes? Local prisoners, released into the sunshine for a few hours to make thousands of pounds of garbage disappear. Minutes after the last float rumbles by, a line of men in orange sweatshirts or fluorescent yellow vests advances, armed with shovels and heavy-duty bags.
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Corps Members Mallory Falk and Amanda Gross
Although the city of New Orleans has been super busy with the Super Bowl, elections, Mardi Gras, work, visitors, and a variety of other fun events, I have been given the additional opportunity of planning for a group of 16 Northeastern Hillel students to come down for an alternative Spring Break trip February 28th-March 7th. I will be co-leading this trip with another Elon University graduate who works for Northeastern Hillel. He had contacted me a while ago to ask if I would be interested in leading with him because the group wanted to be a part of the rebuilding process and he knew that I worked for Rebuilding Together New Orleans (an organization that rebuilds the houses of low-income homeowners who are either elderly, disabled, single guardians of minor children, or first responders).
I eagerly accepted the offer because it was a combination of so many of the things I love. I was particularly excited to have been offered an opportunity to work with Hillel students interested in service, as someone who specifically has moved down to New Orleans to do community service work in a Jewish context. I jumped at the chance to be able to combine the passion I have for my job with the chance to find ways for individuals to get the most out of a volunteer experience. Additionally, I thought it would be a really great chance to flip my usual role as a participant in alternative spring break trips/service oriented programs and use the knowledge I had acquired during those experiences to create a program for these students.
I hadn’t realized until I began the speaking with the student leader for the group regarding the planning just how much I truly enjoyed this type of work. As the days get closer and closer to when they get here and I realize all the last minute things that need to be done, I get more excited for all that we are going to be able to do. This surprising amount of enthusiasm I’ve felt has had a profound effect on me for two reasons. The first dealt with the realization that maybe this could be something I look into for future employment or just as something to keep in mind in case the opportunity arises again. The second was that it reminded me why I chose to do Avodah in the first place. I knew that I wanted to do service for a year after graduating from college and had looked at a number of different service organizations before deciding on Avodah. Ultimately, I chose what I felt would be the best organization for giving me context for the service work I was doing. I did not want my work to just be a job. I wanted it to be an experience; a job plus an understanding and insight into how that job fits into the context of everything else occurring in the city. I wanted a support system outside of my job that I could find in the community of other volunteers I would be living with. continue reading » »
One of the biggest aspects of my job as a Youth Advocate at Juvenile Regional Services is checking in with the kids who are in the post dispositional phase. This means that the juvenile has gone through the sentencing process and is either on probation or in secure care. The majority of juveniles that I work with are on probation, with review hearings as often as every 30 days. That means that every 30 days, the juvenile goes before the judge and the judge looks over the juvenile’s progress, including drug testing, any academic issues, and any other issues that the juvenile is facing. Due to the fact that I have only been at JRS for two months, when I first started I had to go down a list of names and see what was going on with those juveniles.
Learn more about the School-to-Prison-Pipeline by playing a game created by the ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/school-prison-pipeline-game
While routinely going down my list of clients, I happened to call a client with the initials R.J. He didn’t have a review hearing for another four months, but I figured I would check in anyway. I reached his father who informed me that not only was R.J. not currently in school but that the 15 year old had not been enrolled since May of last year. He explained that R.J.’s mother had moved to Texas and had possession of many of R.J.’s documents such as social security card and birth certificate. His father had been fiercely trying to get R.J. enrolled in a school but it seemed that doors were continually being shut in his face. This was infuriating for many reasons, but one of the most important was that R.J. could be sent to jail for not being in school. The juvenile courts in New Orleans view academic issues as being non-compliant with probation. A catchy phrase for the repercussions of this practice is the “school to prison pipeline”. Kids are pushed out of schools for minor disciplinary infractions, or, as in R.J.’s situation, they are kept out of public schools illegally. These juveniles, living without the structure of school, disproportionately end up the criminal justice system with a recidivism rate that will make your head spin. In New Orleans, juveniles have been sent to jail for repeatedly not passing classes or not attending. So the thought of R.J. going before the judge without even being enrolled in any school was a scary one.
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Rebecca Waxman, a former AVODAH Corps Member, now works with UNITY of Greater New Orleans. This editorial by the Times-Picayune Editorial page staff highlights their extraordinary work during last weekend’s freezing temperatures.
The frigid temperatures that gripped the New Orleans area for five nights last week dipped to a deadly level. But apparently only two of the hundreds of homeless people who sleep on city streets and in abandoned buildings in Orleans and Jefferson parishes were lost to the cold.
Those deaths — one man who perished in a fire in an abandoned building in Bridge City and another who was outside in New Orleans’ Central Business District — are tragic. It is a blessing, though, that there weren’t more fatalities with temperatures in the low 20s night after night. That is due to heroic efforts by caseworkers and volunteers with UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a consortium of 63 organizations working to end homelessness, and the New Orleans Police Department’s homeless outreach unit.
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Here’s a taste of a thoughtful article that Rachie Lewis wrote for the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent:
“New Orleans is a small town disguised as a city. It has its own culture, its own rituals and its own flavor. People sincerely ask you how you are doing, and will capitalize on any excuse to have a party. As a result of its size, warmth and collective curiosity, our Avodah group often gets attention, sometimes with expressions of gratitude, and other times with criticism, asserting our white privilege.
In my job at the public defender’s office, I work as a case manager, matching clients with the resources they need to facilitate a successful re-entry into society after their legal difficulties. I often have firsthand experiences of feeling like an outsider. Working with a predominantly black population — frequently doing so in spaces that create an uncomfortable power dynamic, such as jail and court — has made me very attuned to the limitations of what I can offer people who will not initially trust me. And why should they?”
You can read the entire article here.
When I spent the night with Ruth, I didn’t even know what her last name was. I didn’t know how old she was, or whether she’d had children, or what her line of work had been.
I met Ruth at a funeral home in Metairie. It was raining and cold when I slid out of the cab, slammed the door shut behind me, and ran with bent head toward the back entrance of the funeral home. I punched in the code and pushed my way in through the unassuming white door. A woman named Sandy from the local Conservative synagogue was there to greet me and show me the way to Ruth, the deceased woman with whom I would be spending the night–I on the couch, she in a plain wooden coffin.
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Dec 14th, 2009
by deber |
It is with a heavy heart that I am writing this blog post about my boss, friend and mentor Pam Dashiell. Pam passed away on the first of the month leaving not only the Lower 9th Ward community, but the New Orleans and national community in shock. Many people have written about Pam’s passing, from Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, former Mayor Marc Morial, to friends and neighbors and people from as far away as Kazakhstan.
David (center) with Pam and Mack McClendon, of the Lower 9th Ward Village.
I will always cherish my time with Pam. She hired me at the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development without knowing me, welcomed me with hugs, trusted me with important tasks, encouraged me to go above and beyond, and most of all, she was my friend.
Pam had the greatest smile and laugh. Her laugh was heartier than Santa Claus.
My favorite story of Pam is one that I believe is really indicative of the kind of person that she was: In the early 90’s Pam was attending Mardi Gras with her daughter, and even though she was on crutches at the time, she was not going to miss the Zulu parade.
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