Mary Rowe came to New Orleans in the fall of 2005 as part of her fellowship with the Virginia-based blue moon fund, later becoming the director of the fund’s Urban program which invested in a variety of initiatives to foster innovation and resilience in the region. She currently coordinates The New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation.
>> GNOF: Why did you start the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation? What need or opportunity were you responding to?
I did not start the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation: it really just formed up itself. Here’s what I observed: a group of folks engaged in different kinds of post-Katrina start-ups realized they knew a bit—but not a lot—about each other’s work and they started meeting to compare notes about what they were learning.
Around the same time a collective sentiment seemed to be gathering steam in the city in which locals started rejecting the stampede of “outsiders” that kept trolling through, each with a new diagnosis, or worse, “solution.” There was this growing recognition: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The most enduring, resilient approaches to all the challenges and opportunities were being fostered locally.
Voila: the Institute. It’s a dynamic and loose thing: it’s a growing alliance of groups that know New Orleans and the region are interdependent in every way and that value learning across disciplines and sectors, working to knit the city/region together across barriers like race and class and “wet” and “dry.”
>> So you realized that we’re the solution to our most pressing challenges and we can learn a lot from one another. Why an Institute? Shouldn’t we perhaps just have lunch every once in a while to share ideas?
Albert, you’re becoming very New Orleanian already, making it about food. Of course it’s about lunch; I’m all for lunch. The Institute is about highlighting and aggregating innovation that builds our resilience. We’re trying different ways: social media, targeted convenings that draw diverse folks together around a shared challenge or opportunity, video and audio profiles, old fashioned face-to-face meetings. Not airlifting in things that have worked elsewhere, or condescending scolding about what should work here because it works somewhere else.
The Institute is about what’s here.
So it can’t just be lunch. It’s got to be pot lucks and high teas and crawfish boils and after fives and Sundays at 10 and books and podcasts and video and theater and a mélange of ways of sharing and learning. It’s a hackneyed observation but New Orleans created jazz and gumbo: this is the city of improvisation and adaptation.
>> What might the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation do on any given day?
The Institute is looking for ways to support leadership, harvest lessons, and generate leverage. We’re using meetings, workshops, and social media like the Web and video, as well as events.
For instance, we convened Jane’s Walk here in May, an international tribute to famed urbanist Jane Jacobs in which city residents self-organize walks to show how their city works. New Orleanians hosted ten: more than any other US city.
We’ve been incubating a new nonprofit investigative news source to deepen the dialogue on the city and region’s most pressing issues, called the New Orleans Public Record. And we’re part of a broad coalition brought together by the Greater New Orleans Foundation and supported by the Open Society Institute to create more open and transparent governance.
We’ve just begun to work with the organizations that received support from your Environmental Fund that are doing a broad range of work from urban farming to local business development to experiential education: all with a focus on building resilience—adaptive capacity—in the city and region.
>> You seem to be full of hope for our region. What do you tell the doomsayers?
Albert, this city and this region inhabit a number of visceral risks, so it’s not for the faint of heart. But like any vibrant city, this is a dynamic place: after the storms more so because lots of the veneers disappeared. Things are reweaving themselves, based on an authentic local capacity, need, and opportunity—and what is emerging makes such sense.
Look at the How Safe How Soon initiative, a joint initiative of the Lower 9th Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and the United Houma Nation to share approaches that link the city and the bayou in coastal restoration work. And the Urban Conservancy’s Stay Local program, to stimulate local economies. And the Beacon of Hope neighborhood resource centers where residents have become their own neighborhoods’ groundskeepers, case managers, public policy advocates, and economic developers. These initiatives connect everything: race, class, sector, neighborhood.
One caveat I’d add is that there are all sorts of heartwarming and laudable projects around. But the ones I’m highlighting are those that are teaching us about the ecology of urban systems—how things fit together.
New Orleans is a prophetic city because the challenges being presented and the responses they’re fostering are of relevance to cities across the country.
The doomsayers should just step aside and pay attention.
>> I hear you’ve been diagnosed with a labradoodle. Is it serious?
You’ve just outed us: we own a designer dog! After two decades of stylish mutts my wife Sam (we’re Canadian so legally married) put her foot down: no more shedding. And we have a Smart Car. I think those are our only afflictions. None contagious.
