Why did Open Society Foundations (OSF) begin to invest strategically in New Orleans?

Starting over a decade ago, the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs focused primarily on supporting efforts to reform Louisiana’s broken criminal justice system. The devastation caused by the failure of the levees that followed Hurricane Katrina was an opportunity to examine Open Society Foundations’ most immediate concerns and to see the opportunity in the wake of this crisis to affect the shaping of rebuilding efforts. Katrina was not just a humanitarian crisis but a revelation of the consequences of underinvestment in infrastructure and social welfare in the Gulf Region, revealing to the rest of the nation and the world how much of an unequal society we live in. The racial and class divisions that determine life and death opportunities in this country have been recognized throughout our ongoing and former U.S. work in criminal justice reform, racial justice, women’s and immigrants’ rights, transparency and government accountability, social justice fellowships, and the work of our Baltimore office. Katrina brought our issues and the fissures they create in our society to the forefront of the public’s attention thereby providing us with new-found opportunities to impact and affect rebuilding in ways that foster a more equitable and democratic society.

What do you hope to accomplish with the Transform New Orleans Fund?

The Fund is a way to shine the spotlight on some of the success stories from New Orleans over the last five years. It lets people know that New Orleans is not forgotten, five years later, and that amidst the many other challenges in the nation – New Orleans still needs our collective support. We hope it will encourage new donors to join us in supporting advocacy to build a vibrant New Orleans that provides opportunity for all residents and preserves its rich cultural heritage. There is still a tremendous amount of work to be done and this fundraising campaign invests in a number of inspiring, locally-led organizations that are determined to transform New Orleans. We are grateful for our partnership with the Greater New Orleans Foundation in hosting this fund and we will continue to work with GNOF and other donors to advance a more equitable society in New Orleans.

What does OSF aim to accomplish by continuing its investment in our region?

Our long-term work in New Orleans aims to empower New Orleanians to build a better, stronger New Orleans. This work focuses in particular on criminal justice reform, government transparency and accountability, strategies that will advance positive outcomes for black males, and support for art and cultural institutions that play a critical role in advancing social change.

What impresses you about New Orleans?

I love the passion, determination and spirit of New Orleaneans who in the face of enormous challenges—first Katrina, and now the impact of the BP oil disaster—have displayed admirable resiliency. I have a great respect for the many people and organizations that I have come to know over the years of our work there. It is a great city with a big heart and I am excited by the solutions that its citizens are developing that can offer models for advocates around the nation and the world.

Change From Within

Change from Within is a video produced by the Open Society Foundations on the occasion of the fifth anniversary. It showcases the works of several nonprofits including Silence is Violence and the Orleans Public Defenders.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, the Open Society Foundations partnered with the Greater New Orleans Foundation to open the Transform New Orleans Fund to benefit local nonprofits.

Patricia Jones with the Lower 9th Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association is creating change one home at a time.

My family and I moved back to New Orleans in February 2006. At that time I began attending meetings at the Sanchez Center with different organizers from around the country to help people with the right to return. We sat in circles and talked, and NENA grew out of that.

At one of the community meetings, we were discussing the Road Home policy. They suggested setting up a system so folks could call and get help over the phone. I disagreed with that and suggested instead that we set up centers around the state where people could actually come and deal with a human being. I had already gone through the Road Home process, and realized that their online system was problematic for a lot of elderly folks. So I gave out my cell phone number so I could sit with people and help them get it done. People kept giving my number out, and that was the beginning of NENA.

I knew that in order to begin the recovery process, we had to acknowledge our loss. So we put on a public memorial service standing at the levee wall. We got the list of everyone who passed away, and we asked the pastors to officiate the service. People came from all over, and to my surprise, CNN showed up. We finished the service, we read 1,500 names, and we did a walk from the levee to Flood Street, by King School. Folks asked me, “What are we going to do next?” I said, “Honestly, I don’t know, but I have a sign-in sheet. When we figure it out, I’ll call you.” And so that’s how word of mouth got out, and the organization continued to grow.

Our work has evolved from just passing out information to assessing where a family is, identifying what the gap is, and finding resources to fill the gap. We continue to curve our program around hugging the process of the person getting home. Even today, we know that there are about 1,900 people that have received Road Home resources and have not begun rebuilding. So we try to help those folks who are disenfranchised and overwhelmed with being displaced. It’s an intense kind of counseling. The work we do is not for the faint of heart.

We also have the larger question of, How do we stabilize this neighborhood? I’m helping one person, but that doesn’t affect the other thousand blighted lots from people who didn’t come back. It is detrimental to have 15 percent of a neighborhood blighted. We can’t have tunnel vision in our work. We have to look at the whole picture.

We’ve come up with a community land trust. Instead of someone else buying the land and building what they want, why don’t we do it? That way we can control what goes there. It addresses blight and stabilizes the neighborhood. And the public money that’s invested in getting somebody into an affordable unit will always stay there. What it says is that we will help you get into your house. In exchange, you will agree to help the next person who needs a leg up.

This post is part of a series, “In Their Own Words”, that acknowledges the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. Five years later, they’re still at work.

Tim Williamson with Idea Village is igniting the entrepreneurial spirit in New Orleans.

Idea Village was founded in 2000 by five local entrepreneurs who were all from New Orleans and had moved away in the mid-eighties. We moved back home in 1998 and 1999 to start new businesses, but the collective feeling amongst us was that the city was fundamentally in decline. The problem, we felt, was there was an exodus of talent. The education system was declining, there were no jobs, and there was corruption — there was no reason why people would stay.

How do you create a better city? We felt it was by attracting, supporting, and retaining a new generation of leadership. If we could create a new generation of economic leaders, and new jobs, then those individuals would also pay it forward by supporting the next generation of businesses, but also supporting social issues. Entrepreneurs are the ones who create change. If you look at the founding of our city, or the city leaders, they all were entrepreneurs who were successful, and then they contributed back to education, the arts, and such.

We like to say the Idea Village is not an organization, it’s a movement, started by entrepreneurs who believe in the sense of possibility in New Orleans. We identify and support entrepreneurs with a team of professionals who have given 56,000 hours and $2.5 million to New Orleans entrepreneurs. We’ve seen some get very successful, such as the Imagination Movers, who now have a TV show on the Disney Channel filmed in New Orleans. “Trust Your Crazy Idea,” the cover story in the new issue of Entrepreneur magazine, is about Drew Brees and his partnership with Idea Village.

The day after Katrina, every person in New Orleans became an entrepreneur. We’re becoming a model city, showing the power of what individuals can do. We’ve learned that it’s OK to fail, you just try again. Before Katrina we were more scared, but now we know we can do it. Five years after Katrina, we’ve moved from “we need help” to “how can we help others?”

Every year in March we host Entrepreneur Week, a festival of the mind. People from all over the world come here to celebrate entrepreneurship. We set up downtown New Orleans like Jazz Fest with different venues. MBAs used to come here to help New Orleans, but now they come here to learn and to look for jobs and opportunities.

Brookings and the GNOCDC just came out with a new report that shows our entrepreneurism is off the chart. This is an opportunity to rebuild an American city — and with Mardi Gras, festivals, and the Saints, New Orleans can be one of the best places in the country to start your own company. We’re one of the most creative cities in the world. We create creators. We just need to keep them here.

This post is part of a series, “In Their Own Words”, that acknowledges the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. Five years later, they’re still at work.  Idea Village received a grant recently from the Environmental Fund to explore creative solutions for surface water management.

As we mark the fifth anniversary of Katrina, we need to acknowledge the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. They helped save their neighbors and their neighborhoods. They’ve marshaled armies of volunteers to help rebuild the fabric of our city. Five years later, they’re still at work.

Cindy Nguyen, Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training (VIET)

When the post-Katrina levee failures inundated the Vietnamese community, Nguyen helped thousands of evacuees meet their basic needs and assisted them with navigating the complexities of the FEMA and Road Home programs. VIET is now focused on its children’s programs and has formed partnerships with organizations within and outside of the Vietnamese community.

Patricia Jones, Ninth Ward Empowerment Association (NENA)

Jones was a tax accountant who had never thought of starting a nonprofit organization. After Katrina she set up shop in a heavily damaged building and helped elderly residents register online for Road Home funding. When a funder approached her about forming an organization to help the Lower Ninth Ward, Jones was everyone’s choice to run it.

Tim Williamson, Idea Village

“The day after Katrina, every person in New Orleans became an entrepreneur,” says Williamson, co-founder of the Idea Village, an organization that promotes entrepreneurism in New Orleans. “MBAs used to come here to help New Orleans, but now they come here to learn and to look for opportunities.”

Martin Guitierrez, Catholic Charities

“We have a level of civic engagement in the community that I don’t think we ever saw before Katrina,” says Gutierrez, Executive Director of Neighborhood and Community Centers. “If we play our cards right, if we do what we need to do, I think New Orleans is going to be a very exciting place to be.”

Jeff Schwartz, Broad Community Connections

How do you create a place where people want to be? Schwartz, founder and executive director of Broad Community Connections, believes it’s tied up with simple things, like garbage cans, trees, bike lanes, and benches. Broad Community Connections is working to shape a commercial corridor in New Orleans that fosters economic, residential, and cultural development.

Carol Bebelle, Ashé Cultural Arts Center

“Artists and culture bearers are some of the best neighbors,” says Bebelle, executive director of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. The Ashé Cultural Arts Center has ensured artists’ places in Central City by creating permanent affordable housing for them, in addition to hosting cultural workshops to help the community heal after the devastation of Katrina.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation has been supporting nonprofit organizations in the New Orleans area since the 1980s, but after Katrina, the Foundation’s role expanded almost overnight.

“National foundations, corporations, and individual donors came to us for advice on how to best direct philanthropic dollars,” said President and CEO Albert Ruesga. “We became the conduit through which funders were able to channel precious resources to those organizations and projects that would best support the recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans.”

According to the Urban Institute, there are 4,007 nonprofit public charities in metro New Orleans, up from 3,562 in 2004.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation has tripled its grantmaking from $6.1 million in 2005 to $18.6 million in 2006, and averaged $17.7 million in grants per year since then.

Jeff Schwartz with Broad Community Connections is making Broad Street a place where people want to linger.

Broad Community Connections was founded in 2008 on the premise that we wanted to make Broad Street somewhere that people wanted to come to. BCC’s overarching vision is to create a vibrant place that maintains the cultural resonance of the Tremé, Faubourg St. John, Mid-City and Lower Mid-City neighborhoods.

BCC was formally designated as an urban Main Street in December 2008. The Main Street model is an attempt to think holistically about what revitalization means, and it’s firmly rooted in the built environment, knowing that you’re not going to have a pedestrian-oriented district without doing basic things, like providing benches and trees and a feeling of safety. There are now six Main Streets in New Orleans, and that’s all a post-Katrina innovation. All of them are grassroots nonprofits.

Grocery stores are one of the first things people want to have in a neighborhood before they return. We’ve worked toward this in a variety of ways: We started a monthly flea market that offers not only arts and crafts but fresh food; we’ve worked with a corner store to get some fresh food into it; and we are planning to put an offer down on the old Schwegmann’s in the hopes of turning it back into a grocery store. Our vision for the site includes putting a commercial food service kitchen in the building, where the tenants will be healthy food service operators for public and charter schools. And we hope to create an urban farm on the rooftop as a community space where kids can learn about healthy food.

We are also involved in a number of other projects, including working to make Broad more pedestrian and bike friendly; helping to make sure the hospital development plans on Tulane Avenue include local businesses and benefit the community at large; and increasing community dialogue in the house-moving conversation by linking the Builders of Hope folks to the preservationists, which we hope will create affordable housing from the 100 historic houses that will be moved out of the way of the VA footprint.

We also started the Broad Street Brew Ha Ha, an annual festival that celebrates the brewing traditions in New Orleans. Broad Street and Tulane Avenue are the old brewing districts of New Orleans, and this festival is not only culturally and historically relevant, but it also gives people a reason to come hang out in a place that they never would think about otherwise.

Economic and social value comes from being in a place where people want to be. A lot of that is just tied to simple things, like having garbage cans and trees. So we’ve stepped in and partnered with other groups to provide these things for the community. Ultimately, it’s a pretty simple vision that can transform a neighborhood.

This post is part of a series, “In Their Own Words”, that acknowledges the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. Five years later, they’re still at work.