Hugging the Process of the Person Getting Home

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.