Q&A with Nolan V. Rollins, president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans.

In 2009, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans completed an internal review and adopted a Strategic Framework that calls for the Urban League to be an Architect of Change. For the Urban [...]

Taking a Broad View

Jeff Schwartz is the executive director of Broad Community Connections. He is a native New Orleanian with a Master in City Planning degree from MIT. Broad Community Connections received a grant from the Community IMPACT Program to advocate for the revitalization of our city’s great urban commercial corridor [...]

Q&A with Kira Orange Jones, director of Teach For America in New Orleans

Kira was appointed executive director of Teach For America - Greater New Orleans in 2007. Prior to working at Teach For America, Jones founded and served as executive director of Right Quick Productions, a nonprofit media organization in Baton Rouge, La., dedicated to amplifying community voices through documentary filmmaking. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.Ed. focused in school leadership from Harvard University.

Interview with Mary Rowe, New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation

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.”