Looking back over 2009, what were the highlights for the Urban League?

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 League, being an Architect of Change means becoming an expert on how to effect change on economic, educational, and policy issues that adversely affect African-Americans and other disadvantaged populations.

What achievements are you proud of?

Our Parent Information Center reached over 980 parents, and we conducted 37 parent workshops teaching parents, teachers, and school leaders how to engage as partners in the delivery of excellent public and private education. We conducted a schools fair with over 70 schools participating serving 600 families. We also developed a Parent Leadership Academy and graduated an inaugural class.  Our Urban League College Track program supported 100 students weekly in our college preparatory program. Our Financial Connections program provided financial literacy classes to over 200 participants and our Women’s and Business resource centers counseled over 400 entrepreneurs and supported over 900 in total.

With numbers like those the Urban League has put on the scoreboard in 2009, we are sure to run up the score by thoroughly beating back the disparities that plague our most vulnerable individuals.

Where is the Urban League headed over the next couple of years?

Over the next couple of years the Urban League will be focused making success possible for every individual who is willing to work hard.

What does the Urban League do freakishly well?

I think the Urban League is freakishly good at being the voice of reason. Our voice comes through in a recognizable manner for all to digest equally, and more importantly our voice rings with a sweet and melodic solution that closes gaps of disparity, unites communities around commonalities, and paints a picture that includes the dreams of all New Orleanians in every brush stroke.

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.

Tell us about Broad Community Connections.

It was formed right after Katrina. It is a group of neighborhoods with residents from Treme, Lower Mid-City, Mid-City and Faubourg St. John with the purpose to basically revitalize Broad Street. Our mission is to make Broad Street a place to work, live, and play.

Why Broad Street?

Broad Street has significance throughout New Orleans history. It is a place with a lot of cultural relevance. We all know Treme was the birthplace of jazz, Faubourg St. John is where Degas spent some of his time, and Mid-City and Lower Mid-City are organically mixed income, mixed-use neighborhoods. Broad Street is the one thing that connects them all. It is never going to be a Magazine Street or an Oak Street, but it will be Mid-City’s Main Street.

What’s the interest?

These neighborhoods have such a uniqueness and charm to them. We find a lot of people are looking to reinvest in these neighborhoods. It is very attractive because it is not a developer’s vision but an organic New Orleans vision of what a neighborhood should be.

Is there economic potential?

Broad Street has 25,000 to 30,000 cars a day going by. We just have to figure out a way to get them to stop and shop.

What are you doing to promote that?

We assist with technical assistance grants, façade grants, trash clean-ups, and planting trees. We’re working with the State Department of Transportation to narrow Broad Street from three lanes to two with a bike path. We’re also looking to address the critical food access needs in the neighborhoods by creating a Fresh Food Hub, where we attract a comprehensive food service provider for the charter schools.

How do you describe your work?

While it is basically economic development, more importantly, we’re talking community development. We want businesses that are bringing something back to the neighborhoods whether it is a shoemaker or dry cleaner. It’s all about making the daily existence of living in your neighborhood better. The more mom and pop shops you have, the more local businesses you have and the more money that stays in the local economy. Twenty to thirty percent more money stays in a community when it’s a local business.

How should we be thinking of Broad Street?

It is open for business!

Listen to more about Jeff Schwartz’s vision for Broad Street on WWNO’s Community IMPACT series sponsored by the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

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.

To learn more about Teach For America, visit our Nonprofit Spotlight section.

Q: Why did you join Teach For America?

A: I joined Teach For America first because I felt fortunate that I had access to an excellent public education. I fundamentally believe that teachers are leaders and as such, I could think of no better way to make an impact in a community than as a Teach For America corps member.

Q: What is the impact Teach For America has in our schools?

A: Our impact on the public school systems here is truly exciting. I mean, this is the whole reason I moved down here three years ago. I came to New Orleans for a three day conference. After seeing what was going on down here, on the front lines, I knew that my place was here, that I wanted to be a part of the movement. So, I went back to New York, packed up my apartment, and moved to New Orleans to lead our office here. Our corps members go above and beyond the call of duty every day in their classrooms, and our collective impact is so intense here, our corps members and alumni are impacting 1 in 3 students in the area.

Q: What are some of the challenges that you think we still face in the region?

A: I think that even though we are seeing exciting gains in our schools, we still have a long way to go. If you look at how our students are scoring, we still aren’t preparing them to attend and graduate from a four year institution. It’s data like that that really drives me every day to work towards our mission of ensuring that one day, every child here has the opportunity to attain an excellent education.

Q: How do you see Teach For America fitting into the renaissance that we are currently enjoying?

A: Following the storm we really ramped up the number of outstanding recent graduates that we brought to the area who commit to teach for two years in public schools here and become lifelong leaders in expanding educational opportunity. Once we started bringing in an increased number of teachers, we saw the number of our alumni who chose to stay rise as well. Last summer we had about 200 alumni in the area, and we recently found out that we now have over 300 alumni who are leading and driving forward some of the most successful social ventures here, and who work throughout the Greater New Orleans region as lawyers, physicians, school leaders, as well as many who remain in the classroom.

New Orleans is a very exciting place to be right now, and the opportunities to make a real difference in the way the community operates are very tangible and very attractive to these talented young professionals…we just have to make sure that we maintain this openness to reform, change, and a new New Orleans.

Q: What are the greatest opportunities you see in education for our region?

A: I was watching “When the Levees Broke” the other day, the documentary film that Spike Lee made, and there was a comment that a woman on the film made that resonated particularly…she said something like, “People used to call New Orleans the city that care forgot”.I just think that we have come so far these past four years since the storm. I think that there are numerous opportunities for education reform in our region, we have more resources than before, and we have a revamped system. However, I truly believe that one of the greatest things that we have going for us is that people are not glossing over those things that still aren’t working. We care about our kids and their right to a great education, and we are very vocal about this. I don’t think that we are still the city that care forgot, and a lot of people are fighting to make sure that we don’t slip back to that place.

>> 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.