Reigniting Hope in the Gulf Coast

“All around the country, there’s not a message about Katrina anymore,” said Mary Fontenot. “That’s not an accident – that’s a strategy.”

And after the way George W. Bush just sort of left the Gulf Coast out of his State of the Union address, it’s hard not to agree that there must be some truth to her assertion.

“New Orleans, 15 months out, is still in a very difficult situation,” said Fontenot, the director of a UUSC program partner in New Orleans called All Congregations Together (ACT). She continued, “One of our biggest challenges is around hope. Maintaining hope and reigniting hope.”

“Hope is the biggest obstacle,” echoed Shana Sassoon of Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, a few minutes later. “I don’t think it was a year ago, but I think it is now.”

Mary and Shana, together with Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives in Mississippi, were three UUSC program partners at a meeting of Gulf Coast partners, congregations, and volunteers that I attended earlier this week.

There was a sense of urgency around their words, around the words of all the participants who had come from the Gulf Coast region to share their experiences over the last few months.

There was also urgency around the issues that still face the residents of the region more than a year after the hurricanes: housing, education, environmental concerns, and neighborhood crime. But crucial to their point: Katrina was just the latest disaster to hit the Gulf Coast region, and what has come in the aftermath – the disaster after the disaster – has been just as devastating for the communities.

“We’re living in a city where the infrastructure isn’t even to pre-Katrina levels, which wasn’t even acceptable then,” commented Sassoon.

They called for everyone in the country to pitch in, whether you are a volunteer that can get down to the Gulf Coast or someone who can respond to action alerts pressing for policy changes and accountability.

“If we trust the instinct that in the long run, a very long run, we can recognize that for this whole experience -- the totality of the experience -- to be transformative, it seems to me that what would be needed would be – and I haven’t seen this yet – is a movement," said Evans.

Yes.