The words, "Thank you, Hurricane Volunteers — You alone have made a difference," painstakingly formed out of blue duct tape, are frequently emblazoned on the back of the KatrinaRitaVille Express, a FEMA trailer, which was parked in front of the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center during GA.

Like other GA attendees, I took the opportunity to step inside the FEMA trailer to see what life is like for families who have had to live in the trailers since hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast almost three years ago. The trailer is so small that you have to step outside to change your mind. "How on earth could a family of six live in one of these things?" I wondered.

The FEMA trailer, and a sister trailer, were purchased by several Gulf Coast organizations for a FEMA trailer road show around the United States to raise awareness of the continuing crisis in the region and the lack of coherent government action to rebuild to meet the needs of poor and minority residents, who are still without housing or adequate government assistance.

Despite the obstacles, Gulf Coast survivors have mounted an extraordinary effort to rebuild their homes and their lives. It is both profoundly moving and depressing that the only real support and solidarity that they are getting is coming from volunteers, not from our government. Volunteer work is important, but not sufficient: it should be complemented by the type of large-scale problem-solving and resources that only government can provide.

UUs, of course, represent a considerable number of Gulf Coast volunteers who have come to the region since the 2005 hurricanes. Over 2,000 people have participated in the UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast Volunteer Program to date. At GA, the UUA and UUSC officially transferred the stewardship of the joint UUA-UUSC volunteer program to a coalition of New Orleans UU churches known as the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists (GNOUU). It will now be stewarded by the coalition's New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center.

I was both happy and sad when UUA and UUSC staff handed GNOUU a check for $125,000 to help launch the new volunteer center. Happy, because the coalition has done an extraordinary job of getting ready to take on the responsibility of managing the volunteer program and because it belongs in their hands. Sad, because I've been proud of UUSC's direct connection to this life-changing experience for so many UUs.

However, the UUA and UUSC's commitment to the Gulf Coast, and to the volunteer program itself, has definitely not ended. GNOUU and the Rebirth Center will continue to need time, money, and support from UUs and others. In addition to volunteering our hands and hearts, we must continue to contribute our advocacy efforts to ensure a just recovery for the people of the Gulf Coast.

Okay, let me get this right. There is a horrendous affordable housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. According to Color of Change and human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, rents in New Orleans have gone up 45 percent, over 100,000 people have not yet returned to New Orleans, half of those who want to return make less than $20,000 a year, and 12,000 New Orleanians currently have no place to live. Now, in the face of this serious affordable-housing crisis, the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are planning to demolish 4,600 public housing units in the center of New Orleans.

Well, you might think that these public housing units must have been badly damaged by the hurricane and that they are only now getting around to bulldozing them.

But you would be wrong. Most of these units are in well-built structures, barely damaged by Katrina. Many of the units above the first floor were not affected by the flood waters. In fact, architects who have been taken on tours by UUA-UUSC partner The Advancement Project have testified that it would take minimal renovation for these buildings to provide decent housing.

While thousands of families are camped out in friends' living rooms, living in cramped trailers that FEMA is repossessing, or living in other cities waiting to go home, HUD wants to tear down solid brick buildings that would actually provide people with adequate housing.

Oh, and they want to do this before Christmas, apparently to make sure that the Katrina survivors in trailers and temporary houses get the point that "home for the holidays" most assuredly doesn't include them. HUD has said for the last year and a half that housing demolition orders for public housing take 100 days to review before approval. In the case of New Orleans public housing, they managed to speed it up a little. The review and approval took one day.

On the surface, HUD's stated goal to replace the the public-housing projects with affordable -housing units in mixed income areas could be a good strategy for affordable housing until you take a closer look at the numbers, and obstacles rooted in issues of race and class facing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The new plan will demolish 4,600 units of affordable housing and rebuild 744. Rents have gone up 45 percent in New Orleans. Many of the African-American families who could raise the extra money for rent wouldn't be able to find landlords to rent to them. According to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, there has been pervasive racial discrimination in housing in New Orleans since Katrina. According to their report of April 2007, 57.5 percent of landlords discriminated against African-American renters.

The public housing residents have been fighting back for two years, trying to get the city council and HUD to come up with a better plan that would make maximum use of the resources that exist. Many UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast partners, such as People's Hurricane Relief Fund, C-3 Iberville, The Advancement Project, and the Women's Welfare Reform Project, are deeply involved in this struggle to stop the demolition of public housing. They are asking that the demolitions be halted so that a better -- and fairer -- plan can be put into place. The public housing units could be renovated easily and used as temporary housing for residents until new public-housing units are built.

Over 95 percent of the public-housing residents in New Orleans were low-income African Americans. HUD's goal should be to get low-income families back into decent housing in New Orleans as fast as possible. It's precisely low-income African-American families who face the twin obstacles of high rent and racial discrimination in the New Orleans housing market. If HUD moves forward with its plan to demolish the public-housing projects, it would be difficult not to conclude that their real goal is to keep low-income African Americans out of New Orleans.

Many groups are working hard to stop this travesty of justice as Christmas approaches. Please add your voice to theirs by clicking here to send an open letter to the New Orleans City Council.

Okay, let me get this right. There is a horrendous affordable housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. According to Color of Change and human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, rents in New Orleans have gone up 45 percent, over 100,000 people have not yet returned to New Orleans, half of those who want to return make less than $20,000 a year, and 12,000 New Orleanians currently have no place to live. Now, in the face of this serious affordable-housing crisis, the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are planning to demolish 4,600 public housing units in the center of New Orleans.

Well, you might think that these public housing units must have been badly damaged by the hurricane and that they are only now getting around to bulldozing them.

But you would be wrong. Most of these units are in well-built structures, barely damaged by Katrina. Many of the units above the first floor were not affected by the flood waters. In fact, architects who have been taken on tours by UUA-UUSC partner The Advancement Project have testified that it would take minimal renovation for these buildings to provide decent housing.

While thousands of families are camped out in friends' living rooms, living in cramped trailers that FEMA is repossessing, or living in other cities waiting to go home, HUD wants to tear down solid brick buildings that would actually provide people with adequate housing.

Oh, and they want to do this before Christmas, apparently to make sure that the Katrina survivors in trailers and temporary houses get the point that "home for the holidays" most assuredly doesn't include them. HUD has said for the last year and a half that housing demolition orders for public housing take 100 days to review before approval. In the case of New Orleans public housing, they managed to speed it up a little. The review and approval took one day.

On the surface, HUD's stated goal to replace the the public-housing projects with affordable -housing units in mixed income areas could be a good strategy for affordable housing until you take a closer look at the numbers, and obstacles rooted in issues of race and class facing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The new plan will demolish 4,600 units of affordable housing and rebuild 744. Rents have gone up 45 percent in New Orleans. Many of the African-American families who could raise the extra money for rent wouldn't be able to find landlords to rent to them. According to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, there has been pervasive racial discrimination in housing in New Orleans since Katrina. According to their report of April 2007, 57.5 percent of landlords discriminated against African-American renters.

The public housing residents have been fighting back for two years, trying to get the city council and HUD to come up with a better plan that would make maximum use of the resources that exist. Many UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast partners, such as People's Hurricane Relief Fund, C-3 Iberville, The Advancement Project, and the Women's Welfare Reform Project, are deeply involved in this struggle to stop the demolition of public housing. They are asking that the demolitions be halted so that a better -- and fairer -- plan can be put into place. The public housing units could be renovated easily and used as temporary housing for residents until new public-housing units are built.

Over 95 percent of the public-housing residents in New Orleans were low-income African Americans. HUD's goal should be to get low-income families back into decent housing in New Orleans as fast as possible. It's precisely low-income African-American families who face the twin obstacles of high rent and racial discrimination in the New Orleans housing market. If HUD moves forward with its plan to demolish the public-housing projects, it would be difficult not to conclude that their real goal is to keep low-income African Americans out of New Orleans.

Many groups are working hard to stop this travesty of justice as Christmas approaches. Please add your voice to theirs by clicking here to send an open letter to the New Orleans City Council.

In many respects, the international human rights movement hasn’t fully entered the American consciousness yet, in terms of knowing what rights we can claim as American citizens and what rights we can claim just by virtue of being human beings. There are so many overlaps and distinctions. Many of us don't know what human rights mean in the United States.

For instance, if we look at the situation of the disproportionate number of minorities, especially African Americans, who are incarcerated today in U.S. prisons, most people probably wouldn’t see that immediately as a human rights issue. We would probably label it first as a civil rights issue – and think of it as a way that racial inequality is expressing itself today as a more subtle form of Jim Crow justice.

When we think of federal agents making an impromptu raid on a manufacturing plant in Massachusetts to round up undocumented, mostly Hispanic immigrants and ship them to remote detention centers, we probably wouldn’t call it a human rights issue either. We would probably think of it first as falling somewhere at the intersection of domestic labor and immigration laws.

Today, as part of an effort to honor Human Rights Day, I represented UUSC at the ACLU-Massachusetts’s roundtable discussion on the U.S. government’s 2007 report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. State parties to the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), like the United States, are required to make periodic reports to the U.N. committee that contain a fair and honest assessment of the situation of racial discrimination in their country.

The United States’ 2007 report was basically a whitewash, saying racism is not a problem in the United States – which gave activists an opportunity to call the government out on its deplorable record on racial equality, given not just the Katrina disaster, but also the host of statistics out there on race and poverty in the U.S. and disproportionate rates of imprisonment and infant mortality, low levels of education, low levels of employment, lack of access to medical care, increased risk of being the victim of a violent crime, and lack of access to legal counsel among minorities... all of which points to national practices that systematically violate CERD's promise of equal rights.

This turned our discussion to how people whose rights have been violated and activists on a local level can draw on the powerful vocabulary of international human rights law to call for higher standards and better treatment. This could mean, for instance, in the case of a hostile school environment that contributes to high drop-out rates and low education levels among minorities, calling this a violation of the “Right to Dignity” as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It could also mean calling inferior medical treatment for minorities a violation of the "Right to Health" under UDHR, as well as a violation of CERD.

For all involved, Human Rights Day became an opportunity to further ground ourselves in the assurances of human rights law and encourage more people to frame their demands in terms of human rights – in order to strengthen their present claims as well as to strengthen the universal claim to human rights by everyone.

So, in keeping with the spirit of Human Rights Day, can I recommend that you take a minute to look through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right now, and as an exercise, try to pick out which right in your opinion is most in need of defense in America today? Is it Article 5, torture? Article 9, arbitrary detention? Article 23, the right to work? Article 25, the right to a standard of living? Please post your picks. We'd like to hear them.

Looking into the school bathroom is like taking the pulse of the school itself. Is the bathroom clean and stocked with soap? Students are probably safe and learning. Filthy, smoke-filled, and graffiti-covered? Warning: students probably feel threatened and their learning environment is likely equally appalling.

It was with this first-hand experience that a group of kids began organizing for better bathrooms to be included in the rebuilding of their hurricane-ravaged New Orleans schools. And by "better," the kids mean unlocked, functioning, clean, and safe. But they didn't stop there. They want their bathrooms to be the first green public school restrooms in the country. And it looks like they may get their way.

Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools (Rethink) is a group of students in New Orleans with the simple vision of a great education for every kid in the city, regardless of race or class. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans schools ranked among the worst in the nation. Katrina destroyed most of them. Rethink sees this as an opportunity to make the schools better. And who knows more about schools than kids?

Rethink kids "dream, document, and take action" to improve their schools. Just one of the many dreams they are acting on is the dream of green bathrooms. These bathrooms will improve indoor air quality and energy and water efficiency. They will also be clean and safe.

This summer, Rethinkers worked with an architect to design a green bathroom. In July, they held a press conference about their work. School district authorities committed to using the Rethinkers' design. Now a contractor designing the district's master plan has asked the Rethinkers to help.

The UUA-UUSC Guld Coast Relief Fund is proud to be Rethink's partner in the struggle to rebuild the Gulf Coast with justice.

Written by Sarah Karstaedt, UUSC volunteer National Co-chair for Eastern Territory

My recent visit to New Orleans, as part of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's volunteer network leadership conference, has opened my eyes to the devastation that still persists there.

There is an urgent need for affordable housing for the city’s residents. The people who have returned to their damaged homes struggle against incredible odds. While their dedication and persistence are an inspiration to witness, they face rental costs that amount to as much as 86 percent of their salaries (for hotel workers and others in similar income brackets) to 37-49 percent of salaries for people in other professions. These hardworking residents deserve an affordable home for themselves and their families.

The good news is there is a way to help with this problem. My own senator, Chris Dodd (D-CT), is co-sponsoring the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007, which offers a way to address the housing problems in the Gulf Coast region.

This bill supports low-income families, by moving them out of FEMA assistance and into permanent, affordable homes, through the use of project-based housing vouchers. It provides help for families living in public housing by replacing housing units that were occupied before the storm and offering mobility counseling to assist residents in returning home. The bill also authorizes 5,500 permanent, supportive housing units for elderly, disabled, and homeless residents. It includes funding for fair housing and protects taxpayers and Gulf Coast residents through increased oversight and monitoring of federal recovery funds.

If you’ve been wondering how you can assist the beleaguered residents of the Gulf Coast region, contacting your senators and voicing your support for the Gulf Coast Recovery Act of 2007, is a great place to start.

Today's Times-Picayune story, "Road Home has money to pay grants expected to be issued this year," provides us with a mixed message fitting for its topic.

The title heralds good news, stability. Read down a bit and you'll find this nugget, "Counting on a bailout ... the Road Home is short anywhere from $5.6 billion to $6.6 billion..." Apparently the program has the money to pay as long as Congress bails out the program with somewhere between $3.5 and $4.5 billion in additional federal aid. I wonder how I could apply that sort of logic to my own finances.

As you'll see in the comments left for today's story, Louisiana residents are nothing short of outraged over the program many call No Road Home.

The Road Home program is meant to help mostly homeowners, leaving renters to fend for themselves. This is particularly unhelpful for a city like New Orleans, where more than half of residents rented before the storm.

The program's administration was outsourced to ICF, a private company in Virginia. They seem to have done their best to ensure that homeowners not be helped by the program they run, at least not in this decade.

And today's story tells of the challenges homeowners face in navigating ICF's processes, saying that "...applicants often complain about some part of the grant calculation and are never put into ICF's resolution process, and, if they are, the company may decide their dispute is resolved without ever informing them." The article also notes that "clients have been consistently denied access to their own files, making it impossible for them to figure out where the dispute lies."

I sit at my desk today trying to imagine how many people are sitting at their desks at ICF just not helping people. Not filing claims. Not communicating with clients. Refusing requests. Have they forgotten that these are real people? Real families, with real homes? That megacorporation is made up of individual workers, each with the power to do something.

So here's my challenge to each of them. Do something. Do something now. Ask yourself what's more important: your company's profit margin or the estimated six thousand homeowners depending on you to help them rebuild?

It takes many different ingredients to make a good gumbo. The same can be said about making good public policy -- especially when we want to create a just and equitable recovery for the Gulf Coast. Some of the key ingredients are coming together this week on Capitol Hill. Delegations of Hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors are in Washington, D.C. to share their experiences and insights with policymakers, the press, and the national organizations that want to help.

Earlier this year, Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Barney Frank (D-MA) held field hearings in the Gulf Coast region. They learned that one of the greatest unmet needs was affordable housing -- an essential first ingredient for recovery. Out of that testimony, they drafted and passed the Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery Act (H.R. 1227). The Senate companion bill, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act (S. 1668), introduced by Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT), authorizes even more resources that would help renters and public housing residents to return home. But the bill is stuck in committee. A hearing was held earlier today thanks to the presence of the Gulf Coast delegation. They are helping to get things cooking again!

Nobody knows how to fix a good gumbo better than folks from the region. We need to follow their directions and help stir the pot. Let's make the phones ring off the hook while the Gulf Coast delegation is on Capitol Hill. Take action with UUSC today!

Yesterday, it was hard to reach several of our partners in Louisiana involved with disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, because they were all on buses going to another kind of disaster response -- the rally against the racism and injustice in Jena. UU ministers and congregants from Baton Rouge and New Orleans were also on buses to Jena.

Jena is a small town in Louisiana that reminds those of us who need reminding that racism still runs deep in our country. A tree in one of Jena's schoolyards was known as a "whites-only tree." Some African American students asked the principal if they could sit under that tree. He said yes and they did. The next day, three white students hung nooses from that tree in the school colors. They got a three-day suspension and the school superintendent called it "a prank. " Some prank. The racial tension mounted quickly over the next several months.

According to the Color of Change website, as racial tensions mounted, threats of violence were made against African American students, some of which were carried out. A black student was beaten up by white students at a party. The next day, black students at a convenience store were threatened by a young white man with a shotgun, but the district attorney took no action.

Then a white student, who had been a vocal supporter of the students who hung the nooses, taunted the black student who was beaten up at the off-campus party, allegedly using the "n-word" to refer to several other African American students. He was beaten up by African American students. In this case, action was swift: six African American teens were arrested and initially charged with aggravated battery and intent to kill. Although the white youth had been bloodied and bruised, he did not sustain serious injuries. The bail posted for the six African American teenagers ranged from $90,000 to $138,000. (Bill Quigley relates the whole story in Truth Out.)

The mass demonstration in Jena yesterday was held to protest the double standards of justice for whites and blacks. Mychall Ball, the first student tried, was defended by a public defender to an all-white jury, and called by a white prosecutor. The trial was presided over by a white judge. The public defender presented no evidence and called no witnesses in defense of his client, who was summarily sentenced to 22 years in jail. The case was later thrown out of court by another judge because Ball was a minor and could not be tried as an adult. Nonetheless, he is still in jail, where he has been held since December 2006. The other young men involved in this matter also remain in jail -- none of them have yet to be tried, but their lives are being ruined as day after day goes by while their families struggle to raise the exorbitant bails.

My first response was: how can this be happening? But one of our partners said to me, "I am surprised that you are surprised, particularly after all you have seen down here after the hurricane." She was telling me that to be surprised is a luxury, while for her it is a bitter reality. She was right. This is not a time for surprise, only outrage.

Anniversaries are filled with memories. For me, it's been 25 years since I moved away from New Orleans and this was my first time back since the brutal storm. I'd come with my colleagues to commemorate the second anniversary of Katrina and to meet our partners who are rebuilding their lives and their communities.

On our first day, we attended the "Recovery and Renewal for the Gulf Coast" policy conference held at Dillard University. The goals for the day were to close the "access gap" between those who know the Gulf Coast's reality and national policymakers, and to go beyond telling individual stories to analyze public policies and their impact.

Unfortunately, few policymakers attended. The ones who did were those who have already been active on Capitol Hill on Gulf Coast recovery -- Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA), Bill Jefferson (D-LA), and Bennie Thompson (D-MS). Senator Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) chair sat empty throughout the afternoon, and no one representing the governor's office, the state house, FEMA, or HUD attended. None of the presidential candidates were to be found.

They missed hearing an earful.

Local advocates described how, by failing to deliver the necessary resources, the Road Home program has not lived up to its name. Congress has appropriated money, but it doesn't seem to get to those most in need. When UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast partner Tyrone Edwards got his chance to speak, he gave the policymakers and the audience a real civics lesson. He said, "putting FEMA in charge of investigating the toxic trailers is like putting Dracula in charge of the bloodbank!" One advocate from Mississippi had grown so frustrated with the state's insurance policies that he is now running for state insurance commissioner. These are folks who are not complaining about the obstacles they face; they are doing everything in their power to fix them.

Our second day started with a sunrise service in Waveland, Miss. This community took a direct hit when Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, and was literally blown off the map. The STEPS Coalition, a UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast partner, organized an inspiring interfaith, multicultural service to reflect on their losses and to plant a Magnolia tree to sustain their hope in the future. It was fitting that we began in darkness and moved into the light.

We ended our day 15 hours later at another memorial service organized by our friend Tyrone Edwards and the Zion Travelers Cooperative in Plaquemines Parish. The gathering was held in a church restored by the community with the help of Unitarian Universalist volunteers and support. Martha Thompson, UUSC's Rights in Humanitarian Crises program manager, and UUSC President Charlie Clements were given certificates of appreciation and asked to say a few words to the standing room-only crowd.

It was hard to compete with the six Baptist ministers who also preached that night, but the sentiments were clear: whatever help we have been to this community in no way compares to the inspiration they are to all of us.