INSTITUTE’S BRADLEY CENTER for PHILANTHROPY and CIVIC RENEWAL Presents a Discussion Of

— EDITED TRANSCRIPT—

HUDSON INSTITUTE’s BRADLEY CENTER FOR PHILANTHROPY AND CIVIC RENEWAL presents a discussion of

IN THE

Wednesday, September 20, 2006 • 12:00―2:00 p.m. The Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center • Hudson Institute, 1015 15th St., N.W., Ste. 600

Without doubt, Hurricane Katrina highlighted the deficiencies of many American public institutions. This story has dominated the national headlines. But it’s also clear that America’s tradition of voluntarism and civic renewal—embodied in federal and state service programs as well as in local, grassroots, often faith-based groups—came through the storm with its reputation intact, if not enhanced. On September 20, 2006, Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal brought some of the leaders of the service communities up from the Gulf Coast to tell the stories one doesn’t get from the news media. Panelists included MALCOLM JONES , city attorney for Pass Christian, Miss., DIANN PAYNE of the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service, KEVIN BROWN of the Trinity Christian Community in New Orleans, KIMBERLY REESE , director of service learning at Xavier University, New Orleans, and NOAH HOPKINS , team leader of AmeriCorps*NCCC in St. Bernard Parish, La. The Bradley Center’s own WILLIAM SCHAMBRA served as the discussion’s moderator.

PROGRAM 11:45 a.m. Registration, lunch buffet 12:00 p.m. Welcome and panel discussion 12:45 Question-and-answer session 2:00 Adjournment

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING AND EDITED BY KRISTA SHAFFER. To request further information on this event or the Bradley Center, please contact Hudson Institute at (202) 974-2424 or e- mail Krista Shaffer at [email protected] .

HUDSON INSTITUTE

1015 15th Street, N.W. 202.974.2400 Suite 600 202.974.2410 Fax Washington, DC 20005 http://pcr.hudson.org Panelist Biographies

Diann M. Payne has been executive director of Jackson County Civic Action Committee, Inc., since 1997. She was appointed to the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service by Governor Haley Barbour in October 2004 and serves on the Commission’s Volunteer Development Committee. She was also appointed by the Governor to serve on the Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal. Payne has been a member and chair of the board of directors of the Southeast Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross. She continues to represent Mississippi on the Southeast Area Regional Resource Council of the American Red Cross, and also chairs the Volunteer Awards and Recognition Committee. She is a member of the executive committee of Rebuild Jackson County, the long term recovery committee for Jackson County. She serves on the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce, chairing the Education Issues Group

A native New Orleanian, Kevin Brown returned to the city after pursuing a career elsewhere in social services and became executive director of Trinity Christian Community (TCC). His ventures include teaching entrepreneurship education to at-risk youth, running after-school activities, and organizing community-wide programs to target needy families and disadvantaged youth in New Orleans’ inner city. Brown is the author of several books, including The Quest: A Self-Discovery Workbook for Teens , Setting New Boundaries: Devotions for those in Recovery , and You Take over God, I Can’t Handle It: Devotions for Teens in Recovery . He is also chaplain to the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets. Along with most New Orleanians, Kevin and his family were victims of the flood following Hurricane Katrina. They are very active in the rebuilding efforts; since Katrina, Brown helped secure a $1.8 million dollar federal grant to place AmeriCorps members strategically throughout the city to provided relief, aid in recovery work and rebuilding assistance to those most in need. Currently TCC is exceeding goals and is on track to return $8 million to the economy.

Kimberly Reese is assistant dean of students at Xavier University of Louisiana, and director of Xavier’s Center for Student Leadership and Service, which oversees the university’s efforts to engage student and community volunteers in restoring Xavier University and the most damaged neighborhoods in the greater New Orleans area. She also serves as a member of Women of the Storm, a diverse network of South Louisiana women in leadership positions organized to bring legislative and public attention to the needs of stricken areas, the Gert Town (a historic New Orleans neighborhood) Revival Board, and the Historic 7th Ward Neighborhood Improvement Association. She also volunteers her time with a local high school football booster club.

Noah Hopkins first joined AmeriCorps*NCCC as a corps member in the Fall of 2001. After completing his undergraduate studies, Hopkins went on to become a team leader for the AmeriCorps*NCCC, Southeast Campus, based in Charleston, SC. He has been on a five week assignment at the Camp Hope Volunteer Center in St. Bernard Parish, LA, where he and his team managed camp operations and coordinated the “home gutting” operation for the parish. His team’s next assignment is to join Habitat for Humanity to build homes in Waveland, Mississippi.

Malcolm Jones is the city attorney in Pass Christian, MS. At the time Hurricane Katrina struck, he was also serving as acting mayor, due to the ill health of the elected mayor.

2 FEATURED RESOURCES , ORGANIZATIONS , AND CONTACTS

Resources

National Service: Hope and Help in the Gulf , a video created by the Corporation for National and Community Service. 2006. Running time: 3 minutes. Online at: http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/katrina_video.asp

National Service Responds: The Power of Help and Hope after Katrina (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2006), 32 pages. This and other publications of the Corporation on the response to Hurricane Katrina can be found online at http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/katrina.asp .

After Katrina: Rebuilding Xavier University of Louisiana , a viewbook created by Xavier University (2006). Online at: http://www.xula.edu/institutional-advancement/RebuildingXU.pdf (PDF, 3.76 MB).

The New Orleans Times-Picayune – your source for information on local meetings and events Hurricane special section online at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/ . A section labeled “From the Times-Picayune ” lists local happenings, meetings, and number/web sites.

Nonprofit Central of Greater New Orleans hosts Unified Nonprofits for weekly meetings on the needs of the area’s nonprofit organizations involved in recovery and rebuilding. Meetings take place Mondays from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. For more information (and to sign up for their e- mail discussion list), visit them online at http://nonprofit-central.org/ or call 504-309-2081 x311 or 504-491-7190.

Weathering the Storm: the Role of Local Nonprofits in the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort by Tony Pipa, a publication of Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program (NSPP, 2006). Online at http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/newsletter1525/newsletter_show.htm?doc_id=377736 or http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/Nonprofits_and_Katrina.pdf (PDF, 633 KB)

3 Organizations and Contacts: Speakers’ Recommendations: To Volunteer or Make a Donation…

Malcolm Jones CONTACT INFORMATION?

Diann Payne • Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service , “Volunteer Central,” online at http://www.mcvs.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=130&Itemid=167 • Unified Nonprofits , meets every Monday at Nonprofit Central of Greater New Orleans from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. Great resource for foundation program officers! For details, see http://nonprofit-central.org/ or call 504-309-2081 x311 or 504-491-7190. • Governor’s Commission – Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal (Mississippi), online at http://www.governorscommission.com/ also • Habitat for Humanity , online at http://www.habitat.org/disaster/OHD/default.aspx • AmeriCares , online at http://www.americares.org . Katrina Relief contact with AmeriCares: Liza Cowan , tel. 203-434-6202, e-mail: [email protected]

Kevin Brown • Trinity Christian Community , online at http://www.trinitychristiancommunity.org/ CONTACT INFORMATION HERE • Phoenix of New Orleans , online at http://www.pnola.org/ • Mardi Gras Service Corps , online at http://www.bottletreeproductions.com/mgsc/ also • Samaritan’s Purse , online at http://www.samaritanspurse.org/

Kimberly Reese • I-10 Witness.com , a community based story collective formed to document the myriad tales emerging from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Online at http://www.i10witness.com/ . • Center for Student Leadership & Service , Xavier University of Louisiana, online at http://www.xula.edu/leadership-service/index.html . CONTACT INFORMATION?

Noah Hopkins • AmeriCorps , online at http://www.americorps.gov/ • Camp Hope , online at http://www.camphopeonline.com/ • AmeriCorps Alums , online at http://www.lifetimeofservice.org/ , now under the stewardship of Hands On Network , online at http://www.handsonnetwork.org/ • New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity , online at http://www.habitat-nola.org/ OTHERS, CONTACT INFORMATION?

4 PROCEEDINGS

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: My name is Bill Schambra, and on behalf of Krista Shaffer and myself, welcome to the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at Hudson Institute. Those of you who are familiar with our programs, this program will be a bit different. Normally, we have a conversation – an often spirited conversation – about issues of public policy at usually a pretty hifalutin level of abstraction and detachment from the real world. But one of my roles is to serve on the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, SeniorCorps, Learn and Serve America, NCCC, and a number of other service programs that make up the constellation of federally funded service organizations. And in that capacity several of us went down to the Gulf Coast a couple of weeks ago for about forty-eight hours. When we were down there, we heard the voices of some folks who had survived the storm and were struggling to rebuild their communities. And I knew as soon as I heard them that these were voices that had to be heard in Washington.

This group has just come from a presentation to the board of directors of the Corporation, and I know that they will now bring the same message here that we heard there of tremendous inspiration and incredible hope – I guess there’s no other way to put it. It is a message of hope.

The Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, like all organizations dealing with civic renewal, typically frets about how we can get Americans in general and young people in particular engaged in civic affairs. It seems to be so hard to tear people away from television or whatever trivial entertainments they’re engaged in and get them to pay attention to civic affairs. Service seems to be something that people do, typically in their spare time, when nothing else is urgent. If we can invent some particularly interesting program, maybe people will get engaged – that’s the way we usually think about these things.

But what I think we saw on the Gulf Coast was civic renewal in the darkest hour of communities’ lives. It isn’t something that you do in your spare time. It isn’t something that you do with the energy you have left over. These are moments in human life of banding together as a community in private, civil-society organizations and sort of throwing yourselves against the insurmountable odds. Civil society is all you have in those moments.

As we well know, many of the megastructures of American society, public and private, performed very badly in the Katrina situation. You’re about to hear some of the stories that you didn’t hear in those rather ghastly accounts of poor behavior by many public institutions. The folks you’ll hear today I think will tell you the stories of some institutions that performed rather well – many of them private sector, many of them small, faith-based organizations. And many of them supported those conservatives who have reservations about the effect of national service and federal funding for national service on small, voluntary associations. I think you will find that in these cases, federal funding did not diminish civic energy – let me put it that way, and I will let the folks here explain what an incredible understatement that is.

We’re going to hear first from Malcolm Jones, who is a lifelong resident of Pass Christian, Mississippi, and had been a part-time city attorney for nearly twenty years when Hurricane Katrina struck. He began to work fulltime for his city, continuing as city attorney and taking on

5 the responsibilities of acting mayor and chief administrator to help in the recovery. If you followed the news during and after Hurricane Katrina, you know what happened to Pass Christian, and you’ll hear more about that momentarily.

Diann Payne is executive director of the Jackson County Civic Action Committee of Mississippi. She was appointed to the Mississippi Commission on Volunteer Service by Governor Haley Barbour in 2004 and she was also appointed by the governor to serve on the governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal.

Kevin Brown is director of Trinity Christian Community, which is a Christian community agency that serves New Orleans in numerous capacities, and he is also chaplain to the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets.

Kimberly Reese is assistant dean of students at Xavier University of Louisiana and director of Xavier’s Center for Student Leadership and Service, which oversees the university’s efforts to engage student and community volunteers in restoring Xavier University and the most damaged neighborhoods in Greater New Orleans.

And Noah Hopkins is currently a team leader for the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC, or “N-Triple-C”) Southeast Campus, based in Charleston, SC. He has just completed a five week assigned at the Camp Hope volunteer center in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana – and if you watched the news, you know how badly hurt St. Bernard Parish was. He and his team managed camp operations and coordinated the home-gutting operation for the parish.

So let us start with Mr. Jones.

MALCOLM JONES: I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Hurricane Katrina revealed nature at its worst. I actually don’t think that Katrina set its course to come destroy my community and the people’s lives there. I think it was just nature doing what nature does. But it came, and it did great destruction.

Another thing it revealed was a great victory for society and people – what people could do in unbelievably stressful moments. I came from a community of 6,500 people. We were part of a greater metropolitan area of 400,000. We’re actually right on the Gulf Coast – right on the water. The storm destroyed 75 percent of all homes in the community and all of the businesses. Sixteen of nineteen police cars were destroyed. All of the fire trucks, all of the public works equipment, every single public facility except for one building – a fire station – were destroyed. We held our first public meeting after the storm under the water tower – outside. We had no paper. We had no electricity. We had no telephone service. We had no way to communicate with the outside. But what we did have were people who, although they were emotionally devastated, were of great spirit. And we attempted to reform our community.

And what happened was something that I did not expect. We, in this community that I live in and generally in South Mississippi and throughout Mississippi, are people who are self-starting type souls who will be out there building out, building back, not looking for help, not asking for help.

6 But a lot of help came. A lot of people showed up and were committed. There weren’t just there to experience this historical event; they were there to actually help.

One of the groups that came I had no idea about before: AmeriCorps and NCCC. A man showed up – and you have to understand, now, that I’m in a situation where I’m trying to reestablish buildings. City functions are in trailers. We’re trying to get electricity on. We’ve got crews out searching for dead bodies. We have folks getting hurt left and right trying to return to the area. I’m in the process of setting up military road blocks to keep people from coming back in and becoming more hurt. Constantino wire is being put up. It’s not a life that I thought I would live. But it was amazing and surreal every day. You get up and work twenty hours and you hope to get some rest, and you do it again – you do it every day, every day, every day. And we did that for at least forty-five days before we took a breath. Seven days a week.

But the story is not so much about me or what was going on so much as it is about what happened next. The people who showed up from AmeriCorps and NCCC and Vista and a whole bunch of faith-based organizations really came to help. And what I didn’t know at the time was, not only was it nice to have them, but it was critical, and it was necessary, and it had to be at that moment. We were in a community that really was about to slip away. There was a moment there when I was not sure we would be able to recover. If you have ever lost your home, imagine losing your town, your city. And so, at a moment when we were trying to pull bodies from wreckage and trying to restore city services, and trying to do other things we never dreamed we could do, someone else showed up to help.

Other people showed up to help, too. FEMA sent somebody in, and we have a “MEMA” (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) in our state, and other agencies. They showed up, they tried to help, they tried to offer help, but they would come and they would go. AmeriCorps showed up, and they stayed, and they stayed, and they stayed. And I’m proud to tell you that a year later, they’re still there, and they’ve committed to stay longer.

Why is that? Well, for a couple of reasons, I think. One is, they see a great need – a great need that exists even today. We had lots of homes destroyed, and we had to clean up debris from that. We just finished that – at least the initial stage of that – on August 28, this year. I personally signed my name to demolish nine hundred buildings and homes that were unlivable – homes of people I know well. It needed to be done, and people recognized that it had to be done, but it was just emotionally gut-wrenching. All the way through to today – we had a video that they showed earlier, and I almost couldn’t speak because it just got to me. (View it online at http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/katrina_video.asp .)

What I’m here to tell you is that volunteer service, when it’s dedicated and it’s well prepared and it’s well organized, at a time like this is not a nice thing to do. It’s a necessary thing to do. It’s important. If you’re out there and we’re out there trying to do the things we normally do, we need someone to prop us up, to fill in, to supplement. We need someone to help us organize things we’ve never had to organize before. I’ve never put together a volunteer base camp. I’ve never worried about trying to deal with hundreds of volunteers coming in, and how to feed them and place them in work environments and do it safely and achieve goals. We just didn’t have – and you know, at the same time I’m trying to build trailers and get city functions back online and

7 create temporary sewer systems and all sorts of things. You need the extra help. You need it badly. It’s critical. And so I’m very proud to say that we had great help. It was very effective. It was a great use of funding to do something that you actually saw happen right in front of you.

Katrina did a lot of things, but the one thing it did was create a great and glorious opportunity for people to serve. Many times we work and we serve and sometimes we serve in our work. But when you match someone who is ready to serve and is able to do so well with someone who is in great need, it is a moment that is so magical and so great that you almost cannot catch your breath. You won’t get those opportunities many times in your life, and if you do, breath it all in right there, and hope that you imprint it forever, because it’s fantastic.

Thank you.

DIANN PAYNE: Thank you all, and I would also like to thank the Bradley Center for this opportunity to speak today. I’d like to underscore something that Malcolm talked about, and that is the enormity of Katrina. For those of you who have not been to the Coast, you cannot comprehend the destruction and the devastation. When the governor (of Mississippi) convened his appointees to Jackson to talk about the recovery effort and where we were and where we need to still go, one of the points that he made was that if you did not consider New Orleans but just looked at the Mississippi Gulf Coast alone, the destruction and the devastation there, it would still be the single-largest disaster in America’s history. Conversely, if you discounted Mississippi and just looked at the destruction and devastation in New Orleans, it would still be the single-largest disaster in America’s history. That is just powerful; it shows you how devastating and destructive that storm really was.

Pascagoula, where I am, is about sixty miles east of Pass Christian, where Malcolm is. The storm surge sixty miles away was thirty-three feet; where we were, it was twenty-one feet. And that water came crashing down on houses and communities. In Pascagoula alone, which is in Jackson County, 95 percent of the homes and businesses received water – and that is the county seat and the hub of commerce and activity for our county. And it was severely impaired – destroyed, really.

The other thing we need to say to people who haven’t been there and who think that they don’t need to come, FEMA has determined that the recovery period for Mississippi alone is twelve years. We’re just fourteen months out from the storm.

Malcolm talked about the relief work of the faith-based organizations. One of the ways and the reasons that I think they were most effective is because they came in and they just got the job done. The churches became warehouses. We shared pews with Pampers and detergent and mops and brooms for months and months and months – because that was what we needed to do at that time, and we were willing to do it. And I’ve said often that Katrina has brought an understanding of Mississippi, because the perception of Mississippi is not like the experience that scores of volunteers and other organizations have had. They’ve seen the spirit of the people who are thankful and grateful, and we work together to rebuild our communities all along the coast. I don’t think that spirit exists anywhere else in the country, and so Katrina brought that opportunity for us to show really what Mississippi is about, and I said earlier that as part of our

8 work with the governor’s commission, and the scores of volunteers, urban planners, and architects who came down to help us chart a course and plan a vision for the state, they probably didn’t know that Mississippi bordered the Gulf Coast, and it was unknown. New Orleans, in contrast, is a four-hundred-year-old city and got a lot of publicity. And so a new word was created from those people: voluntourism. They came to volunteer their time and to help us decide where to go from here, and we know they’re going to be back in the future as tourists because we’re going to be a destination in the future.

We talk about what worked and what didn’t work, and certainly there is enough blame for all of us to pick up a wheelbarrow load of it. But there’s also opportunity to make a difference in this country. Some of the organizations that have been engaged in international work came to the coast, and they have the expertise and the experience in housing and problems after devastation because they’ve done this work internationally. And what better opportunity to engage than when we can do it domestically? We have the expertise right in this country to make a difference. And there’s still a great need and a lot of work to be done. I saw a friend here, Betty Weiss from ISC (Institute for Sustainable Communities) here in DC. They’ve done great work in Moss Point. And they’re continuing to do that – civic engagement. She has some meetings set up this week at CNF. They came in and provided services. And just scores and scores of people. But it’s still a long haul. And we want to – as the governor has said over and over – this is our opportunity in Mississippi to get it right. We want to do it better. After Camille, a lot of mistakes were make, and it’s a memory – it’s a faded memory. But with Katrina, we want to go forward with a plan and a vision, to really make Mississippi bigger and better than it has ever been. And to do that, we still need the help and support of the faith-based organizations and other nonprofits to make that happen. We’re fourteen months out, so that puts us about twelve and a half years away from full recovery.

KEVIN BROWN: How do you summarize the most traumatic year of your life in a way that is both poignant and tells the story effectively and gets the point across? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. But I’m going to try.

On August 29, my life was changed forever. I had talked for years with my wife and family about moving into the inner city of New Orleans, the city that I grew up in and love, to live in the heart of the city and to change it from within. My wife and I made our home in Chicago, and I was a psychotherapist and radio talk show host and author – a very successful one, I might add. And for the first ten years of our marriage, when I talked about New Orleans, my wife looked at me and said, “Sure – someday!” But then we did move to New Orleans, to the inner city. And Katrina wiped us out.

If you’re a believer of the things I believe in as a Christian, you shake your fist at God and say, “You jerk! Why did you do this to me?” It’s a challenge to understand why bad things happen to good people. But I will say that out of adversity comes strength, and that is the story of my past year. I have emerged much stronger, and my organization has emerged much stronger. And hopefully our cities and our coast will be much stronger.

We planted gardens the day before the storm. We were going to place strategically gardens throughout the city so that the poor with whom we worked could for an entire growing season

9 have all the vegetables they needed. Now it sounds stupid. But at the time it made sense: Let’s take care of the needs of the poor! Hurricanes come and go all the time. They rarely have the impact that a Katrina had. How could we have known? If I had to evacuate every single time hurricanes happened, I’d be spending all of my salary on hotel rooms during that season. So we take them with a grain of salt. And this one we almost didn’t evacuate for. But this was the big one. In retrospect, I wish I would have spent the time evacuating people in the vans that we lost in the storm.

We tried to get back right away because that’s what guys like me – community organizers – do. We get back in and we fix things. The militia wouldn’t let us in. They met us at the outskirts of the city with M16s and Humvees and turned us away. Meanwhile, people I knew drowned. I could have great things in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t get back in – which only fueled my desire to serve and rebuild afterwards. In fact, the longer I was away, the more passionate I became.

We finally snuck in using forged papers – really! It was like Lebanon. It was like the old Soviet Union, passing through checkpoints with papers. Schutzpasses. We got into the city through nefarious means. And we made it in. And we gutted our house. And the first thing we realized that our community center was wiped out, because I couldn’t get back for the first several weeks. I couldn’t get back by boat because they wouldn’t let us back there. I couldn’t get back by car because the water was too high. And so we knew that we weren’t going to be in our office for a long time. And so we got volunteers to come in and we fixed up our house, and my staff works in the basement of my house to this day.

Now, national service. So the Corporation for National and Community Service comes down and says, “Why not take one hundred members?” Now a hundred members is a $1.8 million endeavor. The year prior to Katrina, by budget had been $350,000. Imagine going from $350,000 to $1.8 million at a time when your house is wiped out, your staff is gone, and there is no housing to house these members. The task was daunting. But for some reason, the corporation believed in our small grassroots, faith-based organization. And they said, “No – we really want you to do this thing.” And after five or six times, I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

And so we began to find partners – partners like Light City Church in the Lower Ninth Ward, a church that lost everything but stepped up to become one of our partners. The corporation now has about twenty-two members down there, serving, gutting houses, and rebuilding the Ninth Ward. Partners like Mardi Gras Service Corps (online at http://www.bottletreeproductions.com/mgsc/ ), started by a Tulane students who was so impacted that he knew he had to do something, and so he took a bunch of our members and began working in other neighborhoods. Partners like Phoenix of New Orleans (online at http://www.pnola.org/ ), rising from the ashes. Paul Ikemire, a medical student, runs an AmeriCorps program in the inner city between classes . (He also chairs the board of Phoenix of New Orleans.) So we put together these site partners and others – I mentioned three but there’s more. And then we began calling everyone we knew across the country and saying, “We need help. We have no finances because everybody’s gone, and we also have no place to put people. But we need volunteers, so send them anyway.” And they did.

10 Volunteers began to come. All of our site partners found volunteers, and we found volunteers. We put them up in places like our community center, where the basement was gutted but the upstairs had minimal damage – even though the roof had blown off. We put the roof on early. And so with no ceiling, and a cat living in the attic, people lived on makeshift bunk beds in this building. They cooked on propane grills. They put their food in ice chests – although we had to go from place to place to place to place before we finally found a place that was open and sold ice. And they were sold out! But finally, we found ice. We put up a tent in our parking lot to at least have something to operate under – we put up one of those big, circus big-tops. And we began putting relief supplies under the tent. And people continued to come.

We learned all about house-gutting and mold remediation. And I’m telling you, you should see some of these AmeriCorps members. Pardon me – I’m a Southern gentleman, but I’ll be sexist for one moment: You should have seen the, um, really prissy young women who on weekend were dressed to the nines. On the weekdays, they are like machines. They look at a house and they say, “Man, whoever gutted that house did a terrible job. They didn’t pull those nails. There’s stuff left over there. Look at the insulation!” And they go in, and when they leave a house, it’s ready to be rebuilt.

And the guys do a pretty good job, too.

At last count – and this is as of August 15 – the return on investment is this: I was given $1.8 million. We will not spend all of that money, because we’ve been very frugal and we’ve gotten the job done for less using lots of volunteers. But if you assume a price of $10 per square foot to gut and remediate mold in a house – that’s a fair price – and assuming the average house is about 2,000 square feet, then the gutting and mold remediation on the 321 houses that we have done would come up to $6,420,000. Now assuming that one person from each of those homes returned home to a minimal salary of $20,000 a year – lest you think I’m inflating the numbers – you’d have 321 people at $20,000 a year, and that’d be another $6,420,000. Now at $17 per hour, our 63,792.75 volunteer hours would net another $1,084,476.75. So only including three of our service activities, the total return on our $1.8 million – which we will not spend – will be $13,924,476.75. That doesn’t include house-to-house surveying, community mapping, or the goods and service we’ve brought to the mix – things like personal care items, furniture, and those kinds of things that we gave away from under our big top. This is one of the greatest untold stories of the storm, this national service thing, people showing up and building the capacity of organizations like mine.

Now, my staff, mind you, seven of them were homeless. We’re back in our house, and one other women is back in her house. So four remain homeless. And yet they continue to run this organization. It’s an amazing story. Earl Williams, my financial guy, fell of a roof while trying to help somebody do their roof. He broke his jaw and his wrist. Yet he got up and came back to work. Turner lost the only house she had ever owned and also lost her husband to divorce, but continues as our training person. John Paul and Rosslyn Bartley had just bought a house – a house that we had rehabbed in the community. It was a crack house. We bought it, fixed it up, and sold it to a first-time homebuyer family who now works for me. Their house was wiped out three months after they had bought it. And yet John Paul and Rosslyn show up for work every day. And among our members – we have one member, Chantall Dunn, who walked through the

11 Upper Ninth Ward with her belongings over her head and water up to her neck for miles to get to the Superdome only to experience what you know she experienced in the Superdome. Chantall came back and every day she smiles as she guts out other people’s homes while she lives in a FEMA trailer in our backyard.

By the way, I might add that I was given three trailers, one by FEMA and two by Samaritan’s Purse, a faith-based organization out of Boone, North Carolina (and online at http://www.samaritanspurse.org/ ). I had those two trailers, the Samaritan’s Purse trailers, hooked up within two weeks of their delivery. It was seven months before my FEMA trailer was hooked up. It sat on my property for seven months. If they had just given me the keys and said, “You take over – you do it,” I could have had that thing hooked up in weeks and it would have been used. So it sat there on my property rotting for seven months. It was a very frustrating experience for me, as you can tell.

These people live in trailers: Brian Ridley, who lost all of his musical equipment. He is a musician. He went back to Wisconsin and said, “I’m never coming back.” But this whole thing just gripped him, and he came back to serve as an AmeriCorps member in our community. He lives in a Samaritan’s Purse trailer. And others – who are similarly filled with passion because of this thing and have come back to serve. We’ve had 2,200 plus volunteers over the course of the last year. It has been an amazing thing that has happened.

Let me say that without national service, we would not have accomplished this thing. Without that boost, that capacity-building, and without their believing is us – believing that this little inner-city, faith-based organization could do something on a grander scale. We would have done some great things, but not nearly as much as we did. And we wouldn’t have been able to generate nearly the number of volunteers.

This past year has taught us a lot. One of the things is, don’t plant gardens when you’re expecting a major storm. But it also taught us that we are more resilient, and stronger, and capable of far more than we know.

Thank you.

KIMBERLY REESE: On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came through the city of New Orleans. I was there, in the residence hall with some Xavier students who stayed because, as Kevin mentioned, we don’t really leave for hurricanes. We left for the hurricane before, Hurricane Ivan (September 2004), and it took us eight hours to get to Slidell. Slidell is maybe sixty miles from New Orleans. And we evacuated with students at that point. So for this hurricane, students were not enthused about leaving, and many of them didn’t leave or arranged transportation too late, and so they were in the residence hall. I don’t know if it’s fortunate or unfortunate, but I’m part of essential staff, and so I had to stay. I watched as my family packed up. One family member stayed behind with me, and stayed in the house while I stayed on campus.

And so I know that we survived the hurricane. And I was actually preparing to leave the next day; I said, “Oh, this is good. I’ll be gone the next day, and we can get back to life as normal.”

12 But when we woke up the next morning, water covered cars that had not been previously submerged, and there was a current to the water. When you grow up in New Orleans, you know flood water. Flood water is still, and you can sweep it out with a broom. This water was coming as if it was part of a body of water.

We heard from the radio that the levees were breached; the levees that the federal government had said would protect the city could not stand up to a category 3, at best, hurricane. And there was breach on top of breach on top of breach. And as a result, most of the city of New Orleans was under water.

A recent book called The Millennial Student describes the student who is now in college as increasingly skeptical of the political system. These students for the most part distrust our government. However, the millennial student is more involved in community service and volunteerism than any other group of students since the Baby Boomers. Millennial students are the students we now see in AmeriCorps NCCC, the very students whom the Corporation for National and Community Service mobilizes. And I say this not just because they’re a funder and we receive numerous grants from the corporation, but because it’s true: The one federal agency that got it right was the Corporation for National and Community Service.

We were looking for FEMA and even wondering what other nonprofits were doing. The Corporation for National and Community Service was there from the beginning. They were there when Xavier didn’t know what our campus would look like; we didn’t know if we would have classroom space; we didn’t know anything, really – except that we needed to get these buildings up and running; we hadn’t received any insurance money; and $50 million would have to come from the university’s general fund to get the university up and running by January. The Corporation was there saying, “We have AmeriCorps NCCC students who can help you with this process. And when you’re looking at people who are not only charged with getting a business up and running, but also their lives, and someone is telling you, “We have volunteers,” you’re thinking, “Yeah, right .” But they came through for us. I was familiar with AmeriCorps NCCC but never really had seen them in action. When they were finally deployed to Xavier University, they did wonders. They helped us gut homes that the university owned as well as homes that were in the local community, because these homes the university owned were where some of our staff people lived; they were home to offices – at one time my office, Volunteer Services. They were able to do a host of things – foodbanks, for one – for which the community had ooked to the university before Hurricane Katrina, and which the university could no longer do given our state at the time.

I think there are a lot of lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina. I think the power of volunteerism, the power of civic engagement – it’s what I do for a living, and so I always believed in it, but never before to this magnitude. Thousands of college students descended onto the city of New Orleans with no place to live – living in tents, living in a school close to the Lower Ninth Ward that had received damage on the first floor, but the second and third floors were available for living.

If you consider the concerns and distrust of the government of these “millennial students,” their experiences in New Orleans in many cases confirmed their worst suspicions. One year later in

13 New Orleans, my house is the only house on my block. Three trailers are on my property – one for myself, one for a family friend, and the other for my brother. My parents live in one room in my aunt’s house. They went from a 3,500-square-foot home to a single room they share with my seventeen-year-old brother. The CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) money that the federal government promised finally arrived in January. So I think that we as a country have to really look at Hurricane Katrina and ask ourselves some hard questions. How prepared are we to take care of citizens of our own country? I can tell you that we didn’t begin to receive federal assistance until our mayor – and if you followed the news stories, then you’re familiar with our mayor – was actually on the radio and, for lack of a better term, basically cursed the federal government and said, “Where are you? We need you!” and bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. And then we saw action. And for a city that definitely contributes with its gas and oil resources to this country and has the largest port by tonnage to the country, the response was unacceptable – except when you look at the movement of students around community service and volunteerism.

NOAH HOPKINS: I’m a millennial, and proud to be serving in this role: I’m a team leader with AmeriCorps’ probably highest profile program, called the National Civilian Community Corps, or NCCC (pronounced “n-triple-c”). We’ve borrowed those three “c’s” from another historic organization that did a lot of good work in this country in the previous century, and we’re proud to continue that legacy.

Most of the organizations we’ve been hearing about today have NCCC teams that are working with them, or volunteers from other AmeriCorps programs. We’re doing a lot in the Gulf right now. My particular role in that has been working in St. Bernard Parish, which as many of you know was heavily affected by the failed levees and the floodwaters that came in. There is a lot of damage down there. It’s pretty overwhelming, for those of you who have been down there. But we’re there to do something about it, and so my team has partnered with the parish government, there; we worked with their gutting and debris removal operations. Homeowners were given the opportunity to sign up with the parish and other faith-based organizations in that area to have their homes gutted – which has been a slow process considering the magnitude and the number of homes that need that service.

At some point after the storm – I don’t know when – FEMA had set up a volunteer camp, Camp Premier, to host volunteers and serve as a base camp for that gutting operation. There was a certain deadline that passed and the camp there had to be shut down, at which point several organizations got together and came up with a way to fill that void the closing of that camp would leave. The solution was Camp Hope (online at http://www.camphopeonline.com/ ). It was spearheaded by the parish government in partnership with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, another organization called Emergency Communities, which provided our meals and a distribution center for materials for the camp’s residents. At the beginning, the National Lead Network was also a partner, and they brought in volunteers from all around the country to help out and serve in the field.

When you put any number of organizations together on a project, it can be challenging to coordinate their efforts, their interests, and the stakes they have in that operations. That has definitely been true in Camp Hope. And so AmeriCorps NCCC, serving under the auspices of the parish and operating the camp, was charged with the task of balancing those interests, solving

14 those problems, and playing the political game that existed even down there, in the midst of chaos and destruction, in the recovery operation. Much of my time as a team leader on that project was spent in our operation center balancing different issues that came up at camp as well as out in the field.

We ran not only the operations in the volunteer camp, which hosted volunteers from all over the country, but also the gutting operations in the field – logistics, routing. I served with a team of about ten Corps members who had been trained for a week on gutting practices and our program’s safety procedures – what tools to use, what concerns to have, and how to arrive at a home, make sure it is safe to enter, and lead a team of volunteers in a gutting operation. Our Corps members were all between 18 and 24 years of age, all millennials. And they’re out there leading a variety of volunteers from all over the country, young and old. Volunteers came from New Orleans; they had heard about what we were doing and wanted to help out. And volunteers came from all points around the country and along the Gulf Coast; these were people who had not been exposed directly to the effects of the hurricane and the floods, but wanted to be a part of the recovery operation. One of the most profound experiences of working at this camp is actually getting to talk with and work with other volunteers, and the thing that you’re bound by is the desire to serve, the desire to help. It makes for some really interesting experiences.

Our responsibilities also included overseeing food preparation and food operations, and the facilities. You hear a lot of stories about our teams that went in and built community centers and volunteer centers and bunk-beds throughout the Gulf. We did that there as well. I would walk through the building about every day, and I would always see something new that somebody had put together. And a lot of those ideas were just ideas volunteers had about how to improve things. They saw a need and they addressed it. I had one volunteer who came down for a week, and on Sunday night after a weekend of orientation and preparation to spend the week gutting houses, she came to me ready to gather the phone numbers of tire shops. She had noticed the many flat tires we had on our tool trucks, which we used to cart tools around to different work sites for volunteers in the field, and she was ready to purchase whatever materials were necessary to make sure that we didn’t have that problem. So our greatest resource out in the field in that volunteer operation was our volunteers, not only for their labor but also for their ideas and perspective on how we can make things better.

NCCC was not only able to help bind these organizations in a common goal, but also help operate the camp itself pretty much for the parish, which had other obligations and was already stretched thin, just like many other municipal, parish, and state governments. So we filled that need for them, and we primarily ran that camp.

For me, it has been a powerful experience, to say the least. I served as a Corps member – and so I didn’t wear the green shirt, I wore the gray shirt, which you may have seen around – about four years ago. I had gone to college for a year and didn’t know what I wanted to study. I was having a lot of fun, but wanted to focus my interests before I spent all that money and time going to classes. So AmeriCorps and NCCC represented a great opportunity for me to get out a little bit, travel, meet some great people with a lot of good ideas, help out, and make a little bit of money for college. So it seemed like a perfect fit, and without a doubt in my mind, I applied and I was accepted and began my year.

The experiences we’re having as Corps members and team leaders in NCCC right now are very different from the experience that I had four years ago. Typically we work in a variety of service fields. We do environmental projects like working with national and state parks at exotic species removal; public safety projects; education projects like working with schools and mentoring, helping schools meet their needs. It is that diversity of projects and experiences that is key to a positive Corps member experience, or NCCC experience, I think. It was definitely key in my own experience, and it allowed me to identify my interests, academically, and I ended up returning to my university and studying geography, the environment, and anthropology. But it was my project that I had as a Corps member that led me to that.

And it gives a sense leadership. When we’re out in the field – and Camp Hope was the first project of the year for my Corps members – they handled it very smoothly. They were put with a team of volunteers and told to lead those volunteers – whereas their expectations were that I would always be with them as a team leader, that I would always be working on the same site and providing constant direction and support. For me to tell them, “Oh yeah – you’re going to be leading teams of volunteers.” I think it was a shock to some, but it was a very powerful experience and it really empowered them and I’ve seen them grow so much in the same way that I did four years ago, and developed leadership tools that I could put in my sack and take with me back to college and apply there. And so when I returned to college, I was very active in student organizations and worked very closely with the administration. I became active in government – perhaps I was mistrustful of the government, but my solution to that was to get involved as opposed to just sitting around talking about it, which I see so many other people do. I did a lot of environmental activism on my campus, and I chaired committees – in short, I did a lot of really cool things that I couldn’t have done if I hadn’t had that Corps member experience and hadn’t developed that sense of confidence in my ability to speak with people about my concerns and develop solutions that balanced the interests of the stakeholders involved. And my parents are really proud of me, and it will pay off later, in the end, but throughout all of that, I was always more excited about returning to NCCC as a team leader to help facilitate that same experience I had for other people. I was more excited about that than I ever was about graduating from college – but I had to finish college for my dad, and so I did that and I’m back, now, and the experience is different, and I knew it would be. When I applied, I knew we’d be focusing on disaster relief. That’s where the need is, and so that’s where the service is, and I’m happy to do it. And I think, despite the change in the NCCC format, it’s still a positive experience for everybody involved not only for the same reasons I had for applying, but also for the simple fact that you’re there for the common goal of simple service, of serving a need wherever there is a need – and right now, that need is in the Gulf, and so that’s where we are.

So just to wrap things up, I think NCCC has had a challenge filling their ranks because of uncertainties in funding and logistics. At the same time, I think we can work more closely to engage young people in recruiting in a format that is consistent with typical promotional styles – make it glamorous. That’s what young people like. For example, I describe NCCC as Road Rules (the reality television show) meets the Peace Corps. I think if we really show it that way to other young people, we can fill our ranks and recruit more young people to come down and help.

Thank you for having me here.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Thank you very much! I have a quick question for the panel, and then we’ll turn it over to the audience for questions and reactions.

Ours is a center for philanthropy and civic renewal, and so we have to ask a question about philanthropy and foundations. I’m certain, Kevin, that as an effective faith-based group with a track record and the fact that you’ve been in the city, you live in the same ZIP code where you work, and you’ve done incredible things for a number of years, foundations must be tripping all over themselves to help you in your work. And Diann, you and I have had a conversation earlier about a foundation and its approach to the disaster situation. But first, Kevin, why don’t you describe how difficult it has been to sort of keep the foundations away from your door along with the volunteers that you bring in.

KEVIN BROWN: I wish everybody believed in me as much as the Corporation for National and Community Service did this past go-around. We’ve been around for forty yearsl, so we’re not a fly-by-night organization. We were doing civil rights stuff back in the ’60s, my family. And so this organization that I’m part of has been around for a long time and has done a lot of great things. Despite that fact, I have had to beg and plead with organizations for help. Many of them discount us because our name is Trinity Christian Community – the word “Christian” automatically discounts me with about 50 percent of corporate funders. I won’t name any major corporations, but if you go on their web sites, you can see it: “We don’t fund religious organizations except those that serve a greater community purpose.” The challenge is that when your document comes in and says, “Trinity Christian Community,” you’re discounted points off and you don’t make it past the first cut.

One of those corporations did fund us this year – a national organization that does some kind of building stuff – I don’t want to identify them too much. But they came and did a portion of our building. And I had to prove five or six times that the purpose we serve as an organization was both secular and Christian, and yet the building that they would be fixing serves a secular purpose. In other words, for small, grassroots, especially faith-based organizations, there is a certain bias out there against us, and it is difficult to overcome it.

I’d like to break it down a little further. “Faith-based” is one bias. “Small, grassroots” is another bias. We obviously got the job done. The numbers prove it. And so we’re obviously capable of doing it. But there is a bias against us.

DIANN PAYNE: I have some thoughts on that. It’s being smart about the way you do business. We had an opposite experience in Mississippi. I think that’s probably due to the differences in the disasters, but AmeriCares – and I met Kurt Welling early on, and hadn’t heard of AmeriCares. But later on, what his position was: They actually hired someone to be their eyes and ears on the ground. It’s hard, in a storm, to determine who is most effective. You can be in business forty years – and we know a lot of companies that have been – and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you do good work. So I think they need to determine that. Some people have been around for a hundred years and that doesn’t mean that they do good work. But if you have someone on the ground, and they did that, and they granted seventy-five small grassroots organizations $25,000 each for administrative costs because the infrastructure was gone. Money

17 alone will not solve all problems, but it takes money to solve most. There’s no question about it. And they saw an effective way to do that, and Liza Cowan has been from New Orleans to – I’m surprised she doesn’t know you, because she has done a very good job of connecting grassroots organizations with AmeriCares Katrina Relief funds.

And also, leadership. We can’t discount leadership, and I think that’s one of the things that made the difference in Mississippi – that our leaders really stepped up. Good or bad, leadership is important in peaceful times, but it’s critical during time of disaster the magnitude of Katrina. Now, AmeriCares is going to fund the three long-term recovery committees. They’re going to give us a grant to fund positions. Because we need help. We need people out there doing some of the heavy lifting and some of the things – connecting people with services and helping people organize. It’s herding cats; there’s no question about it. Noah didn’t say it quite that way, but that’s really what it is. Because it’s hard to get your hands around it. So we have to do things differently.

And what we’ve also heard from funders, “That doesn’t fit my guidelines.” Well, it’s easier to change your guidelines than to undo Katrina. And we need to give some thought to that. And now that you know that (Kevin) is here, I’m sure he won’t have that problem anymore. But I think funders need to look at – and what I’ve said to foundations, and this is really key: Nonprofit leaders may have a good heart, but you still need some fiscal accountability – and I tell people this. I’m sure Kevin has it. But a lot of grassroots organizations do not. But if you fund a large nonprofit that has been in business for forty years, and they can’t bring to the table some grassroots organizations –and not only bring them into a collaborative relationship, but to also say, “Of this million dollars that you’re granting us, I’m going to give them $100,000. Because what happens is: The bigger organizations get the money, and organizations like Kevin’s do the work – with no money. That’s not novel, I don’t think. It’s common sense, and it’s the way we should go about business. Sure, we need oversight and accountability. But we also need people down in the trenches. And we need people at the table who understand where the people are who desperately need help – because those big nonprofits don’t live in the same ZIP code. And I think that should be our approach, and I think with that approach we’d be more effective.

MALCOLM JONES: I just going to say one thing from a small, local government standpoint: We really didn’t interact with foundations and nonprofits because before, we didn’t really think about trying to provide some of the things we’re doing now. We provided water and sewer services and fire trucks and police; now, we’re managing volunteer base camps and trying to create programs for people to rebuild their homes. So we’re in a new ball game, too. But I really would recommend that if you have an interest in doing this, and you’re really searching for it, you have to send somebody down into the field and link up with the groups, and then you can be pointed to the groups that can create the structure that you need to give you the accountability that you need. It doesn’t need to go ahead and work its way through several different levels. Go down to the dirt where the people are and start building from there. Don’t make it too complicated. Just lay it out simply and then find the people who can provide that to you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in city government; it can be just local citizen groups that are there, working.

18 WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: One hopeful sign, I think – I see Tim Walter in the back of the room, who manages the Association of Small Foundations (online at http://www.smallfoundations.org/ ). I suspect that small foundations might find working with groups like Kevin’s particularly interesting and appropriate. And on October 26-28, the Association of Small Foundations is actually meeting in New Orleans, which was – I know, because you scheduled this meeting quite a while ago – a real vote of confidence on your part, Tim, in the city of New Orleans. At the time that folks were canceling conferences, you all stayed with your conference venue, and that’s terrific.

Are there questions from the audience?

STEVEN CULBERTSON: I’m the president of Youth Service of America, and we spent the last twenty years trying to build this national service movement which you all are describing. And in the course of building it, of course, we’ve had to fight against political forces that wanted to dismantle it – political forces that zeroed out the budgets that supported that work you’re doing – literally zeroed them out, and they had to be reinstated by the US Senate. Right now we’re looking at a current administration that has cut Learn and Serve America from $43 million to $34 million. Learn and Serve America is the on-ramp to service – this is the service-learning programs for the nation’s school’s 1.5 million kids engaged in service-learning. As you know, this is behavior that, when you start young, and this is what the millennials have shown us, you do it for the rest of your life. The AmeriCorps budget has been cut $20 million. NCCC was completely zeroed out except for $5 million that was left to dismantle it. Obviously, the scenario of Katrina has changed some of that, and it looks like we’ve saved NCCC, but we’re still facing severe budget cuts at a time when I think what you’re proving is that national service matters . What you said, Malcolm, was exactly right: It’s not just nice, it’s critical.

I’m wondering if those of you who are funded could just mention one thing that national service has provided to you. Could you share with us a quick nugget of what national service has done that, if it had been zeroed out ten years ago when they wanted to, might not have happened otherwise?

And Bill, if you could help us with this: How can we take the story out to the world. Where’s C- SPAN today, and the media? This story is critical.

KIMBERLY REESE: Well, I’d have to talk about Learn and Serve America. Xavier has received numerous Learn and Serve grants, and I think that in New Orleans, had it been zeroed out, the term “service learning” would not have reached the schools and the other universities like it did, and it would not have the impact of service combined with academic learning and getting results from that – showing students practical applications of their knowledge.

KEVIN BROWN: 321 people would not have their houses gutted today, nor treated for mold.

DIANN PAYNE: We have a volunteer center that we had the ribbon-cutting for last Monday, which was 9/11. Habitat for Humanity needs volunteers to come into the region to build houses, and they didn’t have anywhere for their volunteers to stay. The NCCC team built 150 bunk beds, and because of the efforts of NCCC, we now have that volunteer center.

MALCOLM JONES: It’s a real hard thing for me to answer because although they do things like help us manage our volunteer base camp and help manage thousands and thousands of volunteers, its not what they’ve built that’s most important, I think. It’s what they have achieved. They’ve achieved hope in a desperate people. And you can build things – you can do that. But to build hope in me at a time when things are very desperate just from your great attitude and your positive influence on people and the commitment that you’re going to get it done, that is more important and bigger than anything else. And no, I can’t quantify it and put in a nice, thick report and send it to wherever the person is who is going to read it, but the point of it is: It’s big. It’s huge.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: C-SPAN isn’t here today because the ways of C-SPAN are mysterious. If you’ve ever tried to get C-SPAN to come to an event of yours during a congressional session, it’s almost impossible. If this had been Labor Day, we would have had three people in the audience, but C-SPAN would have been here because Congress would have been back in their districts. We’ll do our best to put a transcript of this discussion online afterwards, and I urge you all to link to it when it’s up so that we can get this conversation out to a larger audience.

The challenge is this, I think: We need to figure out just exactly what the story is, first of all. It’s much bigger, the story, I think. As a former board member of the Corporation for National and Community Service – my term expired at the beginning of this month (September 2006), so I can now speak freely – I confess, I had no idea what was going on down there until I went down there and saw it. And I agree with folks who say, “You cannot understand it until you see it.” It’s just impossible. You can’t understand what the devastation is, and you can’t understand what’s being done to rebuild communities and lives. But I think this is the make-or-break moment for national service.

The problem with national service has been that all too often, it looks like adults trying to get kids interested in projects that they really don’t much care about, but in which adults think it is important for children – young people – to become involved. It’s make-work, and it is obvious to young people that it’s nonsense, that’s it is just something to please daddy. But I think what you see – what I saw on the Gulf Coast with Noah and others, is that you don’t have to explain to them how important this is. An adult didn’t come up with this make-work project and try to persuade young people to become involved. People are serving their terms; they’re re-upping for another year; and then they’re trying to figure out any other way to stay down there, to do the work. That’s an extraordinary moment for national service, and I think the challenge will be to figure out how we develop and accelerate that message to a larger audience.

AMITY TRIPP: I’m the director of AmeriCorps Alums (online at http://www.lifetimeofservice.org/ ), and to add to Steve’s point, when you look at the power of national service, it grows exponentially when you add the people who are former members – and we encourage former members to continue their lifetime commitment to service that the pledge when they the oath of AmeriCorps.

20 AmeriCorps Alums is now under Hands On Network, a larger nonprofit (online at http://www.handsonnetwork.org/ ). We went down to the Gulf Coast when Katrina hit, and Hands On Network now has two sites down there, Hands On New Orleans and Hands On Gulf Coast in Biloxi. And we’ve worked a lot with Malcolm and with Diann and Marsha, and the Commission, and also actually with Timothy in New Orleans. We mobilized AmeriCorps Alums to do a month of service this past June, and because we’re newly reorganized under Hands On Network, I wasn’t sure how alums were going to take the call to service. We asked them to pay their own way, take their vacation, and go down and serve.

They came in droves. We provided the housing and the service opportunity and the food, and it was amazing, and affirmed for me that alumni really are out there to continue their service. It’s a powerful constituency to engage and to mobilize. What I wonder, from Noah and others, is if you have ideas about what is the most effective way to engage that group. They are trained – a lot of times, trained in disaster relief. NCCC alumni are by far the most hard-working and amazing. But NCCC is very organized in the Gulf. So how can we and how can I mobilize alumni to continue to serve down there. And also, we are planning the Hands On Network national conference to be in New Orleans in March 2007, so we’ll be back down with a big group then, but we want to continue to do it throughout the year.

NOAH HOPKINS: My old NCCC team just had our five-year reunion, and some of the things we did after our year are: Three of my teammates entered into MPA programs to go into public administration and work in policy, and in that sense they continued their service. Another team member just finished law school and she does pro bono work in New Jersey. Another team member works at an organic, community-supported farm in Minnesota, and has three interns working under him, and he teaches them about different practices and sustainability up there. So in their own way, each of my team members has taken their experience as a Corps member and advanced it. They’ve committed beyond our year of service – which is what we commit to as AmeriCorps members. They’ve given it their own flavor, and they’re doing things they really enjoy. And for us to get together – this was a few weeks ago – it was really special to see how each of us has continued on in our service. We debated doing some kind of service at our reunion to honor our commitment, in fact. But it was a sense of pride that we had in our experience and knowing that we accomplished such great things as a team that really brought us together.

I think that we can capitalize on that pride – and we’ve already been doing so – with the whole revamping of AmeriCorps Alums and our partnership with Hands On Network. I think it’s a really a powerful step in trying to create a movement out of service. These are people who have already committed one year out of their lives – for three, six, or nine months – with AmeriCorps, helping to perpetuate that sentiment in the future. That’s the only thing I can think of: Capitalizing on that pride in service.

DIANN PAYNE: I would like to just comment on that: The experience of AmeriCorps NCCC members allows them to understand, because of their training – and they’re young and can stay up until three or four in the morning, as Marsha and I say. They bring energy, their passion, and their expertise; after all, they’re highly educated. I would say to foundation program officers, that’s the group you need to look to. They can give you some good advice and recommendations.

21 For example, the person AmeriCares has on the ground, Liza Cowan, is an AmeriCorps alum and has a very impressive skill set.

MALCOLM JONES: It seems like we’re just trying to direct all this effort down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans because of what happened, and we are asking for that – and it’s difficult for me as a Mississippian to extend a hand and ask for help, let me tell you that. And I’m not uncommon, in the area I come from. But I want you to understand that you are doing something more than just helping me. You are creating in Noah and all the Noahs and all of those who are with Noah something that stays with them for the rest of their lives. How cool is that!

Second, you’re going ahead and you’re showing the rest of the world that your community, wherever it is, counts and you’ll take care of it. And more importantly, this will happen someplace else. Whether it will be another natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or some other thing – and we need to go ahead and learn from this, get it right, and have it ready so that when it happens, we’re ready to respond and take care of our country. I want to see Mississippi load up and drive up to wherever we’ve got to go – because we drive up from where we are to everywhere. But the point of it is, we will come. We will come to your home and your home, and we will help not because you came to us, but because that’s who we are. Let’s not forget what kind of a country we are, and what we’re about. Let’s create this environment to where it makes sense, because we have these organizations – I mean, there were a lot of things that were done wrong, but there were a lot of things that were done right, and we can learn from this experience now and create these minutemen all around the country. You know, we started off this country with people taking up their arms from their homes to defend the country. It was just regular citizens doing things. If they’re well organized and helping each other, the synergy and the power is tremendous. I mean, a big thing happened down there with the storm, but a bigger thing has been happening since August 29, 2005, and it will not be denied.

ALAN ABRAMSON: Thank you, Bill, and thanks to Hudson and the panel for this great discussion. I’m director of the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program (http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/ ), and this week we’re also holding an event on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in connection with a report that we commissioned by Tony Pipa. The report is called Weathering the Storm . It’s available on our web site at http://www.nonprofitresearch.org/usr_doc/Nonprofits_and_Katrina.pdf . And I think the themes of that report will really resonate with a lot of the discussion here, in particular, the emphasis on the importance of the work of local nonprofits and faith-based organizations in the relief effort.

So much of the attention has been on the big national organizations – the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the work of FEMA. I don’t want to take anything away from the great work that those organizations did, but what Tony Pipa’s report found is that a lot of the local groups – local nonprofits and faith-based groups of the kind we’ve been talking about here – really were doing a heck of a lot of the work themselves. What comes out of that report is, I think, two particularly important challenges, and I’m wondering if the panelists might have any ideas about how to address these issues.

22 The first challenges is how to get more funding to these local groups. There has been a little bit of discussion about that, but I wonder if there are any more ideas. So much of particularly the national funding flows to the bigger groups like Red Cross from individuals, foundations, and government. It’s easy for us as individuals in Washington, DC, to say, “Hey, who do we know who is doing work down there? Oh, the Red Cross.” And again, not to take anything away from the wonderful work they’re doing, but how do we get national money, including government money, to local groups? So that’s one challenge.

A second challenge has to do with coordination. While these groups were doing wonderful work, too, what came out of the some of the research that we were doing was that there really needed to be more coordination. People needed to consider how the various efforts fit together. You don’t want to go overboard; obviously, some of the strength is that there are all these groups out there in the communities. They know the neighborhoods. They’re finding people. And so you don’t want to coordinate them to death, but at the same time, you do need more coordination and a sense that that coordination mechanism was really missing.

So I’d be interested in any thoughts about (1) how to get funding to grassroots groups, and (2) how to do a better job at coordinating.

DIANN PAYNE: I would really like to take the lead on that for a number of reasons. It goes back to what I said earlier. For the Red Cross –and I chaired that board and I’m on the regional resource council – they need to have partners and partnerships prior to the funding. And I think you need to insist that those relationships exist because we’ve learned on the Gulf Coast that you can’t exchange business cards in the wake of a storm. You need to know people before it happens. And I think that should be a requirement.

And when you talk about the Red Cross, I run a community action agency and we do a cadre of social programs. But we opened the first financial service center for the Red Cross (a) because we knew the community, and (b) because we had the only undamaged facilities and the ability to provide the services. So when people called me and asked, “Are you a disaster relief organization?” I had to say, “Well, I can be – because my community needs the services.” So we took a subordinate position to the Red Cross because of that relationship, because of my understanding of what the needs were. And you’re right, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross are going to raise the big money nationally because that’s what they do well. But I think that we’re going to have to insist – we’re going to have to demand partnerships so that they are aware of it when their grassroots partners need help and need money. It’s a perfect match. And I think the foundations and large nonprofits need to draw up proposals that reflect how grassroots nonprofits are engaged, and state, for example, how they’re going to share that $2 billion they raised. And it can’t be just on the spur of the moment. You can’t build a relationship at the spur of the moment.

In South Mississippi, the nonprofit community has formed an alliance – we’re calling it the South Mississippi Alliance of Service Organizations because as I understand it, the business community doesn’t like the word “nonprofit.” They’re used to profits. And that’s okay. So we’re the South Mississippi Alliance of Service Organizations, and we’re going to have people who stay the course, who are more interested in providing services. Those that show up to see if the

23 Red Cross is going to be writing checks – we don’t need that, because the money still will not get to the people. So I think you’re going to have to insist on more partnerships, and if they don’t come to you with partnerships, true partnerships – and I’m a student of business, and partnerships are a win-win situation, not give me the money and the grassroots organizations do all of the work because they’re committed to service. I don’t think it’s difficult. I think it’s difficult for them to do it, because they’ve not had to do it heretofore. But I think it’s imperative, because there are limited resources. There is not enough money to go around. And I think that’s the way it should be done.

KEVIN BROWN: I think we need to stop and think before we knee-jerk give. The most frustrating thing for me was that all of this money was flowing to the Red Cross, and meanwhile, I knew what was going to happen to me; once the storm was over, I was going to be sunk – because my city is half as large as it was, and the people who gave to me before just aren’t there. So I think we need to first stop and think before we make knee-jerk gifts to the Red Cross. Because there are a lot of people who are going to be hurting afterwards, and the social service sector is very, very important – especially the nonprofit sector.

Number two, we devalue locals. I went back really quickly after the storm out of a desire to do something great, and I hooked up with a national relief organization. I had been without sleep for days; I was exhausted. But I wanted to do some work and I made myself available to them. And I sat there while they argued about how this other relief organization had set up their tents too close to them, and their titular head couldn’t get a good camera angle. And then I listened while they talked about my flooded city and how these “stupid people” are going to pump all of the water out into the Gulf and ruin the ecosystem. Meanwhile, my house was underwater. Right in front of me they had these conversations. And a day later, I left. I was not going to work with these people because they don’t really care about our city, and I do.

I think you need to find locals and partner with locals.

Number three, when you find those locals, some of those people are natural networkers. I’m a natural networker. I know a lot of people in the city. If you come to me and ask me, “Kevin, whom should we give to in this city?” I’ll give you an honest report on who I think is worthy of getting some money and who is not – who is grassroots and reliable, and who grassroots and not. Or who is a bigger organization and is reliable, or who is a bigger organization and drives around in Bentleys. I’ll tell you who those people are – honestly. I’ll give you an honest appraisal. I care about my city.

So, (1) delay, (2) involve locals, and (3) find the natural networkers.

KIMBERLY REESE: And just to add, also, I think Xavier, particularly my office, the Center for Student Leadership and Service, received money from the United States UNICEF Fund. And one of the things they did that I think was important was they sent a team of people to New Orleans. They had an idea of what they wanted to fund, something dealing with children. They sent their staff out to agencies and places that they knew had done things for children in the past. And they sat down and just had conversations with those people. From that, they went back to their offices, decided what they were going to fund, and asked for concept papers.

If your foundation can afford to do this, you should send people to the city to explore, to look at – you keep hearing about the Lower Ninth Ward – so, to look at the Lower Ninth Ward and to see those areas that are most in need. And then, as Kevin is saying, speak to people. There’s a group meeting, a collaborative effort of all the nonprofits in the city. I think they meet weekly – Mondays. They’re called Unified Nonprofits (information online at http://nonprofit-central.org/ ). It’s a great place to get information. If you’re interested in what’s going on in the city government, in the nonprofit sector, the Times Picayune , which is the New Orleans newspaper – you can access it online at http://www.nola.com/ – contains a listing of nonprofit meetings in the city, city government meetings, anything you can imagine. It’s in that newspaper. Go and sit in on a meeting, hear the stories, and get a good grasp on what is actually needed and who the key players are.

MALCOLM JONES: If you want a good team, and you want a good local partner, you send a scout down to ask the questions and listen. The stories are all there. The ones that are doing well and that are effective are all very obvious. You don’t have to run around very long to find out what worked. So match up with those people. Create a relationship that exists for the next event. Create a “mutual aid agreement” or whatever it happens to be, whatever you want to call it. And then you have that local partner so when something happens, you communicate with that local partner and figure out what to do. You cannot devise the strategy of how to respond to something like this, or even something smaller, from your corporate headquarters – unless you got hit! So let your scouts pick the players, create the team, and it should work.

A lot of us down there don’t know - some worked with foundations and nonprofits and new how to apply for grants, but there are a lot of good groups that don’t even know how to get to that place. So you have to go down and find them.

DIANN PAYNE: I don’t want to belabor this, but be careful of the meetings – because if you want to kill an idea, call a meeting. And that’s a problem, and it continues to be. But again, let’s not make this more difficult. And I have to defend the Red Cross, because for one thing, they’re the vehicle that can raise the money, because people aren’t giving for Katrina now, but the Red Cross is going to activate their system and they’re going to get the money. And they do some things well. But connecting those partnerships and those local partners, I think, is a problem. We talked about this, with the Red Cross. When they show up, they say, “We’re national and we’re taking over.” Well, we know our community. Why can’t we be in charge and you support us ? I wouldn’t come to your community and tell you, “I’m taking over,” when I don’t even know how to get out of town without your help. That defies logic. Disasters are local, so therefore the local people need to be part of the leadership and the recovery. We need help, yes – but we need to lead and direct those efforts. It goes back to what Kevin said. He knows where the people are who can help. Why would you not listen to him? But they don’t take that approach because they’re good at selling a story to people and raising money. And then we show up with the real problems, and you’re out of money. It’s really not that difficult. Just insist on the local partnerships – and they need to exist before the storm.

SALLY PROUTY: I represent the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps – 23,000 young people currently working in forty states. And I just want to say two quick things.

25 Bill (Schambra), thank you to you, and thank you to Hudson Institute for making this subject the center of attention in this room today. It is a giant step when you’re acknowledging to us that service hasn’t had a good name among conservative thinkers. And in part, that’s our fault, but in part, it’s a lack of understanding. It’s a huge deal that you’re acknowledging that. So I just want to commend you for the step your taking today in putting the topic out front.

And then to say that of the corps that we represent, there are a substantial number of local, state, and regional disaster preparedness planning activities going on that involve service and conservation corps, and it happens that we do not have a national plan for how that works. The Corporation (for National and Community Service), as I understand it, is committed to developing that national plan, which will bring you from Mississippi to where we need help in other areas. And I just think that, coming from this, if there’s an opportunity to do substantial planning and prevention, first of all, we’ll all be far better off in the response and recovery efforts. Thank you so much.

LEWIS PERELMAN: I’m a senior fellow with the Homeland Security Policy Institute (at George Washington University), and also a former Hudson Institute senior fellow, once upon a time. I was particularly resonant – I won’t say struck, because everything struck me, but resonant – with Diann’s early comment that after Camille and other disasters, lessons that should have been learned were not, and the same mistakes were repeated. You hope that won’t happen again. Noah said that his initial instinct was that he wanted to share the knowledge that he had acquired with others, but his father discouraged him from doing that right away. And Malcolm recently, again, underscored the importance of learning, as has almost every comment that we’ve heard. And there is the underlying question that you raised, Bill, about what philanthropy should learn from this.

Just about a year ago, I visited the Lessons Learned Center that the Department of Homeland Security set up just down the street, here, on Pennsylvania Avenue – the Katrina lessons learned. In a room a little larger than this one, a few dozen people were sitting at tables in front of computers entering reports. A piece of paper that went all the way around the room was a timeline with dots where each report was entered. Fascinating. And I asked, “What’s going into this database?” And all of the reports that they were entering into the government’s official database were about what federal officials, federal bureaucrats, did or what was done to them or about them or for them. Nothing about what state people did. Nothing about what local people did. Nothing about what you all did. This is how the government learns things.

I was working for the Homeland Security Institute of the department at the time, and I floated a proposal. My observation was – as you all emphasized – that this was the greatest disaster in American history. It’s also probably the most documented disaster in American history, when you think of the millions and millions and millions of e-mails and letters, phone calls, SMS, IM – all of the information that was generated and continues to be generated, as we’re doing today, about what happened. And there are millions of stories out there that have not been captured, have not been codified. And I wondered, what would it cost to do that? And so I got estimates from experts in building knowledge bases of anywhere from $10 million to $30 million. Not really a huge amount of money, when you look at the billions that have at least been promised and spent.

Now, in the philanthropic sector, the understandable impulse is to give money for things that are tangible, visible – blankets or water or cash to organizations so that they can go and strip mold off of houses. And God bless you for doing that. But I think you all emphasized in your own experience the power of knowledge that we always pay lip service to. We know the parable about the difference between giving somebody a fish and teaching them how to fish. And yet this is what I’ve learned in the past year: The government clearly is not interested in capturing this knowledge, codifying it, organizing it, and making it accessible so the American people can get the know-how to prepare for the future, to rebuild in ways that are resilient and sustainable and not prone to repeating the same disasters over and over again. All for of these how-to questions that we refer to, we have, as you all know, the web and the information technology for anybody to get access to anything if it were made available to them.

So, my answer to your question is, I think this is a great challenge, and an opportunity for American philanthropy to fill a gap that nobody else is filling. This session, as you said (Susan) is worthy. This is about the sixth one of these I’ve been to, and I’ve heard lots of fascinating stories. I saw (the movie) United 93 last week. But there are millions of stories, and there is a lot to be learned.

A sidebar comment: Good intentions, as you all noted, don’t always produce good results. Mistakes are made. Also, what people think are lessons often, on further scientific examination, turn out to be incorrect. Their personal experience, their emotional responses, color their impressions. To really digest what happened – to really analyze and make useful knowledge out of that and then convey that, it takes work. It takes investment. That’s my message to you. I’d like to see a lot more of this. Thank you very much.

KEVIN BROWN: Can I add one thing to that? You said the parable was, teach a man to fish, but you forgot the part about teaching the man to own the pond from which everybody else fishes. That’s the way we need to be thinking.

NOAH HOPKINS: I just want to add to that and recognize that for our program, NCCC, we’re the ones who own the pond. What NCCC is doing is teaching our Corps members to become leaders and to follow up after their term of service and become leaders in the field, leading other volunteers. I think that’s very important.

MALCOLM JONES: The only thing I’d like to add is this: If you want to really learn lessons, go down there and talk to the people who live that life. I didn’t bring any notecards. I didn’t prepare this speech. I’ve done this over and over and over again – not because I’m a big person or a great person or anything, but I can tell you that I learned lessons. I learned lessons that will help other small communities, and other things that can be a great contribution to someone. Maybe I’m not worthy of someone spending paper and time on me. But there are other people I know who have stories to be told, and lessons to be learned, and it is not about what the federal government did there. I’m not going to bash the federal government and say that they did things wrong. They did a lot of things right. But it was the team effort of a lot of different people. FEMA and the federal government was only one part of it – one part. A big part, but only one part. And there were all of these other players. We have to go ahead and work together where we’re not stepping on each

27 other’s toes. When you’re going through what we went through, and you make mistakes, people get hurt – more hurt than they already were. We don’t need that.

KIMBERLY REESE: There’s a web site, I-10 Witness.com ( http://www.i10witness.com/ ). If you’re interested in hearing more stories about people from all over the Gulf Coast who were affected by Hurricane Katrina, Xavier students partnered with a group called Mondo Bizarro and conducted interviews of people affected by Hurricane Katrina, as a part of their service learning project. There are a lot of stories that I think are worth listening to on www.i10witness.com .

GENE SOFER: I’m a consultant working with a lot of national service-oriented nonprofits. I have two questions. One of the major criticisms about AmeriCorps is that this is paid volunteerism and work that would have been done anyway by people of good will. Do you think, based upon your collective experiences, that the issue of pay plays a role in this – number one. And number two, do you think that this would have been done the same way without AmeriCorps as it was with it?

MALCOLM JONES: Absolutely not. (Other panelists nod, agree.) Think about what Kevin talked about. You put a little money out there, and it comes back in big, big ways. I mean, who of you out there has an investment program that delivers to you in that matter? It’s just that simple, and yes, you do have to put some money out there to support. But we’re not talking about sending out folks with big investment-banker salaries. We’re talking about taking a little bit of money and putting Noah out there. How simple is that?

NOAH HOPKINS: And to consider it a salary I think would be erroneous. $13 a day is hardly a salary. (Agreement from Diann.) It pays for the cell phone bill so that I can call home and tell my mom what I’m doing.

DIANN PAYNE: Yeah, the money is no money. It’s less than minimum wage. But the key thing is, sure, a lot of us – and I’m on a lot of boards – volunteer if it’s easy. We volunteer if there’s a photo opportunity. We volunteer if it’s going to build our resume. We’ll do that and we all have things where we do that. But Noah and others in the program have that consistent work ethic. They’re going to be there and they don’t care what it is they do, whether it’s building bunk beds at the volunteer center or gutting houses or cleaning debris. That’s what they bring because they chose to serve.

You know, a lot of people serve and I think that they’re all needed, but sometimes I’d rather have NCCC in the trenches, because the folks in the suits and ties are not interested in doing any work. And what I get often from people is, “Oh, Diann, I have an idea!” Well, I grew up on a farm and I picked cotton so I know what work is about. “I have an idea” – I know what you’re saying. You need someone to do work for you. And my response, now, is, “I have some ideas, too.” We need people to do some of the really back-breaking work. And a lot of us, let’s just be honest about it, we’re not up for that. I mean, we sort of are, and we think we are, but to go down and do what they’ve done, you’re not going to get many who’ll do that. And while a lot of people came, they didn’t stay. In the South, we have this saying: “We can all stand hell for a day.” But can we stand it beyond that? This was really difficult, hard, laborious, unclean work. But it was rewarding because they served people.

KEVIN BROWN: Volunteers come for three days, five days, a week. My best volunteer who is not AmeriCorps stayed for six weeks. And that’s great! But in a rebuilding time like we’re in the midst of, there’s no continuity if people come for just six days, seven days. You can’t even finish one house in that span of time. So then the next group comes in and has to figure out where the last group left off. Or with an electrician – he’s got to figure out what the other guy did. It’ll be three days before he can even get started. So having that consistency, a group of underpaid – and all my guys are on food stamps and live in trailers – people who are dedicated to the cause for one entire year or in some cases, a quarter. That’s invaluable because there is continuity. Does that make sense? Volunteerism is fantastic, but how many volunteers stick around for a year? How many volunteers stick around for more than a week? And you can’t have the kind of continuity you need in an organization like mine, especially in the time we’re in, without volunteers who are with you for long periods of time.

DIANN PAYNE: One comment – we talked about Habitat. Everybody loves it. Our local affiliate doesn’t have any paid staff, but everybody wants to hammer and to drive a nail in a home. Well, we also have to select families; we’ve got to support families; we’ve got to raise the money; we have to find the land. That takes volunteers, too, but people say, “Oh – we don’t want to do that! We want to hammer.” There’s a lot – and we all want the easy stuff. And I understand – I do understand. But we need consistent, passionate people.

NOAH HOPKINS: That’s something we had a hard time with at my last project at Camp Hope, working with the different partner organizations staffed entirely by unpaid volunteers who, granted, had a strong commitment to come down and help and take the time away from their lives. I think it was far easier for them to rationalize and to justify leaving in a few days or a week. They had no commitment there. It’s like so many other things in Washington – by accepting a small token of money, that acknowledges a commitment to whatever is being done, and I think it’s very important.

KRISTEN CAMPBELL: I’m with the Case Foundation, and actually, an alumna of AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). My question goes back, in a way, to what Bill (Schambra) said earlier about kids feeling that their parents are forcing them to do national service. I would be interested in hearing from the panel what you think of government- mandated national service, and also, registering for national service as an alternative to registering for the military.

NOAH HOPKINS: That was actually proposed by someone in Congress a few years ago (The Universal National Service Act of 2003, H.R. 163, proposed by Charles Rangel, D-NY). I don’t know how far it went, but I, for one, think it’s a great solution, and I think it would really engage our young people in our society and help to build a sense of ownership over what we’re all a part of, here. So I completely support it. I would have done it myself. I don’t know how well it would be accepted among the general population – I can only hope. But if I were put in that position, I could tell you now that I would most certainly select national service here in our country.

DIANN PAYNE: I don’t think I would go to the extreme of mandating it. I’m not fond of mandates. But I think that in local communities, there are various opportunities to engage people

29 in service, and even with some of the federal funding that we get, it’s a requirement that, if we’re going to help you with anything, then you’re going to have to invest or volunteer four hours a month. They had it at eight hours a month, and I said to my staff, “Do you volunteer eight hours a month on Saturdays?” We don’t want to set a higher standard than we ourselves would do.

So there are ways to do that, and we need to insist on that. If we’re going to pay someone’s light bill, I think they should have a responsibility to give something back to the community, whether it’s working for the American Heart Association during the Heart Walk or taking classes in CPR and first aid with the Red Cross or helping at a shelter. We’re also trying to get our population to understand that if you get training in disaster relief and you become a shelter manager – if have to go to a shelter, trust me, you want to manage it! We’re providing those opportunities. And we constantly see, and it gets reinforced over and over, that people welcome the opportunity. They’ve never been asked, because there are no expectations. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime; give him a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.

KIMBERLY REESE: I think that if you encourage meaningful service, where students or young people can see the connection between their service activity and the community, you don’t need mandated service. We’ve grappled with this for a while at Xavier. What we know now is that over 80 percent of our students at some point in time will walk through the doors of our volunteer services office or go through a service learning program. And I think that’s because over the years, we have really engaged our students in meaningful service. We’ve set up leadership programs where students can see the connection between their lives and service. And I think when you do that, eventually the student will come, because they’re going to make that connection with their life. And I think it’s important that we set the stage. We don’t force them. We set the stage, we give them the tools that they need, and we let them work with those tools.

MALCOLM JONES: I think you need to go ahead as adults and parents and uncles and aunts and talk about it. Talk about the value of it. Don’t talk about it to other adults. Talk about it to young people. Talk about it to your children. Talk about it to your nieces and nephews and their friends. Talk about how it’s a big deal to you, and how it means something big.

DIANN PAYNE: I think if we model it – I thought about Bill (Schambra)’s comments about forcing children to do service. Yet I’m so thankful now, and we all are thankful now, that we were forced to do some things. We don’t get it at the time. My grandmother used to say, “You’ll understand it by and by.” And I think that still holds true.

KATHERINE CORR: I’m with Notre Dame Mission Volunteers/AmeriCorps. I think it was Diann who mentioned about the twelve-year plan for recovery. I’m wondering if you could lift up for us a little bit more what the next five years look like, in terms of services needed in the Gulf Coast region.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: That’s an excellent, excellent final question. What sorts of resources –

DIANN PAYNE: I can give you some very basic examples for each of the lower three – I’m sure this is true in New Orleans as well. We’ve established long-term recovery committees and, for example, we have the volunteer center. And some of the things we don’t that we need until we

30 get to that point. We have the center open, and it can house the volunteers, but we need a truck and a trailer to get the supplies into the various sites. We hadn’t thought of that, and now it’s a great need. And that’s where unrestricted philanthropic dollars can come in. Because to make that request through FEMA, you know, the need will no longer exist by the time we get the money. So it’s things like that – that’s not a lot of money.

We also need support for those long-term recovery committees, which are assessing unmet needs. That’s where everything should go – through those long-term recovery committees. We need some expertise there, too, and we’ll have definitively in the next month or so exactly what our needs are. And our needs are not that big at the moment, but we don’t have anywhere to go to get those things done. So the needs then go unmet longer.

KEVIN BROWN: I’d just like to add that specifically in the area of housing, which is a very big concern for me, as a New Orleanian, there were 250,000 structures impacted by the storm. All of those 250,000 structures have to be rewired because when water touches metal, it ruins it – and so all of the wiring is ruined. Most of them have to be replumbed. Most of them have to have new drywall. Now, let me ask you, to redo 250,000 structures, how many electricians do you need? Now many plumbers do you need? How many contractors do you need? Is it any wonder that people are waiting six months to a year for an appointment with an electrician? So specifically why will it take so long? There just aren’t enough contractors in America to do the job quickly.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Is there, then, a need for volunteers with particular skills?

KEVIN BROWN: Yes! And specifically, we would really covet somebody coming for a long period of time. I’d love to have an electrician to spend six months with me. I’ll find housing. Or a plumber, licensed in New Orleans, to come spend six months with me. And then I’d take my AmeriCorps members and have them repipe or rewire the house. It would teach the AmeriCorps members a new skill, which would be of lifelong value- I rewire my stuff all the time, and I wish I could replumb my stuff.

We’d teach them a great skill. It’d be of great value to the community – because if this guy is volunteering his time, and we can supply the materials, we could do it for a fraction of the cost for the people who were uninsured.

KIMBERLY REESE: We are in great need of volunteers with specialized skills – we talked about this earlier today. Contracting skills. Education – we have schools that cannot reopen because there is a severe shortage of teachers. And also in the health field, there’s a severe shortage of nurses and doctors. In fact, only a few months ago our level-one trauma center was reopened – in the suburb of New Orleans. Not in the city, but in the suburb.

MALCOLM JONES: All I can tell you is this: We’ve reached a different a different stage in Pass Christian than maybe some others have. We finished our debris operation, basically, on August 28, 2006. We’ve demolished the houses. We’re now ready for the rebuilding stage. If we could have skilled people come in and act like foremen, almost, and manage these crews of unskilled workers who are just dedicated to doing the work, we could accomplish great things. The other

31 thing is that we have a town that has no doctor in it, now. All of the buildings were destroyed, and the physicians’ homes were destroyed, and so they’ve had to relocate. And so we’re trying to go ahead and establish some clinics to work with our older population. So if you have groups that can offer that type of service, we need that type of help. A lot of it, really, is coming down to just having people who can come in and help manage things. It’s hard to explain that, other than: Just imagine that we’re working feverishly doing what we normally do in city government, you know, with the police, fire, water, and sewer and all of that. But then there is all of this other stuff going on that is really important – home rebuilding. Trying to link people up with grant applications and all sorts of things. There are people who need to be mentored. A lot of the people in my community are afraid of a computer. They need a person to work with them to go ahead and work through the process, to get all of the difference components put together to try to rebuild their lives. They just need mentors. They don’t have to be particularly skilled in anything other than just knowing how to troubleshoot and solve problems. They need that type of help. And so we have a community outreach center that we have some people working in, but frankly, we need some paid help in that center to make it more effective. So that’s the thing.

I appreciate you taking the time and listening intently. But I really challenge you to go back to your organizations and take this feeling that you have inside of you and make it into something that will be action at someplace, wherever it happens to be, because any place it goes is good.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Let’s thank our panel! (Applause.)

KEVIN BROWN: We want to thank Hudson Institute for having us.

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