Issue #152, Winter 2007

Everyday Heroes

After the 2005 hurricanes, a wealth of new, independent, young leaders emerged from the ruins with the potential to transform the Gulf Coast and the nation - if the systemic barriers of gender and race can be eradicated.

By Mafruza Khan

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Southern Perspective

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"Community groups that start from the dirt they stand on and are neither tied to funders nor to institutions are the majority of organizations on the ground prompting real levels of solution building through civic engagement.” —Colette Pichon-Battle, Moving Forward Gulf Coast, Slidell, La., and Center for Social Inclusion local partner

Colette Pichon-Battle is a 32-year-old lawyer who has been a lifelong activist and social entrepreneur. She has been recognized by the American Bar Association for her work throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. After the floods, she was instrumental in organizing and mobilizing several strategic relief and community-development efforts including the Louisiana Network, Inc., Moving Forward Gulf Coast, Inc., and Operation Gulf Coast, a national coalition of private companies, concerned individuals, faith-based and nonprofit organizations. She now works as the Gulf Coast coordinator for Oxfam America. Pichon-Battle symbolizes a new generation of young, black women, who have the energy, vision, skills, and commitment to create a new South, and in essence, a new country.

As staffers with the Center for Social Inclusion (CSI), we met Pichon-Battle and a host of other inspiring community leaders from the South after Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma and have been working with them since. CSI’s goal, as a national organization that partners with local communities, is to support and strengthen community capacity in the Gulf Coast region by supporting leaders like Pichon-Battle as well as informal/organic leaders through policy ideas and research, leadership and network development, and through advocacy strategies for systemic change. Stories and voices like Pichon-Battle’s emerged in our year-long research project that looked at nonprofit, associational, and informal leadership capacity in five Gulf Coast states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia). CSI staff and five local consultants interviewed more than 80 nonprofit and community leaders as well as local and national funders. As we witnessed the amazing work done by local people with minimal or nonexistent resources, we realized that no one—neither national and local organizations nor funders—had a realistic, comprehensive picture of the state of community infrastructure in the region. Nor did any of them know what kind of investments and support was needed to remove systemic barriers to opportunity for people of color and other marginalized populations. Without that dynamic community capacity, the robust civic engagement needed to successfully rebuilding the region is unlikely to develop.

Because the CSI seeks to support and build local capacity, the participation of community leaders engaged in community development and social justice was central to the project. We based our research on the assumption that local leaders who engage in effective community-building efforts are often not organizationally connected. The implications are that effective leaders may exist in the absence of organizational infrastructure and, therefore, the project had to search for those leaders, and that measuring effective community-building should factor in the role that organizations play in the development of leaders who live and work outside of organizational structures.

We saw the project as a mechanism for testing out the types of relationships that could be built between national intermediaries and local leaders, and between local leaders. Overall, it helped our local partners develop a more complete and nuanced picture of the states in which they work and the actors within it, as well as identify and create opportunities for regional collaboration.

“If you don’t know where you’re coming from, you don’t know where you’re going.” —Cassandra Welchin, director of policy at the Mississippi Youth Justice Project, Jackson, Miss., and Center for Social Inclusion local partner.

A native Mississippian now living in Jackson, Cassandra Welchin brought her leadership experience and advocacy insights to the project as a local partner. She recently worked as a legislative advocate at Congregations for Children, where she develops legislative and lobbying strategies and tracks legislative and policy proposals that impact poor children in Mississippi. Welchin has consulted for the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI), where she provided programmatic support. She has also consulted with Oxfam America, specifically working on the strategic planning for the Mississippi NAACP during their Gulf Coast Reconstruction efforts. She has also worked at Southern Echo, a well-respected community organization, where she developed fundraising plans to build capacity for black-led, black-based, grass-roots organizations in the Mississippi Delta that engage in community-organizing work.

Welchin interviewed the diverse group of leaders—both organic and formal, young and old—for the project. In talking with community elders, she realized the importance of bridging intergenerational gaps by having more intentional conversations with them. She saw these bridge-building conversations as being essential for keeping alive the history of the elders and to overcoming the current struggle to rebuild. Connecting the struggles of the past to the challenges of today also helped both generations to reach a mutually beneficial consensus on rebuilding strategies from recycling to green-building technologies, to making multi-racial alliances for successful community empowerment and participation, to building support networks to advance their agenda of transformative policies and practices.

This new generation of young leaders acknowledges and appreciates the contribution of civil-rights activists of an earlier era and are thrilled that the disaster has prompted them to become active again. But in the course of their conversations, they were able to identify conflicting generational and gender dynamics. The new leaders are mostly young and female, and the majority of the civil-rights leaders are older and male. There are several strategies that can help them move beyond the challenges of traditional gender roles and generational hierarchies: leadership opportunities in existing organizations; resources targeted specifically to their leadership development, as they are often too old for youth-training support and too young to benefit from senior leadership investments; and relationships with business leaders, elected officials, and other nonprofit organizational leaders who invest in new leadership and organizations.

While leaders like Pichon-Battle and Welchin are “professionals,” many exemplary “organic” leaders (non-professional, trusted community figures) play a critical role in post-disaster community-building. Our local partners coined the term “Ms./Miss Mary” to refer to these organic leaders. A Miss Mary is an individual who may work and exist outside of an organization. These leaders are trusted within a community because they do not work for money and are deeply rooted in their communities.

Onie Norman is a Ms. Mary. Norman has been doing community work for more than 30 years in Arkansas. In 2002, She and a group of volunteers from Dumas, Ark., started the African American Women’s Network so that African-American women could network and participate in community-building.

The African American Women’s Network organizes conferences, discussion groups, and projects to build community and power. Their core values, shaped by their personal and social experiences, are rooted in their perspective that women are the foundation of the community and the family— “...We mold the children and transfer our values,” says Norman. They believe that women in rural communities need to know that they have power and can be empowered in the process.

When Norman first became involved in community activism as a young woman, she received encouragement and support from an older woman who continues to guide her in community-building and leadership development today. “She worked with me and included me in going to meetings with the city council and school officials,” says Norman. “The more mature women would tutor the young women on how to dress and present themselves. They taught us to always maintain dignity and respect for self…never allow someone to make you feel as if you were less.”

Individual dignity, self-respect, and collective self-empowerment are intertwined. Leaders like Norman talk about the need to help communities confront their fear of challenging policies, practices, and decisions that harm them, given the violently repressive history of the region, the concentration of wealth and political power in a few hands, and the resulting vulnerability to retaliation.

Many black women leaders created new nonprofits after the disaster in response to some of these challenges. Examples include:

• Saving Our Selves (SOS), a coalition formed to provide relief, restoration, and community-rebuilding support to the Gulf Coast region with offices in Mississippi and Georgia. SOS focuses on leadership and capacity development on health care, affordable housing, education, sustainable jobs, and a safe environment.

• Ninth Ward’s Neighbors Empowerment Network Association, a community-based organization led by Lower 9th Ward residents to provide direct assistance to community residents rebuilding their lives after the hurricanes.

• New Orleans Network, which no longer exists, provided information about organizations, a community calendar, and announcements to foster communication and network-building among groups.

They all struggled to attract resources to build their organizations. The reality in the Gulf Coast is that these are the people doing the everyday work of gutting houses, rebuilding schools, and taking care of the elderly and the sick. By and large, these leaders come with a vision of collaboration, networking, and relationship-building.

The Path Forward

Despite the dynamism of local work and leadership documented in our project, there are significant community-building capacity issues in each of the five states. The relationships, networks, and alliances that are necessary to draw attention and get results do not always exist or may lack adequate geographic coverage. Despite the number of successful and impressive groups in the region, peer-to-peer learning opportunities are virtually non-existent, and people are unable to share their knowledge, experiences, and strategies regionally.

This trend is also true for other parts of the country, but resource constraints make it a bigger challenge in the Gulf region. Community development practitioners have illustrated how networks can foster real engagement by mobilizing residents to create a “strong demand environment for change,” as Bill Traynor discusses in his 2005 article in Shelterforce, “Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement.” Given the post-disaster context of the Gulf Coast, where there is a strong demand for change, a resurgent social movement, the fact that thousands are still displaced, and the fact that emergent national alliances such as Right to the City have made New Orleans a priority, a network strategy seems to be a practical and strategic approach for fostering maximum inclusion and enabling democratic practices.

In the networked approach to governance, what becomes more important is to learn how to manage organizations that are composed more of networks instead of individuals and programs. In the case of Gulf Coast rebuilding, the values and guiding principles of the emergent leadership are aligned with the organizing principles of network development—which include flexibility, change, choice, and relationships that are more suited to the context of rebuilding rather than a traditional institution-building approach.

CSI is thus organizing convenings, meetings, and other forms of networking in the region, in addition to providing research and policy support to groups working in the region.

Our goals are to:

1. Align strategies and strengthen existing work. Leaders can connect with local and state efforts, share strategies and lessons learned, consider shared priorities for collective action, and identify and strategize around gaps. These strategies can then feed into existing efforts aimed at affecting local, state, and federal policies and programs.

2. Build community capacity through policy recommendations and advocacy strategies. By developing strategies that are directly connected to Gulf Coast communities, local leaders can better hold national organizations accountable and leverage national resources and support.

3. Create long-term regional transformation. Leaders grounded in shared principles and connected beyond geography, issues, and expertise can serve as a continued resource for strategizing and mobilizing beyond the life of specific efforts.

We believe that local leaders can help the nation see the benefits in rebuilding the Gulf Coast and forming the policies necessary to build healthy communities, particularly for communities of color. To do so, leaders across the region need to be connected with one another in order to think collectively, strategically, and long-term.

Alliances can form beyond what is traditionally considered grass-roots, recognizing that post-Katrina and Rita rebuilding affects a wide range of community members. Leaders will be able to pursue strategies that benefit all communities. Under the right circumstances, national leaders can emerge from the resurgent social and civil-rights movement of the post-Katrina South.

We believe that to nurture emergent leaders, funders should: 1) provide core support grants to stabilize and build existing organizations and invest in community leaders with a track record of alliance-building and collaborative work; 2) invest in relationship- and network-building within states and across the region; and 3) provide financial and technical assistance for developing community infrastructure.

National advocacy groups also have a critical role to play, including actively engaging in resource-sharing and other in-kind support. National and intermediary organizations should publicly acknowledge the contributions of local groups and leaders who have enabled their work and successes and should include local groups and leaders in meetings with funders, donors, and policymakers when discussing the needs of the region.

Two years after New Orleans’ levees broke, thousands, mostly people of color, remain displaced, unable to rebuild their lives and homes in the Gulf Coast region. The problem, as this nation was forced to acknowledge, was not a hurricane, but decades of flawed public policies and discriminating institutions that created such a concentration of poverty.

Race has been an architect of our institutions and policies, and the structures that determine opportunity and well-being continue to be stacked against people of color, women, children, and other vulnerable populations. Seen from this perspective, it is not hard to understand why they are having the most difficulty rebuilding their lives even now. And yet, the crisis has ignited powerful grass-roots mobilization that is giving new meaning to community-building and leadership.

What has emerged, or has become visible, is a wealth of leadership. Many are young women of color, who share values and a common understanding of what kind of communities we want to build and the kinds of physical, social, economic, and political infrastructures are needed to sustain them. The importance of this shared value system cannot be overemphasized. If democracy is government by discussion, and not just about elections, then the greater the participation by the people who are excluded from the market because of systemic or structural biases, such as race or gender, or because of the outcomes of those biases, such as illiteracy or poor health, the better.

At the same time, power involves having the ability to negotiate and set the agenda, make and enforce the rules, determine how resources will be allocated, and communicate without barriers. Given the violently repressive history of the region and the current concentration of wealth and power, building community power and leadership will require an explicit acknowledgement of the inequalities of power—from the traditions of exclusion to the social networks that sustain them.

The stories of challenges and opportunities as told by the many leaders who participated in our project tell us that successfully rebuilding the Gulf Coast depends on: a) local leaders and organizations driving the processes and creating the policies, with support from strong networks; and b) support for both emergent and existing community-based leadership who can identify, develop, and carry forward structurally transformative policies and practices that are inclusive, transparent and accountable.

The region, however, is not monolithic and, therefore, each state and locality needs individual and focused approaches to best support capacity-building. Leaders in these states share similar priorities and mirror national priorities, including affordable housing, public transit, more economic opportunities, better educational systems, public safety, criminal justice, and a clean environment—in short, a decent quality of life that everyone deserves.

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