NEW YORK - August 30 - Women are building houses and communities, sheltering the homeless and preventing domestic violence, and advocating for policies and approaches that improve life in the areas devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with help from the Ms. Foundation for Women. Now, these women’s personal stories of triumph and tragedy are available for viewing on the Ms. Foundation web site.

Since Katrina hit, some 23 organizations throughout Louisiana and Mississippi have received strategic support from the Ms. Foundation through its Katrina Women’s Response fund, which raised $1.3 million in the aftermath of the storms to help elevate the voices of low-income women in the Gulf—especially those of color—and to ensure that their leadership is central to the region’s recovery process. One year into that process, these women are speaking out about their experiences rebuilding their communities and fighting for their rightful places at the decision making table—battling not just water and high-winds for the survival of their communities as they knew them, but also the government itself.

“While women play critical leadership roles in their communities, their voices have been largely marginalized in key policy debates” says Sara Gould, President and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women. “Funding community-based women's organizations in the Gulf Coast has offered the opportunity to help elevate women’s voices, support their leadership and bring them to the policy table as real partners. This is the only road to just and equitable policies that meet the needs of all people.”

Marking the first anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by spotlighting these women’s stories creates an opportunity to once again focus public attention on the devastation and hardship people on the Gulf coast continue to face. More importantly, however, it offers an opportunity to examine the more persistent devastation caused by our failed policies both pre- and post-Katrina and Rita—policies that continue to marginalize low-income people and people of color, most especially the women among them. The challenges faced by the Gulf Coast region are long-term, and critical policy directions taken now and over the coming months will have broad and long-term implications for the type of society we commit ourselves to building.

Among the stories of rebuilding and hope—and the women making them happen—are:

• Brenda Robichaux, Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation and founder of the United Houma Nation Relief Fund Located at the direct intersection of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the small Louisiana settlements of the Houma Indian tribe were devastated by the storms, leaving some 5,000 tribe members homeless, their houses completely destroyed by wind and water. Undaunted, Chief Robichaux quickly pulled the tribe’s resources together, providing assistance to thousands of Houma families by delivering furniture, food and hope, and offering the benefits of a tight-knit community. A Ms. Foundation grant enabled Robichaux and the tribe to offer training to women in non-traditional work roles, including repairing and re-building structures that were destroyed by the storms.

• Mary Croom Fontenot, Executive Director, All Congregations Together (ACT), New Orleans Putting aside her own familial losses, Fontenot returned to organizing her community immediately after the storm. Five days post-Katrina, ACT took a group of clergy and families from all over New Orleans to Washington DC, where they met with 40 members of Congress. Since then, Fontenot has grown ACT, a congregation-based, non-profit organization established in 1991, from 15 to 32 congregations, helping individuals, families and communities to empower themselves and improve the quality of life in Greater New Orleans. To mirror the community it serves, the organization recruits and engages as many African-American female pastors as possible. “The day I forget I’m a woman in a male-dominated world, that’s the day I don’t succeed,” Fontenot said.

• Donna Banks, Coordinator, Common Ground Women’s Center, New Orleans, LA Donna Banks lived in New Orleans for 48 years before the day she was forced to float her 10-year-old son out of her Uptown neighborhood in a plastic garbage can, walking in water to her chin. They survived National guard attempts to separate them, time under highway bridges, and a three-week stint in Texas before moving to the Common Ground Women’s Center in the Upper Ninth Ward, a shelter that provides 22 women and their children with services including medicine, clothing, legal aide, food and child care. Although Banks began as a client, her talent for organization soon earned her the job as the center’s coordinator. “We’re a family, we’re survivors,” Banks says of the Center’s residents. “We’ve done it through love, unity and cooperation.” She believes the most critical policies are those in housing – “There’s no place to stay. The trailers are an outrage; they’re like sheets in a storm” – schools and education, and price-gouging. Still, she continues to have hope for her city. “I want the Big Easy to become the Big Better.”

• Una Anderson, Executive Director, New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative Give Una Anderson three or four weeks, and she’ll give you an affordable house, complete with the little touches that make it distinctively New Orleans. A coalition that works collectively with neighborhood organizations, NONDC has built five houses in Central City post-Katrina, which have served as a real catalyst for the community. “Because we build them, others renovate,” Anderson says. “It’s a symbolic action that gives others hope.” Anderson herself was a source of hope during Katrina’s immediate aftermath, when she and her husband drove a bus from the Northshore into the city and rescued 60 people from a highway overpass. A Ms. Foundation grant helps NONDC promote neighborhood diversity and resident input into rebuilding and rezoning plans. “I urge people across the country to stick with us,” Anderson says. “If we can change the dynamics and the structures, if we can change this city over time to a place where residents have avenues to opportunity so that our children aren’t trapped, I’ll die happy.”

• Sharon Hanshaw, Executive Director, Coastal Women for Change, Biloxi A lifelong resident of the Gulf Coast, beauty salon owner Sharon Hanshaw helped start Coastal Women for Change (CWC) to give women a voice in the direction and future of their Biloxi community. “People are trying to take away your community while you are sleeping,” she says. The group’s first event was a forum with local elected officials that culminated in CWC members being granted five seats on the Mayor's planning commission. In July, CWC partnered with the NAACP to hold a Women of Color forum to identify housing issues for a legislative agenda; a childcare needs-assessment survey offered an opportunity to learn more. In door-to-door interviews, CWC found women desperate for childcare, but also discovered incidents of robbery and abuse of elders living alone in trailers and afraid to come to the door. Hanshaw alerted the police to increase patrols and surveillance, and created emergency preparedness kits for seniors to record their emergency contact information, evacuation options, and prescriptions.

• Bishop Williams, CEO, Lafayette Restoration Center, Imani Temple, Lafayette, LA The first woman bishop in the African American Catholic Congregation has mobilized to help more than 10,000 people since Katrina hit. When she realized that church colleagues from the Lower Nine had not evacuated, Williams sent members of the Lafayette congregation to rescue them. When she realized in November that “people had not cried – they were still in a state of shock,” she instituted a regular “29 minutes of prayer” to encourage healing by allowing people to tell their story. When she realized people were getting sick, she brought in a nutritionist. “Right away we began preparing meals, feeding 1,000 people breakfast, lunch and dinner. We got money from wherever we could: the quilting group in Florida; $5 from a grandmother.” The group fed and clothed evacuees, and gave them access to computers and cell phones to get families reconnected. “We can’t depart from family values that have been a part of our life from generation to generation,” Williams says.

• Carol Burnett, Executive Director, Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative According to FEMA, museums and zoos are “an essential governmental service.” Child care centers are not. Try telling that to Carol Burnett’s clients at Moore Community House. When seven of Moore House's eight buildings were destroyed by flooding, hurricane insurance did not cover the damage, and FEMA denied eligibility. Burnett, among the first female ordained Methodist ministers in Mississippi, now focuses on rebuilding the child care sector along the coast, increasing its funding, and making sure people know that economic development is linked to quality child care. Needs are great, says Burnett, both for those who have returned home and for those living elsewhere. “Out of 100 families we surveyed here, 65 needed child care,” Burnett says. “Many families are sending kids to relatives in other cities – or to people they barely know.”

• Xochitl Bervera, Co-Director with Gina Womack of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) Prior to Hurricane Katrina, 240 juveniles were in detention in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. When the storm hit, some of them were moved to Orleans Parish Prison, where they found themselves up to their necks in water, covered in sewage and starving. Contacted by state authorities, FFLIC was eventually able to match every one of the juveniles with their families and release them into family custody. “We put on our FFLIC t-shirts and walked around,” Bervera said, “and it worked. I’ll never forget finding my first grandmother.” FFLIC staff then raised $100,000 to support the families in the program. Ultimately, Bervera predicts, New Orleans will be saved by the action of its families rather than waiting for government: “The trauma was that the world could see and recognize the most profound levels of racism and poverty and do nothing.”

Each of these grantees is available for interviews; background briefings are also available from the staff and board of the Ms. Foundation for Women.

The Ms. Foundation also joined with the Women’s Funding Network for a report on the groundbreaking work of women's community-based organizations, focused in the hurricane-affected areas of the Gulf Coast, and the importance of women's philanthropy. The report will be available soon at www.wfnet.org and www.ms.foundation.org. Both Christine Grumm, head of the Women's Funding Network in San Francisco, and Sara K. Gould, head of the Ms. Foundation for Women in New York, are available to comment on the overall trend of women's funds and their grantees, and how Katrina and its aftermath changed the approaches and influenced the solutions supported by such funds.

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