The Fish Foundation news and events

We met with the People's Organizing Committee, a group that's organizing poor, black residents of New Orleans around issues of housing, education, and the rebuilding. Most importantly, the POC trains and develops these residents with the skills they need to organize and lead communities on their own. The Fish Foundation is all about creating self-sufficiency in poor communities, and the POC is out there making this a reality. There aren't many groups dedicated to giving the poor the rights of self-determination. Right now, they're helping poor residents take back public schools and public housing that were closed by the state after Hurricane Katrina.

The housing crisis is acute in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of New Orleans. Before the storm, homeowners made up 80% of the Ninth Ward. These people lived in the area for generations, and consequently many owned their homes outright. However, many of these homeowners didn't have their property insured, and today they're unable to afford expensive flood and wind insurance, the cost of paying private contractors to rebuild their homes, and the cost of elevating their homes to meet guidelines to protect against future flood damage.

On the other side of the coin, people who lived in public housing before the storm have not been allowed to return to their homes. Most the public housing projects were structurally *undamaged* by the storm, leaving us to wonder why state and local authorities won't allow residents to reclaim their homes and property. We've driven by public housing to see for ourselves, and it makes no sense to us why hundreds of apartments would be surrounded by chain link fence. The residents of New Orleans public housing are overwhelmingly poor and black. The People's Organizing Committee isn't content to wait on the state to rebuild the community; they're helping the poor do it for themselves. They're mobilizing residents to take back their apartments, and they're also helping rebuild and repair classrooms ahead of the next school year. We're going to be filming some of their work at a local public school in the next few days, as well as assisting in their fundraising efforts. The images above show a housing project in the Seventh Ward that's been fenced off, as well as a local school.

After meeting with the POC, we drove two hours out to Gulfport, Mississippi to meet with Melinda Harthcock, the executive director of the STEPS coalition. Hurricane Katrina narrowly missed New Orleans, but the full force of the storm all but destroyed the Mississippi Gulf Coast. While the news media reports ad inifitum on the destruction in Louisiana, the plight of the residents of Mississippi has gone under-reported. The poor communities of this region are facing similar issues of displacement -- a lack of housing, community and prosperity in the wake of the storm. STEPS is acting as a bridge for grassroots organizations in Southern Mississippi who are working to rebuild their communities. As Melinda explained, millions of federal dollars haven't yet made their way down to the poor people who need the most help. Much like the People's Organizing Committee, STEPS is supporting a rebuilding effort from the ground-up, rather than waiting on the state and local government. We're going to help publicize the work of STEPS and their thirty allied organizations by boosting their internet presence via FISHNET.