Christopher E Manning: We Came to Rebuild New Orleans, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

"When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing the deaths of more than 1, 800 people and damages of over $100 billion, observers called it a "once in a lifetime storm." In response, over 1.5 million volunteers went to New Orleans through a constellation of nonprofit organizations, and some five hundred new charities formed to give the city aid. With annotated interviews of the activists who led this recovery, We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers documents this movement and provides insights into New Orleans history, Hurricane Katrina scholarship, and the scholarship on volunteering. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans draws from over 120 hours of interviews with leaders and staffers involved in Katrina recovery in housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The book seeks to understand and contextualize the characteristics that led people to dedicate a significant portion of their lives to the recovery and asks whether using nonprofit volunteer labor was the most effective method to execute a recovery on this scale. Although recovery work in New Orleans was a significant chapter in the volunteers' lives, it usually represented a portion of an ongoing narrative of service and civic engagement. Despite the magnitude of the volunteers' goodwill, the testimony of these activists highlights the inadequacy of using volunteer nonprofit organizations in disaster recovery. Although the steady stream of books covering Katrina points to the extensive nature of the scholarship, the experiences of those on the front lines of New Orleans' long-term recovery process have often been ignored. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans tests the dominant theories of volunteerism within a real-world context and provides a detailed view of an essentially neoliberal response to disaster recovery in the absence, at the outset at least, of a viable government sponsored program for recovery in housing"--