Notes From the Rebuild Photo Gallery
February 22, 2010
My friend photographer Linda Jaquez came to visit me a couple months ago and she took the photos in this gallery. I wrote captions for each image and an essay describing the work that non-profit organizations are doing to get people in New Orleans home
I absolutely see non-profits, especially those that use volunteer labor, shouldering the burden four years after the storm and also doing the most high-profile work in the city. However, what my essay doesn’t say explicitly and what I’m still grappling with are my misgivings about the predominance of non-profits in post-Katrina recovery.
That non-government organizations are at the forefront of this work suggests an absence of assistance from federal, state, and city governments. Homeowners and even renters did receive compensation from government agencies (though it was often not sufficient), but the help to rebuild–the contractors, labor, and materials–came from private citizens, companies, and non-profit organizations. Some of these were predatory and some saintly and it goes without saying that any government agency would have been both of those things as well, but my concern is the way that nonprofit organizations while responding to an obvious and gaping need, also inadvertently take the heat off government.
This is not to disparage the work that non-profits are doing. Someone had to step up. It’s more to state my own misgiving and my intention to look more closely at the implications of non-government driven disaster recovery both on individual and civic levels. In particular I’m wondering about what’s referred to as the Non-profit Industrial Complex and the ways organizations start as grassroots, political groups and gradually become more corporate institutions as they take on more responsibility and become more successful.
