Thursday at NEMA

Wednesday and today four of us (Selene, Janet, Moira and myself) went to volunteer at NEMA (Lower Ninth Ward Empowerment Association). This experience was very unique in that we worked on the beginning of what will soon be policy on redeveloping the Lower 9th Ward.
We started out by understanding Community Land Trusts, simply stated a community puts all their resources or as much as needed into buying their lands and being responsible to each other for the upkeep of their properties; all monies from renting out goes to the community. This is a fight against pushing out low-income housing and the government having say in what to do with homes after a disaster. Once we gained efficient knowledge on the topic we were going to write a letter to be sent to the community explaining NENA's attempts to regain property rights. This did not get completed since we only had two days:-/ But it is a project we can do from home since we vowed to remain in contact!:)

Our second project, which took up most of the two days was preparing and putting data into the computer that will eventually create a digital map of the Lower Ninth Ward and will depict every home that has been gutted, untouched, rebuilt, and if people have moved into the home or not. This information was party done by past volunteers who surveyed the desolate area. But Our work took the project even further, we put all of the data in which was an amazing accomplishment! But, we also learned how to put houses into census tracks and census blocks which are smaller areas. To understand how to do this Selene and I took a ride around the lower ninth ward to see which houses would fit into a census block depending on street address. I had the chance to walk around with a developer also who guided us through the project.

At the end of the second day we were upset to leave our work, but we left the agency and developer with a letter describing the work we did and a map of the census tracks and blocks for the next volunteers.

For me it was an amazing experience in urban planning and organizing principles.