For years a group of committed community activists in New Orleans have been working cooperatively with local residents to better their neighborhoods and city. But after Hurricane Katrina devastated large swaths of the city, the focus of the organization has changed to focus on the rebuilding effort and its unintended effects.
From an article by Greg Allen posted on the NPR website:
“The group was founded nearly 15 years ago as part of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national group started by community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Jeremiah Group member Nell Bolton, who’s with the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, says the organization took its name from a passage in the Bible.
‘The prophet Jeremiah is telling the Israelites, who are in exile in Babylon, to ‘seek the welfare of the city, for in its welfare you will find your own.’ And that’s the motto of the Jeremiah group locally,’ Bolton says.
[…]after Katrina, the Jeremiah Group found a new focus as people returned to New Orleans and tried to pick up their lives, says Jaime Oviedo of Christ Temple Church.
“We started to hear that rent was doubling and tripling in some cases. And we started to hear this, and there was nobody fighting against it. And we started to have public meetings, and we started to hear this cry of ‘the rent, the rent, the rent,'” Oviedo says. “And we said we need to get into the fight.”
Renters, in large part, have been all but forgotten in the rebuilding process. The LRA does have a small program to help landlords rebuild. But after the storm, rents in New Orleans have shot up — in some cases nearly doubling.
In small house meetings across the city, Jeremiah Group leaders heard from residents who felt that the government had let them down. Group member Janet Barnwell says for many, it was natural that they turned to their churches and to people they trusted to share their stories.
“When Jeremiah was available to churches and to community organizations, people spoke up. And perhaps people who had never spoken before, who’d never wanted to be political activists, spoke up,” Barnwell says.
Out of those stories, the Jeremiah Group developed a plan.”
The plan creates soft mortgages and provides the financial resources for people who have been renting to buy their own homes at affordable monthly payments.
Read the details and additional background here.