In New Orleans, the St. Bernard Project is Proving There's No Place Like Home

Congrats to our friends and neighbors over at the ST. Bernard Project: featured now on GOOD Magazine's website!

GOOD and Toyota, co-sponsors of the People Are Awesome series, bring you additional stories about individuals and organizations that are making a positive impact in our world.

When Zack Rosenburg and Liz McCartney took a trip to help rebuild homes in post-Katrina New Orleans, they intended to stay two weeks. But that all changed when they saw the scale of need when they arrived. Even six months after the hurricane, homeowners were still living in deplorable, substandard conditions.

Rosenburg, a lawyer, and McCartney, a teacher, had no family ties in New Orleans and had no experience working in disaster recovery or construction, but the slow pace of recovery efforts spurred them to action. Inspired by the perseverance of  the community and frustrated by the redundancy, lack of coordination, and efficiency of the recovery efforts, they left their lives in Washington D.C. and moved to New Orleans. “It was our only choice: we could be part of the problem, or we could be part of the solution,” Rosenburg says.

They established St. Bernard Project (SBP), a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding homes in New Orleans.  Named after one of the hardest hit parishes, SBP serves the St. Bernard Parish area, the only U.S. county to have been declared 100 percent uninhabitable after a natural disaster. After the flood waters receded, only eight homes in the parish (of more than 27,000) were deemed safe. READ MORE >>

via www.good.is