Service And Disaster Recovery
Subscribe to the Blog RSS FeedOne of the strongest arguments for the importance of service has been the way in which volunteers have rallied to help communities ravaged by natural disaster. Nowhere has this been demonstrated more powerfully than on the Gulf Coast, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
To mark the 5th year anniversary of that disaster, the Corporation For National And Community Service has published an excellent fact sheet on how national service has played a key role in helping hurricane-struck communities. Here's the intro:
Since August 2005, the Corporation for National and Community Service has provided
more than $200 million worth of resources to Gulf Coast states recovering from the
devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.Working in cooperation with
FEMA, state and local authorities, and hundreds of nonprofit groups, more than 110,000
national service volunteers have contributed more than 9.6 million hours to the relief,
recovery, and rebuilding effort. They also have coordinated an additional 648,000
community volunteers, a major share of the overall volunteer force. Activities have
included supporting shelter operations and housing placement; establishing call centers and
warehousing sites; assisting with case work and benefits coordination; setting up school
and youth programs; blue roofing, debris removal, and mucking out homes; serving on
long-term recovery committees; and construction of new homes for low-income families. As
a result of its experience with hurricane relief and recovery, the Corporation has established
a number of new procedures to provide more effective and timely response to disasters
under authority of FEMA mission assignments. Using lessons learned in Katrina, trained
AmeriCorps teams have been deployed to winter ice storms in Missouri, tornadoes in
Greensburg, Kansas, and Parkersburg, Iowa, California forest fires, and 2008 flooding in
Iowa and Missouri, the BP oil spill, among other disasters. The Corporation continues to
shift its resources to support a variety of disaster preparedness and response activities.
It's worth reading the entire fact brief, because it explains the lessons learned from Katrina, and how service volunteers are putting them to work, even today as they help the Gulf respond to the BP oil spill.
Oh, and Serve.gov produced a pretty nice vid too:
