Katrina Response by RSS

With support and participation from USDA/CSREES, the Farm Foundation, the Southern Rural Development Center, the Community Development Society and the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals, RSS has organized a meeting of about forty individuals representing these organizations to develop a plan of action to guide a joint response to the disastrous situation created by hurricanes this summer across the South. This meeting is being held in Nashville, TN next week. I will have a report on the outcome of this meeting in the next TRS, so I hope you will watch for it. I feel certain there will be opportunities forthcoming for many more RSS members to play a role in implementing this plan when it is completed.

This is not to say that individual members of RSS are not already engaged in such recovery work as, indeed, they are. Some could not avoid it! Shirley Laska of the Univ. of New Orleans and Director of the Center for Hazards Assessment has been engaged in research and action efforts and has testified before the House Science Committee's Basic Research Subcommittee last month. In that appearance Shirley described her work with FEMA where she has noted that "... social science research demonstrates that agency assistance should be locally situated, take place over a significant period of time, and develop ongoing working relationships with community officials." Her work at the Center has also discovered that "... repeatedly-flooded structures are found in clusters and thus the response must be spread across local areas, not by individual homes." Shirley has also demonstrated that participatory approaches have proven to build community resiliency, an important factor in recovery activities.

John Green of Delta State University has given leadership to efforts in East Biloxi to build on this participatory approach, convening a meeting of institutional responders in October and building a project that engages citizens in self-recovery efforts. John's website ( see http://ntweb.deltastate.edu/vp_academic/jgreen/Institute_CBR/CBR%20and%20Disasters/CBR_and_Disasters_Main_Page.htm) not only provides a vehicle for disseminating information from a variety of sources, but shares a research agenda developed by participants at the October meeting and describes his own (and Anna Kleiner's) community-based research agenda being implemented in East Biloxi. As you may realize, community-based research is also an action agenda and intended to be empowering for local citizens, further building community resiliency.

Bob Gramling and Bill Freudenburg (along with Laska) have been meeting with Kai Erikson who is leading an ASA-sponsored response effort. Bob reports he is far too busy working with local leaders on a variety of issues to be able to attend the Nashville meeting. "Go get 'um, Bob!"

I suspect there are other RSS members who are similarly engaged and other efforts that I'm not aware of and don't have room to report on here. If you know of someone or some thing you would like to share with RSS members, please send it along or post it in a response on this blog. While the specific aspects of the hurricane disasters in the South are horrendous and tragic in many aspects, there are also general features of sociological importance to learn and to share that may assist recovery efforts in another place and time. It is to that, as well as the immediate needs, to which rural sociologists are so often dedicated.

Your thoughts???

Ken Pigg

Note: Quotes attributed to Laska taken from the Washington Update, November 21, 2005, Vol. 24, No. 21 published by COSSA.