Why New Orleans?'
I didn’t think long and hard and weigh a lot of factors before deciding that since I was interested in volunteering I should probably go to New Orleans. I think I made the right choice, but I was going on instinct. There’s a vague sense across the country that the city still hasn’t recovered, plus I thought New Orleans would be a cool place to spend a couple months. Since I’m interested in other people’s volunteer experiences as well as my own, the suspicion that a lot of other people were coming to New Orleans on a hunch made it feel like the place to start my research.
Just as I decided, on instinct to go to New Orleans, I chose to work with organizations confronting scarcity of affordable housing, rebuilding and homelessness because it seemed obvious. It’s my sense that rebuilding New Orleans neighborhoods and housing stock is one of the most high profile service projects in the US.
According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, in 2007 over 166,000 volunteers from other states traveled at least 120 miles to volunteer in Louisiana. That’s 19 percent of the state’s total volunteers that year. Louisiana ranked sixth in the US in total number of long distance volunteers though the overall volunteer rate was ranked 48th. Rebuilding the Gulf Coast post-Katrina is the main reason lots of out-of-towners end up volunteering here.
A note on quoting of federal agency data: I am aware that volunteering is widely encouraged by government and supported by mainstream values, and since I’m wary of many conventionally “good” practices like marriage, employment, sobriety and exercise, this makes me a bit uneasy. But I’m going to put skepticism while I figure out if there’s actual progress to be made as a volunteer in the Crescent City. At some point, I’ll compare more anti-establishment activism with volunteerism, but for now I’m going to have faith in community service.