Day 26, Way 26So, it's Friday. Fridays during lent Catholics are not supposed to eat meat. Used to be that Catholics couldn't eat meat at all during Lent, which is why they ate a lot of fish. So I thought, well, I wonder what has happened to all the people who used to work in the fishing industries on the Gulf Coast. And voila! For this week's
Put Your Works Where Your Faith Is Friday, I bring you:
The Southern Mutual Help AssociationThis is cheating, a little bit, because the SMHA is not a religious organization per se. As its
website explains,
Southern Mutual Help Association (SMHA) helps people develop strong, healthy, prosperous rural communities in Louisiana. Our special focus is with distressed rural communities whose livelihoods are interdependent with our land and waters. We work primarily with agricultural and pervasively poor communities, women and people of color. We help build rural communities through people's growth in their own empowerment and the just management of resources. In keeping with its mission, Southern Mutual is playing a key role in the recovery and long-term development of hurricane-ravaged areas of South Louisiana ravaged through its Rural Recovery Response.It was founded in 1969 by two women--and here the faith thing comes in, because one of them was a
Dominican nun--who felt that Lyndon Jonson's War On Poverty had not accomplished its mission:
Several of us had previously confronted the failures of the War on Poverty, of policies that did not change people’s lives because they were based on service, not on real change. When we began to make changes, to involve people into real decision making, we were fired. Across the South programs were taken over and became tools for the creation of a service system, not for making substantive change.Yes, that's a shame...but at least this experience taught all future American presidents never to declare war on abstract concepts! Oh, wait.
The SMHA is defined by its core belief that the decisions about how to eradicate poverty and strengthen rural communities should be made by and in consultation with the people who are actually going to be affected by them. This insistence on local control has meant that the SMHA has
given up on applying for federal money, on the grounds that it comes with too many strings attached and ultimately ministers to the needs of the program and its administrators rather than the needs of the beneficiaries. Nevertheless, the SMHA has made an
impact by forming and partnering with other organizations to help develop rural communities. Their staff is, by my calculations,
94% female, and a new nun, Sister Helen Vinton, has taken the place of the original nun, Sister Anne Bizalion who passed away in 1997. And permit me to say that if people like Sister Helen Vinton, Sister Anne Bizalion, and the many other indefatigable and fearless nuns who routinely put themselves in harm's way to help the wretched of the earth actually had any power within the Catholic hierarchy, the world would be a better place for it. But of course they don't, because...well, never mind, moving on.
Since they were already in the business of rural recovery, the SMHA is well-placed to
help rebuild after Katrina. They are doing a lot of that basic home rebuilding work that I posted about in the first week here; a volunteer team from a
Vermont Universalist church has put up a slide show documenting their demo & rebuilding of the home of the Rosser family. They're still doing plenty--they have a waiting list of 100 families for these rehab projects--so if you're handy with tools and you want to help, you can
sign up here. They are also working to try to get local businesses reopened so that people can actually live in these towns again once the houses are rebuilt; for instance they helped get some of the local
restaurants reopened so that people would have somewhere to eat. There's a
blog you can go to to see what they're up to lately, and of course you can
donate.
Reading the SMHA's site has been an interesting experience because it contains a lot of the same anti-big-government language that one is accustomed to hearing from the right. Just to see what would happen, I googled the SMHA and "Republican." I discovered
this interesting piece by a group called the National Committee for Reponsive Philanthropy, which recommends the SMHA as the kind of community-based organization that is in a better position to help with the long-term rebuilding effort than the Red Cross and the other mega-nonprofits who got most of the initial donations for immediate relief. It also exhorts its readers to be vigilant about right-wing attempts to exploit the tragedy, and includes the following memorable line: "Adversity should bring our society together, but it shouldn't make us collectively stupid."
The SMHA's story, in fact, reminds us that no one party has a monopoly on collective stupidity. The reason the SMHA's "we're doing it the right way, not the government way" refrain sounds more persuasive to me now than it would have 10 years ago is that this particular government is corrupt, incompetent, power-mad, abominable, and continually acting in bad faith. Of course we have to turn to the private sector; the public sector is possessed by a demon. However, it is true that no matter who's in power at the moment, there has to be some room for local control and local initiative where it will actually benefit people in need. This country would be better off if the "local control" idea could be liberated from the school-voucher ownership-society crowd, for whom it is basically a tactical weapon used to defund and dismantle the foundational structure that allows things like public education to exist. There's no reason, for instance, that federal education policy can't be so structured as to leave most of the decisions about how to actually run the damn school up to the local administrators, and still provide the funding that will allow them to serve their students. But no, all anyone ever wants to do with federal education policy is get into bullshit political battles over intelligent design, sex education, and standardized testing. It is a basic problem with politics in this country that making shit
work doesn't get you anywhere near the kind of press and poll support as grandstanding about some wedge issue does.
Anyway.
The SMHA is good people doing good work and making a real difference in poor rural communities--which, as they repeatedly point out, are always the last on anyone's list of places to help. You go, girls.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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