INC NEWS - Asheville Conference "Reimagining New Orleans" looking for participants. May 25-28.

[Wendy Jacobs]

This conference is welcoming participation from city planners, architects, clergy, artists, etc. Please pass on this info to those who think may be interested in participating.

Thank you.
Wendy Jacobs
Participants' stories and varied life experiences are grist for conversations

May 25-28 Council to "reimagine" New Orleans

Emily DeMoor witnessed the fury of Hurricane Katrina firsthand. She rode out the storm in a New Orleans hospital with her teenage son who was suffering from a collapsed lung. Pam Broom escaped the city, driving north out of New Orleans as the storm was approaching, her 22- and 17-year-old son and daughter and 5-year-old granddaughter in tow. 

Emily - an educator, ecologist and community activist -faces huge challenges putting her life back together. She has a place to live - for the moment; but draconian cuts in the university programs where she used to teach have eliminated her livelihood. Pam's old job in New Orleans - running an adult literacy program - is waiting for her, but there's no place for her family to live; she now lives in Durham (NC) where she works with other Katrina evacuees, helping them find employment.

Neither woman has let the experience stop them from reaching out to others. With her colleague Jim O'Neill, Emily now offers a "day of recollection" entitled Finding Your Way Back Home: The Place that Storms Can't Destroy to those affected by Katrina. Pam, the hub in the local network of evacuees, enjoyed a minor success last week when she managed to connect the donor of a small warehouse of Rooms-to-Go furniture with her "Katrina neighbors" (the name the evacuees have given themselves).

Both women will be among a diverse group of 10 delegates from the New Orleans area participating in a May 25-28 Council on Reimagining New Orleans. Joining them will be 30 other participants from North Carolina and across the country. Among them: 

  a.. Anthony Weston, an environmental philosopher at Elon University and author of Back to Earth, who sees our time as one of dramatic social change and hopes Katrina may have jump-started a process that will lead to new models of ecologically sustainable cities; 
  b.. Nancy Margulies, author, facilitator and graphic artist from California, who is planning a series of events around the country, using the World Café process (which she helped found), art, and music to spark meaningful conversations that explore what - in the aftermath of Katrina - we can we learn regarding leadership or how to better prepare for disasters; and 
  c.. octogenarian Robert Seymour, an outspoken champion of racial inclusion during the sixties as pastor of a progressive Baptist church in Chapel Hill (NC), who is a forward-looking activist around aging issues. 
The stories and the varied life experiences of the participants from New Orleans will become the starting point for a series of conversations at the Council that confront the stark challenges raised by Katrina: the existence of an "Other America" and of continuing racial inequity and the utter bankruptcy of our current approach to environmental policy. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) will be used as a facilitation process to focus on what has worked and, capturing that positive energy, dream these successes forward into possible scenarios. 

This COUNCIL OF ELDERS will be held at the Wildacres Retreat Center in western North Carolina. The diverse group of participants will include: architects, developers and urban planners; environmentalists and other public policy activists; social service professionals and relief workers; community leaders and elected representatives; advocates for the poor and disenfranchised; clergy and ethicists; artists, musicians, storytellers and poets; and impassioned elders. 

The facilitation team includes John Cronin, a retired hospital CEO who has used AI with community and corporate leadership groups across the country to spark innovative thinking and change, and Isaiah Madison, an activist who worked as a civil rights attorney in Mississippi during the seventies, pastored United Methodist and Baptist congregations in three Southern states during the eighties, and currently teaches political science at Jackson State University.

The registration fee of $445 covers lodging and meals for the 4-day Council and contributes to a pool of funds to cover the costs for the delegates from New Orleans and provide them with small stipends. Additional support for the project is being provided by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Blumenthal Foundation, and the Triangle Community Foundation.

By launching a national conversation, the Council in May will build upon heroic efforts by many who - sometimes one neighborhood at a time - are working tirelessly to engage their fellow citizens, come to consensus, and birth a new vision of how civil society might be lived out in the specific community of New Orleans. Let us follow their lead.

Second Journey, a nonprofit organization based in Chapel Hill, NC, has conducted Visioning Councils across the country pursuant to its mission of "creating a new vision of aging, new models of community for the second half of life, and a just and sustainable world now and for future generations." Additional information - including application form and fuller bios of confirmed participants - is posted to the Second Journey website at SecondJourney.org/NewOrleans.htm.


Second Journey, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit corporation






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.deltaforce.net/mailman/private/inc-list/attachments/20060421/1cde89d2/attachment.htm