We Came to Rebuild New Orleans - by Christopher E Manning (Paperback)

About the Book

"When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing the deaths of more than 1,800 people and damages of over $100 billion, observers called it a "once in a lifetime storm." In response, over 1.5 million volunteers went to New Orleans through a constellation of nonprofit organizations, and some five hundred new charities formed to give the city aid. With annotated interviews of the activists who led this recovery, We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers documents this movement and provides insights into New Orleans history, Hurricane Katrina scholarship, and the scholarship on volunteering. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans draws from over 120 hours of interviews with leaders and staffers involved in Katrina recovery in housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The book seeks to understand and contextualize the characteristics that led people to dedicate a significant portion of their lives to the recovery and asks whether using nonprofit volunteer labor was the most effective method to execute a recovery on this scale. Although recovery work in New Orleans was a significant chapter in the volunteers' lives, it usually represented a portion of an ongoing narrative of service and civic engagement. Despite the magnitude of the volunteers' goodwill, the testimony of these activists highlights the inadequacy of using volunteer nonprofit organizations in disaster recovery. Although the steady stream of books covering Katrina points to the extensive nature of the scholarship, the experiences of those on the front lines of New Orleans' long-term recovery process have often been ignored. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans tests the dominant theories of volunteerism within a real-world context and provides a detailed view of an essentially neoliberal response to disaster recovery in the absence, at the outset at least, of a viable government sponsored program for recovery in housing"--

Book Synopsis

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing more than 1,800 deaths and more than $100 billion in damages, it was deemed a "once-in-a-lifetime storm." After the hurricane, over 1.5 million volunteers came to New Orleans through various nonprofit organizations, and around 500 new charities were established to aid the city's recovery. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans documents this significant movement through interviews with the activists who spearheaded the city's recovery.

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the crucial role of nonprofit organizations in New Orleans's recovery, scholarly examinations of these recovery workers' experiences remain scarce. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans fills this gap, drawing on a vast corpus of interviews with more than fifty leaders and staff involved in Katrina recovery across various areas, including housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The interviews seek to understand what motivates individuals to devote significant portions of their lives to recovery, and to assess whether nonprofit volunteer labor was an effective recovery strategy.

Analysis of the testimonies of participants reveals that most of the disaster recovery corps, even those in their early twenties, had histories of activism or civic engagement before committing to New Orleans recovery work. While significant, their recovery work in New Orleans tended to represent a single chapter in a broader life story of service and civic engagement. Despite the good intentions of the volunteers, their testimonies also highlight the limitations of relying on volunteer nonprofit organizations for disaster recovery.

We Came to Rebuild New Orleans thus offers an extraordinary new look at long-term disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sharing the personal stories of nonprofit workers from many walks of life, the book emphasizes their persistent spirit of activism and civic engagement, while also reflecting critically on the effectiveness of volunteer--based disaster recovery initiatives.

Review Quotes

"We Came to Rebuild New Orleans examines the experiences of the mass of volunteers who cycled through post-Katrina New Orleans contributing to post-disaster cleanup, gutting and rehabbing homes, new construction, service delivery, and wetlands restoration. Through fine-grained case studies of volunteers, Christopher E. Manning provides us with a unique window into their motivations, desires, and experiences. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans casts a critical eye on the limits of nonprofit and volunteer-led reconstruction, but also sketches a practical way forward that might center more democratic and effective coordination of public resources and local recovery and reconstruction work in the event of future disasters."--Cedric Johnson, editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans

"Christopher Manning's We Came to Rebuild New Orleans is an erudite model of engaged scholarship on one of the worst disasters to ever befall an American city. Manning vividly describes the enormous altruism of volunteer recovery workers specifically and the American people in general, while convincingly documenting the inadequacy of relying upon nonprofit volunteer labor to execute a recovery of this scale. This is a must-read for anyone interested in public policy, disaster relief, environmental sustainability, or the history of American cities."--Timothy J. Gilfoyle, associate editor of the Journal of Urban History and editor of The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York

"Manning has produced a book that is at once a model application of oral history and a probing examination of the massive volunteer response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the city of New Orleans. This engaging public history offers important lessons for how to better integrate volunteer and government resources in the response to future disasters."--Theodore J. Karamanski, author of Mastering the Inland Seas: How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America

About the Author

An Army brat, historian, and former professional Latin dancer and choreographer, Christopher E. Manning received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2003 and has served as the vice president for student affairs and campus diversity at San Diego State University since 2023.