A Healthy Dose of Anarchy

After Katrina, nontraditional, decentralized relief steps in where big government

and big charity failed.

by Neille Ilel
Reason, December 2006

When I walked into Rose and Gary Singletary's house in the black, middle-class
Gentilly section of New Orleans in February, I saw the shell of a building. The
floors, the walls, and all the fixtures toilets, sinks, doors--had been removed.
Floodwater from Hurricane Katrina had reached higher than the Singletarys'
front door, and their home had to be stripped down to the frame to bleach out the
mold. After months of on-again, off-again work, the house was finally ready to be
rebuilt.

The couple had all but given up on getting any more than the $2,000 they had
received from their insurance company. They had been insured under a state
initiative called the Louisiana Citizens Fair Plan, administered by the American
International Group. According to Americans for Insurance Reform and other
watchdog groups--not to mention several class action suits--the group paid out
$2,000 "advances" to its policy holders and then effectively disappeared through
tactics such as not answering calls, constantly changing adjusters, and conflating
wind/storm damage (covered) with flooding (not covered).

But the Singletarys were beaming. Nearly six months after the hurricane hit, their
house was miles ahead of any others in the neighborhood. It got that way not with
conventional charity or insurance, nor with government aid, but with a ragtag
crew of amateurs. Were it not for a rotating group of young volunteers, the house
probably would have been in the same state as those surrounding it: empty, only
superficially cleaned, and growing more mold by the day.

"They're a godsend," Rose gushed. "You'll find everybody down at Common

Ground. They've got lawyers, child care, computers with Internet."

Two giant spray-painted signs point to the Common Ground Collective's

headquarters in a church parking lot in the now infamous Ninth Ward, where the
group houses its volunteers, takes names for house gutting, and gives away
bleach, buckets, respirators, canned food, and other supplies. The collective was
founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina by a former Black Panther and some
street medics trained at mass protests.

Like most residents I talked to, the Singletarys had seen little of the Red Cross
aside from an occasional food truck, and they evinced nothing but frustration
when I mentioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It was a
major coup that seven men from the city had actually arrived to pick up debris
from their house on the day I visited. Of the seven, four were dedicated solely to
detouring nonexistent traffic.

The Red Cross and FEMA are under serious scrutiny for their mishandling of
Katrina's aftermath. In addition to a very public failure to manage the immediate
flooding crisis, FEMA has been skewered in a recent Department of Homeland
Security inspector general's report, in its own internal audit, and in private and
public conversations along the Gulf Coast. The inspector general's report faulted
the agency for poor communication, lack of preparedness, and inadequate
staffing. FEMA's emergency housing program, which includes expensive cruise
ships and trailers that cost $30,000 apiece, is fraught with inefficiency and waste.

The Red Cross is widely thought to have performed better than FEMA, but it's on
the ropes too. At the request of the aid organization, the FBI recently took charge
of an investigation involving volunteers who misappropriated millions meant for
victims of Hurricane Katrina. A March New York Times report revealed major
gaps in the organization's system of accountability. Red Cross officials have
acknowledged that their reaction in the storm's aftermath was inadequate, and
that tensions, possibly race-based, have sometimes emerged between its
volunteers and the residents.

Against this backdrop of failure, successes stand out starkly. Perhaps the most
obvious mistake made in the institutional response to Katrina was a failure to
innovate, to ignore the old rules and procedures when they stood in the way of
helping residents in need. Individual citizens, church groups, and a new brand of
grassroots relief organizations stepped in to fill the gaps. These grassroots groups
dispense with bureaucracy and government aid. They rely instead on small
donations of money and supplies, and the commitment of on-the-ground
volunteers and the communities they serve. In addition to Common Ground,
secular organizations such as Emergency Communities, the People's Hurricane
Relief Fund, and Four Directions have joined a multitude of small church groups
in the region to provide services where government and big aid organizations fell
short. When necessary, they simply ignored the authorities' wrongheaded
decisions: pushing supplies through closed checkpoints, setting up in unapproved
areas, breaking the rules when it
made more sense than following them.

Their organizers, as well as their volunteers, have little experience with relief
work. They live in tents or sleep on cots in repurposed churches and community
centers. Volunteers run the gamut from hippie dropouts to middle-class students
on spring break, and the outposts they've built are filled with things you'd never
expect to see anywhere near a relief effort: free acupuncture, vegetarian cooking,
cross-dressing volunteers, a giant geodesic dome. Despite their inexperience and
occasional outlandishness, they are organizing and delivering some of the most
effective relief work in the area.
They aren't a complete solution to the problem. But they have complemented and
sometimes superseded other efforts, and the old-time charities are starting to
take respectful notice of their unusual new colleagues.

Acupuncturists Without Borders

I first heard about Common Ground in an email from my friend Jeff, a New York
bohemian who frequented underground art parties and halfway legal street
events. It's fair to say that many of the people who organized and attended those
events were of a type. They had odd jobs and even odder side projects; they made
their own clothes, and it showed. And they threw really good parties.

So when I learned some of the same people were helping organize a relief project
in New Orleans, I was both fascinated and skeptical. When I poked around
further and learned that many were alumni of Burning Man and the Rainbow
Gathering, two of the nation's biggest, strangest counterculture festivals, I was
even more fascinated and even more skeptical. Could a bunch of middle- and
upper-middle-class kids, many of them fresh from "alternative" experiences,
connect with poor, churchgoing residents of the South? And if they could, would
the experiment affect more than a handful of residents?

To my surprise, the answers were yes and yes. As I watched these groups in
action, it became clear that they were connecting with the locals and that their
services were invaluable. Residents used words like "heaven-sent" and "angels"
when describing the volunteers, even the guy serving food in a cowboy hat and a
dress.

Common Ground's initial incarnation was a medical clinic in an Algiers mosque.

Algiers is a decidedly poor and drab cousin to the rest of New Orleans; it's hard to
believe that its sprawl of nondescript homes and apartment buildings is just
across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. But unlike the city across
the river, Algiers didn't flood. And within a few days of the storm, several young
men on bicycles started knocking on doors in this unremarkable place, asking if
people needed medical help. They called themselves street medics.

"A street medic," explains Iggy River, a Common Ground volunteer, "is a person
with an indeterminate amount of knowledge, usually from mass gatherings or
street protests, of acute need first aid"--treatment for dehydration, cuts, broken
bones. With his dark disheveled hair and giant wooden ear spools, Iggy looked
like he would be more at home at a World Trade Organization protest than
coordinating supplies in the ruins of a poor black neighborhood. Indeed, it was
for such protests that the street medics learned their craft. After Katrina, street
medics provided first aid and basic medical services such as blood pressure and
diabetes testing.

The renegade volunteers soon ran into Malik Rahim, a neighborhood activist and
former Black Panther, and Common Ground was born. By the time I visited, the
group's clinic had moved into a permanent storefront location and was staffed by
three motherly receptionists, two acupuncturists, and one overworked doctor.
The acupuncturists hailed from Acupuncturists Without Borders, one of the more
curious groups founded after Katrina. To accommodate medical volunteers from
all over the country, the state of Louisiana allowed out-of-state practitioners to
provide treatment without a Louisiana license. The acupuncturists fell under that
umbrella.

In the clinic's waiting room a man with diabetes waited for acupuncture with his
wife. Since the hurricane, Dennis Waits had come back to his job as a furniture
restorer. But because only two of his colleagues also returned to work, the
company was cut from its health insurance program. Waits, a solidly-built,
middle-aged white man in a work shirt, did not look like an adherent of
alternative medicine. But his diabetes had led to a condition called nephrotic
syndrome that caused painful swelling in his legs and feet. It wasn't easy for him
to swallow his pride and get care from a free clinic, but he was up to two shots of
cortisone a day, and it was wearing off after a few hours. In any case, he wasn't
afraid to have needles put into his wrists.

You're Seeing Life Here'

Waveland, Mississippi, is one of those small Gulf Coast towns that wasn't covered
much by the national media but suffered Katrina's winds and storm surge as
much as anyplace else. It's also where a band of hippies from the Rainbow
Gathering landed just after the storm. "Waveland was as far as you could go
then," said David Sayotovich, a tall, skinny 51-year-old who has been attending
Rainbow Gatherings since the 1980s.

Every year, usually in July, a group of like-minded folks get together for a week or
so in a national forest to honor the ideals of peace, love, and cooperation. Begun
in 1972, the Rainbow Gathering is an institution of the American counterculture;
it brought an estimated 15,000 participants to the Routt National Forest for its
annual gathering this year, according to the Denver Post. Most people associate
the group with drumming and smoking pot, but the group also manages to cook
and serve meals for a large number of people with no running water and no
electricity. To people like Sayotovich, it was a no-brainer to use those skills to
help people hurt by Katrina.

With encouragement from a local church group, a Rainbow busload of volunteers

decamped in Waveland, pitched tents across from the police station, and started
serving hot meals to the displaced. "The FEMA people said, You can't do this--it's
not in the manual,' but we got away with it," Sayotovich said with a grin.

Dubbed the New Waveland Caf, the operation didn't just feed residents. It
encouraged them to participate in cooking, cleaning, and other details that went
into running the aid effort, transforming the helped into helpers. Tales of how the
residents of this small Southern town took to a group of hippies reached as far as
the Chicago Tribune, which reported that the group ran its kitchen so well that
one Red Cross volunteer quit to join them instead. The Gambit, a New Orleans
alt-weekly, described a police officer looking the other way when the smell of
marijuana drifted out of the Rainbow camp.

"You're not just seeing a truck driving around passing out Styrofoam containers
of food," said Mark Weiner, taking a dig at the Red Cross. "You're seeing life
here." Behind him a 40-foot geodesic dome--a tent repurposed from the 35,000-
person Burning Man art festival in Nevada--was beginning to fill with the day's
lunch crowd. The 23-year-old Weiner is a founder and executive director of the
nonprofit Emergency Communities, which set up shop in the parking lot of what
once was Finish Line Off-Track Betting in storm-ravaged St. Bernard Parish, just
east of New Orleans. There it operated the Made With Love Caf and other
assorted services, including a clothing swap, Internet terminals, and a children's
play area.

Weiner had never run an aid organization before. He hadn't really run anything
before, which was at once obvious and hard to believe. His phone rang
constantly. Young volunteers ran up with questions at a sustained clip. Weiner
accommodated every request with answers that seemed to be pulled out of the
air: "Sounds great." "Whatever you think is best." "Totally." It sounds like a recipe
for chaos, but behind him trays of coconut curry soup were being instantly
replenished as the food line emptied into the cafeteria.

A fresh-faced graduate of Columbia University, Weiner was your typical young

hipster living in Brooklyn and applying for law school when Katrina hit. Like
nearly every volunteer I encountered, he tried to sign up with the Red Cross first.
After he registered online, the Red Cross informed him he would have to wait
weeks to attend a training session before he could see any action. "Basically," he
recalled, "I was impatient."

Then he found out about the New Waveland Caf. There he met Scott Ankeny, a
34-year-old magazine publisher who had been at Burning Man when Katrina hit.
When the Rainbow kitchen organizers closed shop, the two decided to expand on
the Waveland principles by opening a food kitchen in the denser New Orleans
area.

They settled on St. Bernard Parish, where the devastation was so complete that
some say there may have been only two homes in the area untouched by
floodwaters. Weiner and Ankeny estimate that the food kitchen served around
1,400 meals a day to construction workers, relief workers, and residents who
came back to rebuild. In February, there were still no restaurants or grocery
stores open for miles. For most of the diners at the Made With Love Caf, the
only other option was eating packaged food brought in from elsewhere. Five
months after Katrina, the few Red Cross trucks that had been seen early on
weren't coming around anymore.
Nearly all the ingredients at the caf were donated directly from companies or
individuals who were similarly frustrated with the bureaucracy of the traditional
avenues for giving. The caf's roots in the Rainbow subculture were on vivid
display. Twenty-six-year-old Lali, a slip of a woman in homemade clothes and a
giant head wrap, was the "head kitchen mama"; she believed in using as many
fresh organic ingredients as possible, which is not ordinarily a priority in the
wake of a hurricane.

Lali began volunteering in Waveland with friends from the Rainbow Gathering,
going on to set up the St. Bernard Parish operation with Weiner and around a
dozen others. "We're looked at as outsiders in the rest of the world," she said.
"This is a great opportunity for us to prove ourselves, to be seen in a better light,
not to be judged as people who freeload"--a reputation that haunts the hippie
Rainbows. The meals at the caf were delicious: curried vegetables, roasted
organic chicken, homemade apple pie. I tried to eat there whenever possible, as
did every resident I talked to.

One of the first principles of Emergency Communities was that anyone was
invited to come down and help. "If you're a volunteer and want to come down for
two days, we say come on down," Weiner said. "You don't need training.' We'll
give you two hours of orientation right here." And so behind the tents for eating,
cooking, picking up free supplies, and checking email were a hodgepodge of more
ramshackle tents connected by a makeshift boardwalk of moving pallets.
Volunteers, who ran the gamut from home schooled high school students to a
father-son duo on a bonding weekend, just had to get as far as the New Orleans
airport. Emergency Communities housed them, fed them, and put them to work.
According to Weiner, 1,400 volunteers came through the camp, and the caf
served about 160,000 meals to 15,000 residents and workers in the six months it
was open. (It's impossible to verify his numbers independently. For that matter,
it's impossible to verify the Red Cross' numbers independently.)

Disaster Relief As Civil Disobedience

"The most important thing to remember is that this was a catastrophe rather than
a disaster," says E.L. Quarantelli, co-founder of the Disaster Research Center at
the University of Delaware. The Red Cross tried to operate as it has in most
American disasters--and that usually works just fine. But this wasn't a typical
situation. The relief groups' own headquarters were destroyed, as were local
trained workers' homes. You couldn't reliably reach people by phone or email.
And when the Red Cross was prevented from going into some areas, by physical
hazards or by local authorities, it didn't react like the Rainbows, a group used to
operating without the law on its side. It simply turned back.

Quarantelli says it's not unusual to see informal community groups stepping in
during a crisis. But traditionally it's religious groups that engage in this sort of
decentralized relief. The Mennonites, for example, have been at it so long they've
developed a formal organization, the Mennonite Central Committee, which sends
workers to disaster areas all over the world. Grassroots relief organizations like
Common Ground and Emergency Communities, with no religious affiliation
and with members and organizers who are overwhelmingly from outside the
community, do not fit the Disaster Research Center's model of what kinds of
groups emerge to deal with disasters. Their emergence, Quarantelli allows, can be
attributed in part to the Internet, where people who wanted to volunteer could be
matched with groups that needed them instantly, without an existing social
network such as a church.

Relying extensively on Internet communities like Craigslist and Tribe.net, the

volunteer groups are technically savvy; all had wireless networks in their
headquarters. Perhaps more significant, they have a do-it-yourself culture and a
concept they call mutual aid. "We take your house, we help you in repairing it.
You help us by putting up our volunteers," explained Sundjata Kon, a
spokesperson for Common Ground.

In dealing with the disaster's victims, this approach seemed not only natural but
also necessary. Most were not used to standing in food lines or asking strangers
to come work on their homes for free. They wanted to pitch in.

Take Amie Roberts. She used to cut hair at a St. Bernard salon before it flooded.
When she started coming to eat at the Made With Love Caf, it didn't take long
for her to realize that what was left of the parish citizenry needed somewhere to
get their hair cut. She mentioned the idea to the volunteers at the caf, and they
provided her with a tent and some chairs. She brought her own scissors and a
donation can. "I wanted to do it for the residents," she told me while snipping
away at the head of a Red Cross worker from Arkansas. By all accounts hers was
the only functioning hair salon in the entire parish, attracting dozens of residents,
contractors, and relief workers a day.

The term "mutual aid" isn't as touchy-feely as it might initially sound. The
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin advanced the concept in the early 20th
century as an argument against the idea that people are naturally inclined to
compete against one another. The concept remains popular among radicals
today, and some of the relief workers in the area espouse anarchist politics.

When locals trying to rebuild asked Common Ground for help getting the proper
permits, the group's policy was to help rebuild, building permits or not. "We're
essentially breaking the law," Kon told me, pausing for emphasis. "That's civil
disobedience." If it keeps people from living in mold-filled houses, he said, then
Common Ground will do it. The logic of the approach became clear to me after I
spent weeks trying to get in touch with anyone at the New Orleans Department of
Safety and Permits. I was hoping to get the department's reaction to Kon and
other critics who called it inefficient and unresponsive to ordinary residents. No
one ever returned my calls.

Common Ground's call to action is "Solidarity Not Charity." Its logo features a fist
holding a hammer on one side and a medical cross on the other, la Bolshevik-
era posters. Volunteers argue online about whether the group is too authoritarian
or not authoritarian enough, whether there are too many anti-oppression
workshops or too few. As Owen Thompson, a college student and Common
Ground volunteer, has pointed out in the webzine Toward Freedom, it makes
sense for New Orleans to be attractive to anarchists right now: Here is a place
where government failed absolutely, and as such it could be the perfect place to
argue that government itself is a failure.

Kon was happy to do just that. "They [FEMA and the Red Cross] come in, and
they have all the money," he said. "They do much less than we do. And they put
their volunteers up at hotels, or on cruise liners. And that's our tax money that
FEMA's using for that." Like other organizers, and many locals, he marveled at
the money donated to the Red Cross--$2.1 billion at last count--and how little
he's seen them do with it. "They pay themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars
in salaries," he said. "And they claim they're broke!"

Is It Enough?

The smaller groups' nimbleness deserves a lot of credit for their successes.
Allowing residents and victims to shape the services they receive is a necessary
part of disaster relief and is done best by small local groups, says Joseph Trainer,
projects coordinator at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center.
The sheer exuberance of creatively organizing to help others is also an important
factor. The same naive eagerness that inspires skepticism in some of us is an
asset when none of the traditional avenues for getting things done works.

The first time I met Iggy River, the young man who told me what a street medic
is, I was sitting in a coffee shop in the Bywater section of New Orleans. He was
one of two men in their early 20s whom I overheard talking authoritatively,
maybe a little self-importantly, about supplies for a health clinic in Algiers. They
spoke with a pride that bordered on giddiness.

That conversation was a sharp contrast with the measured words of the director
of the New Orleans chapter of Habitat for Humanity, or the director of the Red
Cross chapter, or any representatives of the large, traditional relief and post-
disaster recovery organizations that normally claim the authority to perform this
type of work. Those people had decades of experience managing crises. They had
staffs of volunteers who expected leadership. They reported to national
hierarchies and had a brand name to protect. "It's not always wise to accept
someone coming through the front door," Quarantelli notes. And with all that
money coming through the pipe, it's not hard to see why. But these big groups
end up turning away the Young Turks who are ready to ride their bikes around a
deserted city with nothing but a hunch that they will find people in need.

In an April interview with NPR, acting Red Cross Director Jack McGuire
admitted the organization had made major mistakes after Katrina, including not
reaching out to community groups that were doing some of the best work in the
area. The organization promises to implement a "cultural shift" that includes
working more closely with grassroots organizations, a tack the institution has
historically shied away from. Kay Wilkins, CEO of Red Cross' Southeast Louisiana
chapter, called Katrina "the great equalizer" of relief organizations. After its
blunders with supplies and volunteers, the Red Cross' reputation as the charity
that could do no wrong has been squashed.

"I'll go to any meeting now," Wilkins says. "I work with groups I had never really
worked with." While the grassroots groups will gladly take help from the
behemoth Red Cross, they emphasize that their lack of hierarchy and take-
anyone approach were not merely born of necessity. They worked that way by
design.

But couldn't that design have flaws as well? It's one thing to tear down Sheetrock
on a house, but the liability issues involved in allowing amateurs to build a house
are a lawyer's nightmare--or dream. I asked organizers at both Common Ground
and Emergency Communities what protections they had in place to avoid
lawsuits from either residents or volunteers. They all answered with the same
shrug.

And during hurricane season it's not safe to have volunteers sleeping in Kelty
tents in parking lots. In fact, the Made With Love Caf closed its makeshift
kitchen on June 15, leaving a permanent community center called Camp Hope in
its wake. The United Way and the local government asked the caf's organizers to
start a new food kitchen in neighboring Plaquemines Parish. They served their
first meal there on June 1.

Common Ground scaled back its house gutting significantly during the hot
summer months and housed more volunteers in more stable structures. The
group is turning its attention to more permanent aspects of rebuilding, such as
job training for returning residents in the construction and mechanics trades, and
workshops on "rebuilding green"--that is, using environmentally sensitive tactics
and materials in reconstruction. It's too soon to tell if these grassroots
organizations will grow into permanent institutions resembling the big groups
they once railed against, or if the spontaneous network of activists will dissipate
until the next big disaster. Iggy River, for one, was on his way back home to
Maine when we last spoke in June.

For Rose and Gary Singletary, the help Common Ground provided has been
invaluable, but in the end it wasn't nearly enough. When I spoke to them again in
May, their house looked much like it did when Common Ground volunteers
picked up their tools and moved on. "Everything is at a standstill," Rose said.
They are still trying to get more help from their homeowner's insurance; more
important, the neighborhood's residents aren't sure the levee on the London
Avenue Canal will protect their homes from another serious hurricane. Mardi
Gras and JazzFest may go on, but a single drive through New Orleans remains
breathtaking. The devastation is relentless. "It's a struggle," Rose told me. "You're
trying to do something in a year that it took your whole life to do."
The ad hoc efforts of amateurs haven't fixed the devastated Gulf Coast. But
neither have the centrally organized efforts of government authorities and
traditional aid groups. The large agencies trusted with caring for citizens in their
time of greatest need have something to learn from the idealists in New Orleans:
Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. Rules made when there
was electricity don't always work when all the lights are out.