Late last August, Hurricane Katrina left thousands of Americans homeless, injured or dead in one of the worst natural disasters ever in U.S. Teenagers around the country sat glued to their television sets watching the horror unfold.
When the federal government failed to respond appropriately to the disaster, some of those young people sprang into action. Many decided to donate backpacks to kids for the upcoming fall semester. Some welcomed hurricane victims into their homes and donated clothing. Others welcomed displaced students into their colleges and universities.
Jackson, Miss., suffered some wide damage from Katrina. But seeing how the storm had devastated the Gulf Coast — places like New Orleans, La., Gulfport, Miss., and Houma, Ala. — a group of high school and college students in Jackson, the Young People’s Project (YPP), joined the recovery effort. They decided to go on a quest to uplift and comfort young people and their families there. They called their operation “Finding Our Folk.”
Key to their mission was giving hurricane victims an opportunity to document what had happened to them, so they could begin letting go of the experience, explains Helena Brown, program director for the YPP. “There was a need to really address the injustices [that Katrina victims had endured], to really be able to hear the voices of the people that were affected.”
YPP is a group that “recruits, trains and deploys” high school and college aged young people to serve as mentors for middle and high school students in urban and rural areas. The organization is based in Mississippi, Illinois and Massachusetts. Brown joined YPP when she was a junior at Jackson’s Jim Hill High School, in 1998. The group had been found in Jackson two years earlier.
YPP is an offshoot of The Algebra Project, a national organization whose goal is to “build the demand for math literacy in local sites across the country.” The Algebra Project was founded by mathematician Robert Moses in the early ‘90s. A legendary former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Moses, along with his peers, fought for and helped gain the right to vote for blacks in Mississippi in the 1960s.
“The Algebra Project focuses on classroom curriculum and professional development. And the YPP focuses on out-of-school outreach,” Brown explains. “The Algebra Project is run by youth. And it’s young people who are taking similar curricula and putting our own twist on it,” she adds.
The time immediately after Katrina was difficult for the YPP, Brown admits. The members had to collect themselves and reconnect with each other. But they also knew “reconnecting” would be much more difficult for hurricane victims in New Orleans and elsewhere. Initially, they decided to help by sending toiletries and money, as the rest of the country was doing. But they soon realized they needed to do more.
“We consider ourselves not only a math literacy organization…Social justice is part of what we do, because we consider math literacy the key to full citizenship,” Brown says.
So on January 14, YPP partnered with local and national community-based organizations, filled a bus with some of YPP’s Jackson-based members and some nonmembers, and traveled to the hurricane-affected areas of the Gulf Coast on four consecutive weekends. Their mission was to provide healing for the hurricane victims and to celebrate the people and culture of the region. Accordingly, the young people conducted seminars on scientific topics, such as using graphing calculators, and also addressed subjects such as quilting and spiritual and emotional healing.
To Brown’s surprise, the work of the Finding Our Folk Tour resonated widely. People came from different part of the country to help.
“People [even] flew in from Oakland, “Brown says.
The www.findingourfolk.org website chronicles the tour: “These events [also allowed] evacuees to share their journey through art and culture and feature performances by national and local performers, musicians, poets, and visual artists, intertwined with speeches by veterans of the civil rights and current resistance movements.”
The site also contains photos of YPP members caught up in the process of teaching and healing what seems to be an entire nation of displaced people. Some of the shots are of the youngsters sitting at a roundtable with elders exchanging ideas. Others capture dozens of people gathered around a street performer in New Orleans. Others show debris as high as the rooftops of houses, almost obscuring them from view. Still another is of a child standing in and unfurnished room with what looks like a bathtub in the living room; the photo expresses the disorder and feelings of loss the disaster have brought.
Christina Royster Hemby is a staff writer for the Baltimore City Paper and a freelance journalist.
