There’s never a dull moment over here in the Rockaways, and we’ve had a lot of exciting visitors and volunteers in recent days.

For the last few Saturdays, we’ve had some great people from Greater NYC for Change come down by bus, along with friends from Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union, Manhattan Young Democrats, and CUNY School for Public Health.

Speaking of CUNY, we’ve gotten an enormous amount of support from campuses across the City. We’ve had help from professors of public health who gave us the green light on our upcoming manual for families dealing with mold issues, and we’ve had two amazing busloads of amazing volunteers come down from Brooklyn College in their Sandy Solidarity Caravan. BC, my alma mater, never fails to make me proud, and you can always follow the work they do to make higher education accessible to everyone and in general fight the good fight here. We also got a great write up featuring Gabriel Van Houten in my old college paper, The Kingsman, here.

We’ve had a few more groups come through and later show us some love on their blogs. We had a bunch of great young writers come through from and another family group that keeps up a cool blog about Family Travels. Thanks for the shout out and for keeping people up to date on our work!

Along the way we’ve also had crucial support from public health experts at Long Island University who have been a big part of how we’ve become the official Mold People of the Rockaways, as well as visitors from the New School of Public Research and Columbia University.

For those who didn’t know, our group has also been rapidly expanding as we’ve had friends from near and far come to help us expand our capacity to reach out more into the community in the Rockaways. Most recently we’ve been joined by Geoff, who has quickly become Safety Guy Extraordinaire, as well as Animal Ben, who helped us to get our fiscal sponsorship from Relief, Rescue, Rebuild, or Triple R Pets. a grassroots that takes care of pets and their owners in crisis situations. We’ve also gotten hold of Good Ol’ Charlie, who we all met in Haiti and who we hear, in his normal life, is the official fireman of the year and unofficial Mayor of his hometown of Boonville, California. We have Zen Ben, who remains calm through any IT madness we may have, and is great at convincing me not to break my computer when something goes wrong. We’ve also taken on quite a media crew in the last few weeks, consisting of Lemia Monet, whose beautiful photos will increasingly be gracing our website, and April Hayes and Nick Carbonaro, who started out as volunteers and officially married our project when they took on our Indiegogo Campaign and the task of making mold remediation a rallying cry in Hurricane Sandy-affected areas of NYC.

So, another big thanks to everyone who puts their time, energy, sweat, spare change, and encouragement into this project. Respond & Rebuild couldn’t do this work if it weren’t for all of you.