Whew! What a big weekend!

Friday started with a meeting at State Senator Sanders office where we really stole the show as the ONLY aid organization currently providing free mold remediation services for low income families of Rockaway, as well as the first group to engage in wide scale education about mold for residents. The day ended with meetings with another relief group to discuss how we can partner to be faster and more efficient in our work.

On Saturday the Rockaway community came together in an event called “Walk a Mile in our Shoes” to highlight the damage done by Sandy, and how large a recovery effort we’ll really need. The event ended in a lively rendition of that song we all know and love, “We’ve got high hopes,” because after all, we are in NYC where the love of Frank Sinatra knows no bounds.

The weekend continued with Mold Madness, as we call it, and we dispatched teams of amazing volunteers from across the NYC area to do some mold busting in several homes close to our workspace. A great time was had by all who donned those Tyvek suits.

Keeping our spirits up with hard work and camaraderie keeps our spirits up when we hear things like this:

⅕ of Rockaway Residents have not been able to return home. Before mold remediation happens, they just aren’t safe for rebuilding, and it’s usually so expensive it’s a major obstacle.

We’ve met with several groups who are in the area providing free rebuilding services with skilled workers and free materials. They told us they aren’t doing as much rebuilding as they could be, because they can’t rebuild over mold, and thousands of people are in need of mold treatment before they can return home.

We can help change that, and help these guys hit the ground running, We have 5 days left of this campaign to raise as much money as possible to get families rebuilding safely. Let’s do it, friends! Share this far and wide, and we can be a part of this recovery together.

Proof that this is all possible? Last week, an Italian filmmaker posted a Youtube video of his work with us. Since then, more than 65,000 have watched his video and hundreds have contributed between $1 and $5 to our campaign. If everyone we know and everyone they know could do the same thing, we’ll be getting more families home safe, faster.

More proof of the community coming together in big ways? As you know from following us on Facebook and Twitter, at the very end of the year we had a benefit concert in Woodmere, Long Island, graciously hosted by Woodmere Lanes/Backstage Nite Club. The lovely Allan Spielman of Retrofestivals.org called us one day, asked if we could use some help raising funds from a local guy who grew up in the area, and of course we said yes! The next thing we knew (and after a lot of help from Allan and his awesome, organized crew of amazing musicians and event planners) we were at the Backstage dancing and raffling off great prizes.

A huge thank you to Chuck Idol, who is not only a musician but also the owner of Long Island Builders, who sponsored the “backline” or sound equipment and sound engineer for the event. Please check out his work at his website, LongIslandBuilders.com and Concerts-4-Causes.com.

If you couldn’t be there and don’t mind being made to feel a little jealous for missing out, check out this video from Toby Tobias’ rendition of one of my favorite songs:

The event raised $1500, which goes a long way for our Disaster Relief collective. Respond & Rebuild was thrilled! A special thanks to all those who donated prizes for the raffles, including Palo Santo restaurant and Fort Reno, both in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who donated gift certificates for the cause.

Another person who reached out to us unexpectedly came to us from UHaul and UHaul’s Disaster Relief services provided us with free use of a box truck for one month, and you better believe we’re putting that thing to good use! (I’d thank them by name but they prefer to remain anonymous.)

Of course, thanks to all of our amazing volunteers, and thanks to all of the organizations on the ground that we work with everyday to make our response better, faster, and more effective. We love you guys.

Thanks for all you do. We can’t do this without people like you.

Oh! And the Italians who are making us famous? You can check out that now video:

Extra points if you can translate for us!

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.