Believe it or not, we don’t JUST sit around remediating mold around here. We also spend a fair amount of time trying to find out everything we can about the relief process, and passing that information on to people who can use it.
Case in point, this Friday we will host an event at our tool chalet-slash-office space where we’ll have an awesome info session that will help people understand how Sandy Aid works. The details are below, so come on by:
UNDERSTANDING SANDY AID FUNDING
Presentation & Workshop
NYC • NY State • Federal • Non-Profit
• Hosted by Respond & Rebuild
• Presentation by Peter Corless - RockawaysHurricaneSandy
• Free & open to the public
Arverne by the Bay Community Center
74-16 Beach Channel Drive NY 11692
Friday • 8 March 2013 • 7-9 pm
• Learn the present status of Federal, State, City & other aid programs for Sandy survivors and businesses
• Ask your pressing questions or propose your solutions to Rockaway’s most urgent problems
• Participate in round table discussions identifying community needs, current gaps and major concerns
• Your feedback will be shared with the Rockaways Peninsula & Broad Channel Long Term Recovery Group (LTRG)
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:
It’s January 6th and the holidays already seem like a distant memory. Some of us spent time with far flung family and some of us relaxed in NYC, but we were more eager to get back to work than we would have been at any other job.
One of the best things that happened over our break was that one of the families we’ve worked with the longest is one step closer to moving home. They’ve started to rebuild! We’re excited that they took all the necessary steps to rebuild safely and that we were able to provide them with the support they needed to do that.
We can’t tell you how excited we are, and it makes us reflect on how much progress community relief efforts have made across the board. One of the things grassroots groups are so good at is helping people who might otherwise fall though the cracks. It’s important work and we’re happy to do it.
Of course, we couldn’t do this work without you, and we want to share these successes because your support makes it all happen!
With so much going on all of the time, it’s also good to look back on how far we’ve come since the storm. On that note, we’d like to share with you a little photo timeline of the stages we’ve been through since the storm, so you can have an idea of what the work you support looks like, from beginning to (almost!) the end.
Please share this post with others who would like to participate in these efforts, but who cannot make it down to volunteer. Anyone can be part of this efforts! Check out our slideshow below, and pass on our Indiegogo Campaign to get 250 families displaced by Sandy home safe.
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.
As the weeks roll on (and we can’t believe there have only been 5 of them so far!) Respond & Rebuild has been getting some more great press. Since we last updated the site, we’ve been mentioned in an article published by Raycomm Media that reached about 40-some-odd outlets, and says great things about our early work. You can check out the article here. And if you’d like to check out the author of the piece, Ray Downs, follow him on Twitter at @RayDowns.
Occupy Sandy gets some great press here, in a video from New York’s Daily News, and Respond & Rebuild’s own Gabriel Van Houten has a quick cameo appearance in front of the YANA Community Center in Rockaway Park.
Last but not least, we got a quick shout out from this Gotham Gazette piece, which features two of our speakers from our mold education events in the Rockaways, Coney Island, and Staten Island last weekend. The four sessions we held were the first of their kind in the area, and each meeting was full of residents wondering about health effects of mold, how to get rid of it, and how to know if homes are safe. Bloomberg is under a bit of fire recently for not addressing the health risk sooner, and Respond & Rebuild is gearing up to build our capacity to address this threat to public safety. As far as we can see, Respond & Rebuild is the only group offering trusted mold remediation services for free in the Rockaways, despite the fact that many Sandy-affected families are experiencing extreme financial hardship and found themselves under-insured when Sandy hit home. Currently, we are discussing ways that we can train neighbors to train neighbors in inexpensive but reputable methods for treating mold in flooded homes, in as many affected areas of NYC as possible.
Last but certainly not least, we have some exciting projects in the works and we want you to stay updated. We know you want to be informed as we launch a full-on mold offensive! If you haven’t yet, please follow our official Facebook page and also check out our first video. (Thanks to Nick, April, and Lemia for all their help on this!) There’s more good news to come, so stay tuned.
So you’re looking to volunteer, huh? Well have we got an opportunity for you! Put on your dirty clothes and lets get to work in the Rockaways. We’ve been called a veritable “Volunteer Delta Force,” so lets explore why.
Days begin with a volunteer muster at our working nerve center and Tool Hub on Beach Channel drive. Just arriving here and meeting the pastor of the small warehouse-like church is a reward in itself. Pastor Dennis Locke has been an incredible partner of fortune for us, and any conversation with this master of metaphor is rife with both heartfelt wisdom and lighthearted humor. Once everyone has arrived and begun meeting one another we hold a short briefing on general safety, basic techniques, and what to expect in the community. Then our coordinators form teams of volunteers, all headed by an experienced and trained Team Leader, to be outfitted with tools and dispatched to work-sites. These sites are homes whose owners have been identified and prioritized by our crack assessment team.
Once out in the field the real work begins. Physical work on a scale that individual homeowners couldn’t really begin to approach on their own, and a subtler emotional support that is really the backbone of any community based volunteer effort. Out in the field volunteers work intimately with residents, picking through flood damaged belongings and gutting out flood damaged residences. It’s people helping people to pick up the pieces of a life, and with each person working, each couch thrown away, each wall pulled down, a little more healing, peace, friendship and light enters the world.
Our teams currently take water-logged basements and ground levels all the way from the initial untouched horror of a post flood disaster, to the clean and relatively manageable bare studs and exterior walls that is a gutted and sterilized home. To begin, we immediately remove large sources of mold and other foul substances from the home by hauling all the water-logged contents out to the curb. This also opens up workspace and airflow. Armed with hammers and crowbars and shovels and wheelbarrows our next step is to pull apart all the trim, drywall, flooring, insulation, and general building materials that got soaked by the storm surge that dark night. By exposing the bare framing of the house we let it begin to dry out naturally. Once the house is gutted, a mold team will return to physically scrape off the mold, chemically treat the bones of the house, and finally paint the same in order to seal out further potential toxic growth. From there the way forward is much more clear and bright to everyone.
The whole process is enriching for all involved. The beauty of strangers helping eachother, asking for nothing, is obvious to anyone who spends even a moment down here. At day’s end there is nothing but smiling faces and glowing anecdotes, phone numbers exchanged and hugs around. It is truly an inspiring sight that should be shared with as many people as possible. Few experiences can compare. So sign up, spread the word, and most of all - VOLUNTEER!
This holiday season has given us so much to be thankful for, it’s almost overwhelming. All of us have friends and families to thank, for both supporting our work and supporting our well-being in so many ways.
There have also been those who have surprised us: strangers who offered in-kind donations both to us and Occupy Sandy. Some have heard about our work, both strangers and friends, and have helped contribute monetary support to keep us going. Some have come by our job sites with bagged lunches to keep our volunteers well-fed while in the field. Some have offered up spaces in their living rooms to store tools until we could get them down to our work sites in affected areas. Some have donated tech skills and help with coordinating our databases. Some have held fundraisers or passed hats so we could get the supplies we needed as soon as we needed them. Pastor Dennis, who opened up his church to us to use as a staging ground for dispatching volunteers. Sal Lopizzo from Yana who has provided us with space, rides home, encouragement, and reminds us that we are never alone. (He also is great at hugging.)
We also would like to thank the great people at Liberty Bar in Seattle who let some ex-New Yorker friends there hold a benefit to support our work, and also the fine folks at Jimmy’s Diner who have helped keep us fed (and so well!) on long days when we have no time to fend for ourselves.
A special thanks this weekend to Edge Auto Rental who donated use of a 15 passenger rental van to Respond and Rebuild for 10 days, which helped us to make the most of the hundreds of volunteers who have been coming out for this holiday weekend. Without support like this, we’d have a much more difficult time effectively coordinating the enormous amount of volunteer motivation we’ve seen in the Rockaways.
One more big thanks goes out to our friends at All Hands Volunteers for inviting us out to their project site in Staten Island for Thanksgiving dinner. It was great to see old friends, hear about all the great work they’re doing in the community, and wish everyone luck on their new project starting up soon in Long Beach. Hugs to all we missed when we were out there.
Phew. That’s quite the thank you list, and it’s not nearly complete. We’re thinking of you all as we continue with the relief efforts in the Rockaways and beyond, and as we brainstorm about the best, most sustainable, inclusive, productive ways to move forward to rebuilding Sandy-affected communities in NYC.
In “Hurricane Sandy is New York’s Katrina,” Village Voice reporter Nick Pinto details the enormous scope of the community response to Sandy-affected areas on New York City in the first days after the storm. It’s a must read for anyone who wants an accurate picture of those days. Our favorite except about us is:
“On 112th Street, Terri Bennett is coordinating 10 crews equipped with gas-powered pumps to empty the water still standing in most of the basements nearby. Bennett is here with a handful of friends she met doing recovery work in Haiti after the earthquake. Calling themselves Respond and Rebuild, they’ve continued to work together on logistical relief in subsequent disasters, and compared with the wide-eyed tenderfoots flooding the Rockaways today, they constitute a sort of volunteer Delta Force.”
Of course those numbers are dated at this point, since on weekends we’re now coordinating up to 15 crews at a time and we’ve become enough of a fixture in the neighborhoods of the Rockaways that we rarely have to go door-to-door these days for more work orders. But we’re thrilled that we, our friends at Occupy Sandy, and all those neighbors helping neighbors got some much deserved praise.
Read the article in it’s entirety here
Oh! And if you’re into radio shows, we’ve got one of those for you, too! On November 21st, our own Terri Bennett was featured on WBAI’s OWS radio in a 6 person panel on the grassroots response in Sandy’s worst hit NYC neighborhoods. Listen to personal stories from the ground, what needs are still not being met, and the experiences of our community members left most vulnerable by the storm here.
