One of the first things that attracted me to SOTRU was the idea of telling the stories behind the news headlines– the issues that may inform our lives in a big way, but don’t make it to the top of a newscast or front page of the paper. But, that said, knowing what’s going down where we live is a vital part of having a healthy community… and these are not easy times for the news industry. (more…)

It was only weeks after the SOTRU team was in New Orleans that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico began sending millions of gallons of oil on a slow creep towards the Louisiana shore. We spent much of our time in the Crescent City talking to people about the slow, painstaking work of recovery from the winds and floods of Hurricane Katrina—and here they are, facing another natural disaster. (more…)

Whether by default or design, all of us on the SOTRU team are gradually becoming city experts. With each fresh location we go to, we accumulate new perspectives on how different places are approaching a frequently overlapping set of challenges, be it how to stem a rise in crime or reverse a loss of jobs, halt a wave of foreclosures or repair an urban infrastructure that’s seen better days.  What if to solve some of these problems we turned not to the usual handful of urban planners and economic development honchos… but to a group of physicists? (more…)

It’s a Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, and we’re stuck in traffic on an ordinary street in the Central City neighborhood. The reason? We made the mistake of trying to drive through the route of a second line. For all the fame of the city’s parades around Mardi Gras, New Orleans residents take to the streets every weekend for a good chunk of the year to second line… yes, it’s both a noun and a verb. Second lines stem from the city’s jazz funeral tradition: the main line is made up of the somber mourners; the second line is the folks following behind—celebrating and dancing. (more…)

The front cover for one of the Neighborhood Story Project's books

I’ve learned something, talking to people who’ve lived through a tragedy—be it the death of a loved one or a tornado destroying a home or an entire town: there is something profoundly healing about the telling a story. This is a lesson the city of New Orleans offers plentiful evidence of; everywhere you turn, there’s another organization recording stories, from oral histories to anecdotes, legends of the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs to tales of Hurricane Katrina mayhem. (more…)

The year is 1967. Bayard Rustin, only a few years off of the triumph of organizing the 1963 March on Washington, is standing before a crowd of people. He’s laying out a plan to erase poverty from American cities and towns. It’s not just a pie-in-the-sky spouting of rhetoric, but an actual, tangible plan. He’s telling the U.S. government: do this, this and this—and maybe we can create a society in which everyone has jobs, health care, food on the table and a roof over their heads. (more…)