Hope House
Sr. Lillian Flavin
916 St. Andrew St.
New Orleans, La. 70130
(504) 522-5881

Just a few short blocks (but a world away) from the elegant lawns and ante-bellum houses of New Orleans' Garden District, this busy, multiple-service organization fills an old, musty house in the city's old Irish Channel neighborhood, once home to blue-collar immigrants but now inhabited by desperately poor blacks, ripped by poverty, drugs and crime and counting at least a 50 percent unemployment rate. Directly across the street stretches the Dickensian vista of the St. Thomas houses, one of the nation's most vicious public-housing complexes, where 600 of the 1,500 units are boarded and where rats and junkies wander in and out of vacant, graffiti-covered red-brick buildings scattered indiscriminately among still-inhabited units.

Sister Lilianne, a Dominican nun, a thin, graying Irish lass with a crooked smile, and Brother Don, a Christian Brother who would require only a suit in place of his sports shirt and khakis to resemble a prosperous young businessman, work here with a staff of 10 (a mixture of Catholic religious and lay people hired from the community) who differ from the typical social workers in one key aspect: They have chosen to live where they work -- in standard units in the St. Thomas project.

"Social workers go home at 5 p.m.," Everard says. "We don't. This has made all the difference."

Starting with a single Catholic nun who organized the community, Hope House has added programs as residents have demonstrated a desire and need for them: a GED program; an emergency-assistance program, raising money through rummage sales, a thrift shop, and contributions from area churches, redistributing it on an as-need basis to people in crisis with rent, food or utility payments (averaging $35,000 a year in cash and perhaps another $50,000 to $60,000 in food and clothing).

They are opening a transitional-housing program in a renovated six-plex that they were able to get from the city for $1 a year. They will select families with potential for finding employment as first candidates for the transitional housing, offering them free rent, utilities and use of the telephone; help them work out a plan of action with goals and objectives; and help them budget so as to save 30 percent of whatever income they have so as to set up a "nest egg" for when they move into their own housing.

Hope House's other projects -- they've got a bunch of them -- include a youth program and "Education for Justice" workshops, which seek to put a human face on poverty by bringing in high-school classes (and adult groups) for seminars and workshops about what life is like for the city's poor. A seminar, "Bridges Week -- Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor" -- brings in students from colleges around the nation for weeklong poverty workshops.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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