We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing more than 1,800 deaths and more than $100 billion in damages, it was deemed a “once-in-a-lifetime storm.” After the hurricane, over 1.5 million volunteers came to New Orleans through various nonprofit organizations, and around 500 new charities were established to aid the city’s recovery. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans documents this significant movement through interviews with the activists who spearheaded the city’s recovery.

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the crucial role of nonprofit organizations in New Orleans’s recovery, scholarly examinations of these recovery workers’ experiences remain scarce. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans fills this gap, drawing on a vast corpus of interviews with more than fifty leaders and staff involved in Katrina recovery across various areas, including housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The interviews seek to understand what motivates individuals to devote significant portions of their lives to recovery, and to assess whether nonprofit volunteer labor was an effective recovery strategy.

Analysis of the testimonies of participants reveals that most of the disaster recovery corps, even those in their early twenties, had histories of activism or civic engagement before committing to New Orleans recovery work. While significant, their recovery work in New Orleans tended to represent a single chapter in a broader life story of service and civic engagement. Despite the good intentions of the volunteers, their testimonies also highlight the limitations of relying on volunteer nonprofit organizations for disaster recovery.

We Came to Rebuild New Orleans thus offers an extraordinary new look at long-term disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sharing the personal stories of nonprofit workers from many walks of life, the book emphasizes their persistent spirit of activism and civic engagement, while also reflecting critically on the effectiveness of volunteer-­based disaster recovery initiatives.