Although they will not be trading in law books for tape measures, 18 students from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government have headed south to New Orleans with other volunteers this week, where they will try to prove that the best-intentioned hard work needs an appropriate blueprint first.
The group of 30 volunteers is spending the week in the low-lying Broadmoor neighborhood of the city, which is still rebuilding after getting hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. The students are collecting data they hope to prove the neighborhood is improving and growing in population -- especially in comparison to other New Orleans communities -- because such figures are crucial to securing necessary grant money for continued recovery work.
"The reality is, grants will be awarded based upon data and the need, and you have to prove the need," said LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association.
The neighborhood has a partnership with Bard College to supply physical labor, Cantrell said, but is slowly returning to normal with the help of both schools.
"We're leading the city right now in recovery," Cantrell said. "But we need a real study and a true analysis to prove that, and this study will be the proof."
The students' data-collecting efforts are proving more valuable than any manual labor they can provide, said Hal Roark, executive director of the Broadmoor Development Corporation.
"It's all intellectual," he said. "No one's gutting houses or anything like that," he said, adding the need for planning in the area currently exceeds the need for physical labor.
Roark said the neighborhood is especially notable because it has taken a proactive attitude in rebuilding.
"I think Harvard wanted to help a neighborhood that was already helping itself and [is] representative of the city and the statistics," he said.
The Kennedy School sent its first group last year to produce a redevelopment plan for the neighborhood, which students created by drawing on previous coursework. This trip is part of the next step, which they hope will prove the neighborhood is on a steady path to recovery, Cantrell said.
Since then, the neighborhood developed a new urban plan on its own, won a $5 million grant from the Clinton Global Initiative and rebuilt about 66 percent of its houses, said Broadmoor Improvement Association spokesman David Winkler-Schmit.
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