Lower 9th Ward Village

Please support the Lower Ninth Ward Village by voting daily and help us win $5,000 in fuel to support our ventures!!!  Voting ends October 27th and EVERY VOTE COUNTS!

http://www.fuelinggood.com/rewardinggood?id=836219

One of our wonderful volunteers, Victoria Holt, has created a documentary for her  sociology class called “Post-Katrina New Orleans: Local Realities, Global Issues”.  This documentary features the Lower Ninth Ward Village and the surrounding community.  Take a look!

The Lower 9th Ward Village from Victoria Holt on Vimeo.

The Lower Ninth Ward Village has recently been in the St. Helena Echo!  Click the links below to check it out!

http://www.tangilena.com/view/full_story/13515575/article-Lower-Ninth-Ward-Village-and-Magnolia-Project-join-helping-hands?

http://www.tangilena.com/view/full_story/14527514/article-Vegetable-harvesting-for-the-Village?

You always pass failure on your way to success.  ~Mickey Rooney

Dear Friends,

As many of you may know, the Village was recently in the running for a chance to win a Pepsi Refresh Grant of $250,000. Voting for this grant, whose winner is entirely decided through online and SMS based voting, ended on the 31st of January. The Village came up just 16 points shy of reaching our goal of making it into the top 100 spots which would have enabled us to start from the same position in the next round of voting. It was a hard defeat only because many of us and many of you all worked very hard getting out the vote, especially in the last week of voting. However, while we did not win, there is a strange feeling around the office; not one of defeat or sadness, but of excitement and invigoration. In the 8 days in which a concentrated effort was made to move our position to within the top 100 we, and this “we” surely includes all of you, were able to move our position from 194 to 116. That’s 78 positions! For anyone not familiar with how the voting works, since we were competing against many other grants it takes many votes from us to move even one position. Therefore, 78 positions is much, MUCH more than 78 votes. The point is: No other organization made anywhere near the huge leap in positions that we did. It was truely impressive! Hence, we at the village have walked away from this experience with a true sense of how powerful and how far reaching our community is.

We also did some hard reflecting. Because of many factors, many which have since been addressed, we did not start a real push on our end until the last 8 days. For this we feel we let all of you down. Many of you were out there everyday getting votes and we did you all a disservice by not getting behind the push sooner. We have used this experience as a catalyst and we feel we have address many of the issues which caused us to drop the ball on this. We also, more than anything, feel motivated and grateful by all the support we received. Above all else we want to thank everyone who worked on getting people to vote! You know who you are as do we.

We plan to reapply for this grant when it opens again in April. From what we saw this round we know we have what it takes to win. We hope that you all will find and take away from this experience the same hope and motivation that we have. We cannot stress enough how impressive the jump in position we were able to make was. Please take our sincere thank you to each of you to heart.

-Everyone at the Village

This week we’ve had an amazing surprise! A group of contractors headquartered in Atlanta, Archer Western, have come in to work on the center. All week the center has been teaming with contractors working tirelessly to get some major renovation projects finished.

With any luck, by mid-February the center will be completely tiled–including the gymnasium– we’ll have a new stage, new trim and doors in all the thresholds, and new industrial lighting throughout! We can hardly believe the amount of progress that Archer Western and their dedicated group of contractors are allowing us to make in just a few weeks time. This has truly been a blessing!

Check back for more updates soon!

Did you know that the village is in the running for a $250,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh project? Check out our application submitted by our friend Shirin Day here. Or, vote below!

You can vote twice a day, once from your phone, once from you computer.

To vote by phone just text 105560 to the number 73774!

Just in! A new video from our friend Lilli Dove giving you a tour of our building!

It’s Springtime at the Village, and presto, we got ourselves a community garden! Our new star volunteer, Cara Walton, wrangled some volunteers and whipped up a raised-bed garden in the back yard. This fall, with any luck, we will have fresh home-grown fruits and vegetables!

Cara gettin' her fingers dirty in the dirty South

Disaster breeds hope. When people lose everything, other people instinctually reach out to help them. Four years after Hurricane Katrina, these are two important things for the men, women, and children of the Lower Ninth Ward to remember.

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