I got a nice email from a friend of a friend, who is bringing a group of high school students to town to some charity work. In addition to volunteer work, the leaders of the group want the students to learn about the city. They break the students into groups and have them study various things. For example, one group is a "Law and Order" group and they’ll be studying the
criminal justice system. Ideally, they’d like to talk to
judges, public defenders, other lawyers and various activists
involved in trying to improve the system.
Other groups will be studying Urban Planning, Neighborhoods, Government (city and
state), Race and Poverty, Environment, Arts and Culture, Storm
Stories (creating an oral history documentary about Katrina), and the
City Economy. So if anyone has some ideas on who these students can talk to, or if you are that person, then let me know.
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urban planning:call uno’s urban studies department and ask to speak to the chair, I’m sure they would love to help, but don’t email cause their email server routes all outside email to junk (found this out the hard way):https://planning.uno.edu/
neighborhoods: contact one of the associations, the ones with blog sites seem to be more open to the public so look at the ones who are associated with think nola (like mid-city neighborhood association mcno.org)
government: call arnie fielkow, he’s always on the radio and tv and stuff, so i bet he has a lot of free timehttps://www.neworleanscitycouncil.com/atlarge.asp
state, call the la district person for your district or anyone running for district 94, they all were willing to talk to me with little or no notice for my weekly podcast
race and poverty: habitat for humanity?https://legallee.typepad.com/noahhohd/
environment: maybe my dad at the picayune. I don’t want to type out emails here, but if you goto nola.com and look up mark schleifstein he co-wrote a series that pretty much predicted katrina and is their ‘environmental reporter’
arts and culture: goto NOMA mid-day and tell them who you are
storm stories: uh, anyone in the nola blogosphere is qualified especially since we are the web 2.0 story tellers of the storm (but not me cause i wasn’t blogging nola at the time, only Adobe Flash)
city economy: back to uno (or any other university in the city) goto the econ department
I mostly say uno cause they could use the publicity and i’m sure they would love to talk to anyone about anything