The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

There is a myth that in New Orleans in summer everything slows down.  We don't know the origin of that myth, but it sure isn't CBNO:  we've just released our new Blight Resource Guide, our Latino Community Health Survey report is almost completed, we just completed neighborhood mapping in another Planning District, and work continues apace on the NPP evaluation.

The Blight Resource Guide is a product of the Housing Community of Interest pilot project of the Citizen Participation Program, in partnership with the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance.  One thing we want to demonstrate with this pilot is how the Communities of Interest -- a groundbreaking new concept in Citizen Participation Programs -- can not only bring new people into the civic engagement process, but also be a resource to neighborhood groups.  The Blight Guide is a perfect example of this.  It serves as a compendium of public sector, nonprofit and private sector resources that are available to individuals, neighborhoods and community groups as they seek to take the fight against blight into their own hands.  Since New Orleans has at least 30,000 blighted properties within the city limits, enabling people to take action towards remediating properties that are impacting their daily lives is a major accomplishment.  The Blight Resource Guide can be downloaded from our website, www.cbno.org, in the Newsroom section; or from the Guide's own site, www.nolablightguide.com.

The Latino Community Health Survey is a project of our other Community of Interest pilot, in partnership with Puentes New Orleans.  The New Orleans Department of Health is also partnering in this.  The purpose is to get a much better understanding of the primary health issues and needs, and barriers to receiving health care, faced by New Orleans' fastest-growing population segment.  The report contains numerous detailed recommendations for addressing the Survey findings, and the Department of Health has indicated that it will begin implementing those recommendations that pertain to its work rapidly.  We have already received support from the Chevron Corporation to begin implementing additional recommendations.  Given that close to half of the Survey respondants indicated that they have received no health care at all in at least two years -- and in many cases, much longer -- moving from information to action is imperative, and we are very pleased to see this happening so quickly.  This project will result in improved outcomes for New Orleans' Latino residents for many years to come.

The Neighborhood Boundary Mapping work continues to move forward, though not as quickly as we might wish.  It is troubling to encounter sections of the city where there is no history at all of neighborhood organization, or even of any real neighborhood identity.  Not surprisingly, these areas tend to be under-resourced and plagued with numerous urban ills.  It is also frustrating when geographically proximate areas want nothing to do with including their neighbors.  Nonetheless, we just completed the Planning District 5 map, and have five more districts in the works.

Finally, we continue working on the evaluation of the City Planning Neighborhood Participation Plan (NPP).  As we've noted before, this is the first major piece of our Citizen Participation Program proposal to be adopted by the city, and it is critical that we get a clear understanding of how it is functioning.  The early results indicate that, while a few tweaks would be useful, it is truly serving its dual purposes of preserving neighborhood character and promoting quality economic development.  We have seen instances where proposals that simply were bad ideas were denied after strong and clear neighborhood opposition; we have also seen instances where proposals that met with such opposition initially were ultimately approved after the developer and the residents worked together to find mutually acceptable solutions.  It is really, really rewarding to see this process working after a decade of pushing to bring it to fruition in New Orleans.

It's great to see this kind of progress happening in our work, and we are already in the early phases of our next publication, a Community Guide to how city government works.  Needless to say, we are extremely grateful to all of our supporters; without you, none of this would happen.  We hope everyone has a happy summer -- just don't look for it to be a slow summer here at CBNO!