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“You’re not just born to fall in love, have a few kids, get a job, pay your bills, grow old, and die. That’s not why you’re here. You have to find out why you’re here. And my purpose is easy. It’s service.”
August 29th is the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, LA. The Category 3 hurricane brought a 22-foot storm surge to the streets of New Orleans, taking the lives of over 1,300 people and leaving 80% of the city underwater by August 31st.
Almost twenty years later, this climate catastrophe has been a signal of times to come. Climate disaster now feels like an ever-present reality, and the lessons we’ve learned from Hurricane Katrina remind us to take care of ourselves and each other.
Years later, systems continued to fail in the Lower Ninth Ward, leaving its residents and homeowners to rebuild and advocate for the investment promised to the community almost two decades ago. Local and national reporting highlights the rise in gun violence and urban decay in the neighborhood, and we rarely hear about the ways that members of this community – in spite of – have fought to take care of each other.
The story of Burnell Colton, brought to us by StoryCorps, tells us otherwise: after returning to his home in the Lower Ninth Ward, he noticed that his neighborhood had become a food desert. Ten years after the storm, no grocery stores, laundry facilities, or barber shops remained. Long before the term ‘mutual aid’ became common, Colton used his time and money to open a grocery store in his community. That grocery store remains open today, a testament to the power of the phrase “we got us.” In his words, “I always was taught if there’s a problem, somebody got to make a move. So, I decided to open up a grocery store.”
You can listen to the full story below:
In Philadelphia, Homies Helping Homies brings the same initiative and mutual aid approach to feeding the Point Breeze community. The organization was founded in 2020, moved by the murder of George Floyd to provide supplies and support to protesters. Since then, the organization has grown to provide food, hygiene products, and art-making opportunities to nourish the soul. Much like Burnell Colton, Homies Helping Homies is driven by the fact that they see themselves as a part of the solutions they offer: ‘We care about the community we serve because it is our community.”
Through one lens, stories from the Lower Ninth Ward and Point Breeze neighborhoods offer more problems than there are solutions: gun violence, poverty, and a lack of investment in the right of the community to self-determine their futures.
Through another lens, the people that make up these communities offer us a roadmap for the realities of this country and a way through: we help each other, take pride in our neighborhoods, and do our part.
To learn more about Burnell Colton’s Lower 9th Ward Market, visit their Facebook page here.
To learn more about Homies Helping Homies, visit their website here. Food and product distributions happen three Mondays a month.
This is the fourth in a series of short editorials that highlight powerful and positive Black stories from our partners at StoryCorps. This post and accompanying audio appear with the permission of StoryCorps, a non-profit organization whose mission is to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all — one story at a time. Find out more about their programming, including their upcoming initiative Brightness in Black, at storycorps.org.
The audio story was first aired on NPR’s Morning Edition on August 8th, 2015. You can read more here.
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