Interview by Kristin Larmore, Relate Intern
“When we drove into the Lower Ninth Ward, it looked as if the storm had hit the day before. We could barely drive to get to the levy because there were still houses in the middle of the road. There were still trees uprooted and cars up-side-down. It was total, complete destruction. I had no idea I would be seeing anything like that. That in itself was shocking.”
-Barron Prize Winner Alex Epstein on his first trip to New Orleans
Have you ever been forced to volunteer or did it for a requirement, but later realized you were involved in something much bigger than yourself? This is exactly what inspired Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes Winner Alex Epstein to start the nonprofit New York to New Orleans about two years ago.
Maybe you don’t see the point in helping out the less fortunate, the sick, the financially needy because you don’t feel your small contribution can really make a dent? Well, take a look at Alex’s experience. He began volunteering in New Orleans as a freshman in high school, far from motivated. And now a few years later he’s raising money to fund trips to the Lower Ninth Ward for kids who can’t afford to go, traveling in two large buses purchased through the organization.
New York to New Orleans, also known as NY2NO, focuses on providing trips to New Orleans to help clear lots and reconstruct homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, as well as connect with victims of Hurricane Katrina. It also allows New York kids to realize the similarities between the two cities as far as social injustice in poor neighborhoods. It has organized 15 trips for around 500 New York high school students.
What’s next? New Orleans kids might make it to NYC to volunteer in The Bronx and Harlem!
Alex just started school at Temple University in the middle of Philadelphia, but that’s not stopping him from continuing to spread cultural and racial awareness. He’s applying the same principles he learned in New York and New Orleans in the great city of Philly.
Check back in a few days to read the rest of Alex’s interview!
RelateMag: What is the meaning of volunteering to you?
Alex: That’s kind of a complicated question and one that has been a struggle in my own life. A lot of people see volunteering as a one time experience where you go to lend a hand or help someone hands-on for a day or for a certain amount of time and that’s the end of it. But I think that kind of thing is important, but it doesn’t move anything toward creating social change of any kind. What we see in New Orleans is that thousands and thousands of people have gone down to do just that: to volunteer and have done great work in terms of rebuilding homes or clearing lots, which we also do, but at the end of the day it doesn’t change any of the systematic or underlying issues in that city. One of the biggest ones is having the levies being rebuilt. At this point, we could rebuild every house in the Lower Ninth Ward, but if the levies aren’t built to a point where they’ll actually protect that neighborhood- the next hurricane that comes along, which could be in a year, it will destroy the levies and all the houses. I think there is a place for volunteering. But people when they do that need to keep it in the context of the bigger picture and understand the more significant issues going on around them and try and find ways to plug themselves into that. That’s why we do a whole lot of community organizing. The goal is to talk to residents and get them to go to meetings where they discuss amongst themselves what things need to be changed in their own communities so in the long-term they are in a position of control over themselves. Hopefully, we do more than just go and leave and pull that support system out from under them when we go.
RelateMag: How were you able to raise this money, and did you get help from other students?
Alex: That’s also been one of our biggest logistical problems. For the most part, when we started doing these trips, we had absolutely no money. We just had a nonprofit so that when people wrote us checks for the trips, they would be tax exempt and then we could run them pretty smoothly, but we didn’t have any money to support students who couldn’t pay. So our first two trips were not diverse at all, economically or racially. And considering so many of the issues in New Orleans and New York deal with race and class, we realized we were going against our belief system by not doing everything we could to bring down as diverse a group as possible. We started a fundraising committee and every trip we encouraged people to fund raisean additional $100 beyond what they paid for the trip. That will add up enough to usually supplement the group of students who can’t afford to pay. We’ve had a lot of benefit concerts. We’ve had sales, we’ve had raffles- everything from a little thing on the side of the street to a jazz festival-type thing with auctions. Every penny adds up and counts. We’ve started to look at grants because we can’t keep asking the same network of people for money over and over.
RelateMag: Could you talk a bit about the volunteer experience you first had in New Orleans, and how did that motivate you to continue this project?
Alex: The first time I went, I didn’t want to go at all. I was a freshman in high school and I remember telling my sister, “I’m really stressed and I just want a vacation.” I really had no idea what stress was yet. I only went because both of my parents were going as chaperones. They didn’t want to leave me at home in New York. They dragged me along, and it was even worse to go because my parents were there. I thought I would just be a volunteer for nine days, rebuild a couple houses, feel good about myself and then come home and never really think about it again. But what really changed my perception was the group we worked with at the time. During that week, there was a split in the organization; we worked with the People Organizing Committee and the New Orleans Survival Council. On the first day, they took us on a levy tour explaining the history of New Orleans through a cultural, regional lens. They took us to the different levy systems throughout the city and that was only nine months after the storm had hit. When we drove into the Lower Ninth Ward, it looked as if the storm had hit the day before. We could barely drive to get to the levy because there were still houses in the middle of the road. There were still trees uprooted and cars up-side-down. It was total, complete destruction. I had no idea I would be seeing anything like that. That in itself was shocking. But when we got to the levy- at that point they were starting to rebuild it- they explained the history of the levies and the fact they had breached in that area two times before Katrina in 1927 and 1965. The government dynamited and blew them up to protect the downtown area. I’ve seen what they’re rebuilding right now, which is just a tiny wall of concrete. It confused me because I didn’t understand if this had happened three times, they still weren’t taking any steps to build something that would be strong enough to protect these people. Then when we went to Lakeview and the French Quarter, two of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city and almost completely white, it was a whole other world. If we hadn’t been on tour when they were explaining what we were looking at, I wouldn’t have known they were levies because there were giant parks with trees built on top of them. There were tourist attractions. The one in the French Quarter has a hotel built on top of the levy itself because it’s so big. You can’t even comprehend how big these things are. To compare the systems that protect wealthier and whiter residents of the city compared to poor, African American residents of the city was just so bluntly obvious. I realize in the newspapers there hasn’t been any conversation about race [in New Orleans]. It had been mentioned a few times, but it wasn’t the main [topic] of the articles or news stories I heard. When I went and saw this, I realized it was the only thing that was relevant. Katrina was a natural disaster in a sense, but the destruction that hit the Lower Ninth was totally man-made and could have been prevented. It has been 40 years since Hurricane Betsy hit, so they’ve had 4o years to build something to protect them and they didn’t do anything. Now, again, they’ve left something that won’t protect them again. So when I saw this, I realized I was involved with something much bigger than myself and more than simply rebuilding. The way the Survival Council phrased it was, ‘We were joining the movement to combat racism.’ Our mission statement is very aligned with that and we see ourselves as hopefully being a part of a much bigger movement than just rebuilding homes. When I came home from that trip, I looked at New York completely differently than I ever have before. We [mapped] levies in New York to see how bluntly obvious the racism, classicism and segregation was in our city, so it isn’t as easy to see. But if you look at maps and statistics or even just walk through neighborhoods [it's obvious.] I grew up on 94th Street and Lex; two blocks South of 96th which is kind of the border between Upper East Side and Harlem on the East Side. I have come to see that as the metaphorical levy of Manhattan in a way because you can walk from my side of that border, which is completely white, and then if you literally cross the other side of that street, you’re in the middle of a completely Latino and African American community. The drop-out rates are 10 to 15 times higher than they are on the South side of the street…crime is higher, death rates are higher. I started to see New York differently. Now that I”m in Philly, I’m coming into the city with that lense.
RelateMag: What is that emotional connection you feel between New York and New Orleans, aside from the factual side?
Alex: I feel like I live in a completely different city now. I did go down to New Orleans because I see the facts and realities of where I live. It’s an unavoidable paradox with people who get involved in this kind of thing. In a way, I feel I’m much more overtly “racist” now than I used to be in the sense that when I walk into a room or neighborhood, the first thing I notice is the race of the people around me and the dynamic of different races and cultures. In a sense, because that’s the first thing I see, it means I am more “racist” than I used to be. That disturbs me and it hurts, but I’ve just come to accept if I’m going to be devoting my life in any sort of way to combating these inequalities between people based on their race or class, it has to be the first thing that comes to mind because it is all around us. And we’re taught not to notice those things and be politically correct and not discuss it, but in order to combat it we have to acknowledge it and be very upfront about it and then try and change them and not just put it in the back of our minds. It’s much less easy-going for me socially now because [I'm the one who points these things out openly]. It would make people feel uneasy and [they] didn’t know how to react when I would say things like that. That takes a toll on my social life at times, but in the bigger picture it’s something people need to hear and acknowledge.
Anxious to hear more about this awesome organization or just on the situation in New Orleans from a teen’s perspective? Check back and read the rest of the interview.
Read about another volunteer organization/opportunity here!
