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Rebuilding New Orleans

Five-City Town Meeting Gives Displaced New Orleans Residents Voice in Rebuilding;
Citizens to Prioritize Infrastructure Investments

Press Release; Monday November 13, 2006, Source: AmericaSpeaks

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- The United New Orleans Plan (UNOP), with support from the nonprofit AmericaSpeaks, will convene an unprecedented five-city Community Congress on Saturday, December 2. The meeting will allow displaced New Orleans residents to help prioritize the infrastructure investments needed to rebuild the city.

The Community Congress will utilize interactive TV to link thousands of participants attending events in New Orleans and four other cities with high concentrations of New Orleans evacuees: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Houston. In addition, New Orleans residents living outside those cities can view and call into the meeting at participating libraries in more than 15 cities nationwide. There are an estimated 267,000 New Orleans residents who have not yet returned to the city - 60 percent of the city's pre-Katrina population - according to a study commissioned this summer by the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

"There is a tremendous need for additional funding to help New Orleans rebuild its parks, streets, schools, sewage and water systems," said Vera Triplett, the chair of the board overseeing the UNOP process called the Community Support Organization. "This Community Congress is an important opportunity for our citizens dispersed all over the country to come together to discuss and decide the most important investments for a smarter, stronger and safer New Orleans."

The UNOP process, which has included dozens of public meetings at the neighborhood and city-wide levels, was established by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, the New Orleans City Council and the New Orleans City Planning Commission to prioritize rebuilding projects. The unified plan will be completed in January. Once approved, the plan will be provided to the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is overseeing the state's hurricane recovery efforts, as well as to federal officials and other funders to facilitate rebuilding of the city.

The Community Congress is being organized and facilitated by AmericaSpeaks, the non-profit organization that has orchestrated dozens of large-scale town meetings across the country, including a 5,000-person meeting in New York City to enlist citizen input for redeveloping the World Trade Center site after 9/11. Community Congress participants will join intimate small-group, facilitated discussions. Employing AmericaSpeaks' technology, each participant will be able to cast votes using a polling keypad. Each small group will submit ideas that they generate through laptop computers linked together on a wireless network so that organizers can report back on themes from the entire group in real time. Participants will see the votes from all sites simultaneously.

The UNOP process is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, The Greater New Orleans Foundation and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

Among the organizations working to help with outreach efforts for the Community Congress are ACORN, All Congregations Together, the Committee for a Better New Orleans, Community Initiative Foundation, Dallas Area Interfaith, the Episcopal Diocese, Faith in the City, Jeremiah Group, the Metropolitan Organization, NOLA Network, Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith, the People's Organizing Committee, Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, the Regional Council of Churches, and Renaissance Village.

The Community Congress will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. CST (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST) at the following locations:

For more information on UNOP and to register for the December 2 Community Congress, visit http://www.unifiedneworleansplan.com or call toll-free 866- 940-1095.

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