dirty
EOG Master
Falcons bless Saints country
The kindest of foes, they've donated $1.1 million to Katrina relief
By STEVE HUMMER /
Published on: 09/25/06
Baton Rouge, La. ? Seventy-five miles west of Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans, in another time zone from Atlanta and its Falcons, there is a block of prim, vinyl-sided homes that testify to both.
Louise Moore, a 63-year-old retired surgical technician washed out of her apartment by last year's monster hurricane, lives at the head of the block of Habitat for Humanity houses. She doesn't know Falcons running back Warrick Dunn. She just knows she has found a place after the storm, a new place so precious she can't stand the idea of nailing holes in those fresh, white walls. So her new picture of Jesus rests on the living room floor nearly four months after she moved in.
<!--endtext--><!--endclickprintinclude--><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width=175 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
Curtis Compton/AJC
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Nina Isaac gets emotional while talking about her new home in Baton Rouge, La., which the Atlanta Falcons helped fund through Habitat for Humanity. Behind her is Cheryl Pixley, another Hurricane Katrina evacuee who benefited from the program.
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
Curtis Compton/AJC
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Louise Moore, 63, gives thanksfor the Atlanta Falcons. The team, which plays the New Orleans Saints tonight, led the NFL in generosity to Hurricane Katrina evacuees, donating $1.1 million, including cash for new homes such as Moore's in Baton Rouge, La.
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
Curtis Compton/AJC
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Falcons running back Warrick Dunn has been pivotal in aid efforts.
</TD></TR><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=1 width=170 bgColor=#cccccc border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=9 width=168 bgColor=#ffffff border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=body>Photos: Falcons help Katrina recovery
RELATED STORIES ? More Falcons
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--startclickprintinclude--><!--begintext-->
"I don't sit out [with the neighbors]. I stay in here and sit back and I cook and I clean," she said. "I just enjoy being in my house. I'll get out with them after a while, maybe next year."
The connection between this block on St. Croix Street in Baton Rouge and the Falcons is strong, if unspoken.
The Falcons meet the New Orleans Saints tonight in the first game at the Louisiana Superdome since Katrina and the latest installment of their long, passionate rivalry. But the Falcons are even better allies than adversaries, having donated more to Katrina relief ? $1.1 million ? than any other team in the NFL.
"When one of your colleagues, even a competitor, is hurting, you want to help him get off the ground so he can play again," said Penny McPhee, president of the Arthur Blank Foundation, the Falcons owner's charitable organization.
Through the foundation ? and with the help of Dunn's fund-raising efforts ? the Falcons gave $381,000 to the Baton Rouge Habitat for Humanity. That was enough to help finance about a third of the cost of this row of 10 homes for those displaced by Katrina.
Dunn, who grew up in Baton Rouge, has been a regular contributor to this cause. His Home for the Holidays program has helped build and furnish 14 Habitat homes for single mothers, said Lynn Clark, the project's development director.
After Katrina, Dunn put out the call for each player in the NFL to contribute $5,000. The money he helped raise would go to the aid a few of the thousands of Katrina evacuees who resettled in Baton Rouge.
"I tried to challenge guys to do something," Dunn said. "You have to do every little thing you can to have an effect on someone else who needs it. Players in the NFL did that."
Along with the $1.1 million to Katrina relief, Blank contributed an extra $700,000 to United Way of Atlanta for Katrina evacuees. Among the beneficiaries were Baton Rouge Habitat, Feed the Children ($170,000), the Desire Street Ministry ($125,000), the Salvation Army ($36,000), the New Orleans Saints Katrina Relief Fund ($30,000).
The Desire Street Ministry money made its way to the grateful hands of a University of Georgia graduate working for the Christian group in New Orleans.
Ben McLeash, an assistant director at Desire Street, is applying his UGA degrees in sociology and nonprofit organization management to this ministry that serves one of America's most blighted neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward.
Not that there's much left. On streets the bear such almost mocking names as Abundance, Treasure, Pleasure, Piety and Desire, the flooded-out homes and public housing projects remain abandoned. Most of the money donated by the Falcons has gone toward moving the ministry's boys boarding school to Baton Rouge, refitting the students with everything from books to football uniforms.
Some of the donated money stays with the few left behind to tend to repairs to the old academy and to plot a renewed presence in New Orleans.
"After the storm we tried to figure out where do we go," said McLeash, who is married and has a young son. "Memphis [where they first went during the hurricane] is a very cool city, but it's not New Orleans. At the end of the day, [New Orleans] is where we feel we've been called. This is the city we love. There are so many things broken. We could leave tomorrow and no one would blame us. But this is where we want to be."
The Falcons have gotten kids in on the relief effort, too. Saturday, 75 players from the Falcons Junior Player Development program, a youth football league sponsored by the team, helped on a clean-up day at the Seventh Ward Willie Hall Park. The Falcons had bused them in from Atlanta for a weekend that would include a scrimmage at the Saints facilities and a seat inside the renewed Superdome for tonight's game.
In another gesture, on Sunday Nike contributed 4,000 pairs of shoes to New Orleans high school athletics on behalf of Falcons star Michael Vick.
Back on St. Croix Street, it is as if an entire block has been lifted from the floodwaters of New Orleans and dropped on a quiet corner of Baton Rouge. A neighborhood is forming around the victims of the wind and fractured levees.
Nearly all 30-year-old Nina Isaac has to show for life back in Jefferson Parish are a few family photos retrieved from her flooded apartment. Their images have been eaten away at the edges by water.
Here at her Habitat home new images are taking form. "My children [a young son and daughter] are happy here," she said, tears pooling in her eyes.
Learning of the contributions Dunn and the Falcons made to this block of Habitat homes, she grew ever more emotional, "Please tell him he did a good job. Look at this, it's beautiful. I don't know where I'd be if not here."
The range of Katrina's damage is almost too great to grasp. Assess it one household at a time, though, and see what forces have come to shape a single life.
Moore was a surgical tech at Baptist Memorial Hospital, looking to put off retirement a few more years. Then came Katrina. The hospital was gone. The roof of her apartment was cast into the wind.
Her son drove through the barricades and obstacles to rescue her from a dangerous city and take her back to Baton Rouge. Nearly two months later, she returned to her old apartment, and about the only thing worth saving was her cat, Gucci, that somehow had survived all that time.
"It's like you've been in a coma or something, and you wake up and there's a whole new life," Moore said. Missing New Orleans, she clings to what she does have. "Having people from New Orleans in the same neighborhood, I can see where it's going to be a lot like home."
And if this Warrick Dunn fellow she has just heard about is ever in the neighborhood, she'd like him to drop by.
"Let me know in time, I'll have some gumbo ready," she said.
The kindest of foes, they've donated $1.1 million to Katrina relief
By STEVE HUMMER /
Published on: 09/25/06
Baton Rouge, La. ? Seventy-five miles west of Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans, in another time zone from Atlanta and its Falcons, there is a block of prim, vinyl-sided homes that testify to both.
Louise Moore, a 63-year-old retired surgical technician washed out of her apartment by last year's monster hurricane, lives at the head of the block of Habitat for Humanity houses. She doesn't know Falcons running back Warrick Dunn. She just knows she has found a place after the storm, a new place so precious she can't stand the idea of nailing holes in those fresh, white walls. So her new picture of Jesus rests on the living room floor nearly four months after she moved in.
<!--endtext--><!--endclickprintinclude--><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width=175 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Nina Isaac gets emotional while talking about her new home in Baton Rouge, La., which the Atlanta Falcons helped fund through Habitat for Humanity. Behind her is Cheryl Pixley, another Hurricane Katrina evacuee who benefited from the program.
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Louise Moore, 63, gives thanksfor the Atlanta Falcons. The team, which plays the New Orleans Saints tonight, led the NFL in generosity to Hurricane Katrina evacuees, donating $1.1 million, including cash for new homes such as Moore's in Baton Rouge, La.
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=caption>Falcons running back Warrick Dunn has been pivotal in aid efforts.
</TD></TR><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=1 width=170 bgColor=#cccccc border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=9 width=168 bgColor=#ffffff border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=body>Photos: Falcons help Katrina recovery
RELATED STORIES ? More Falcons
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--startclickprintinclude--><!--begintext-->
"I don't sit out [with the neighbors]. I stay in here and sit back and I cook and I clean," she said. "I just enjoy being in my house. I'll get out with them after a while, maybe next year."
The connection between this block on St. Croix Street in Baton Rouge and the Falcons is strong, if unspoken.
The Falcons meet the New Orleans Saints tonight in the first game at the Louisiana Superdome since Katrina and the latest installment of their long, passionate rivalry. But the Falcons are even better allies than adversaries, having donated more to Katrina relief ? $1.1 million ? than any other team in the NFL.
"When one of your colleagues, even a competitor, is hurting, you want to help him get off the ground so he can play again," said Penny McPhee, president of the Arthur Blank Foundation, the Falcons owner's charitable organization.
Through the foundation ? and with the help of Dunn's fund-raising efforts ? the Falcons gave $381,000 to the Baton Rouge Habitat for Humanity. That was enough to help finance about a third of the cost of this row of 10 homes for those displaced by Katrina.
Dunn, who grew up in Baton Rouge, has been a regular contributor to this cause. His Home for the Holidays program has helped build and furnish 14 Habitat homes for single mothers, said Lynn Clark, the project's development director.
After Katrina, Dunn put out the call for each player in the NFL to contribute $5,000. The money he helped raise would go to the aid a few of the thousands of Katrina evacuees who resettled in Baton Rouge.
"I tried to challenge guys to do something," Dunn said. "You have to do every little thing you can to have an effect on someone else who needs it. Players in the NFL did that."
Along with the $1.1 million to Katrina relief, Blank contributed an extra $700,000 to United Way of Atlanta for Katrina evacuees. Among the beneficiaries were Baton Rouge Habitat, Feed the Children ($170,000), the Desire Street Ministry ($125,000), the Salvation Army ($36,000), the New Orleans Saints Katrina Relief Fund ($30,000).
The Desire Street Ministry money made its way to the grateful hands of a University of Georgia graduate working for the Christian group in New Orleans.
Ben McLeash, an assistant director at Desire Street, is applying his UGA degrees in sociology and nonprofit organization management to this ministry that serves one of America's most blighted neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward.
Not that there's much left. On streets the bear such almost mocking names as Abundance, Treasure, Pleasure, Piety and Desire, the flooded-out homes and public housing projects remain abandoned. Most of the money donated by the Falcons has gone toward moving the ministry's boys boarding school to Baton Rouge, refitting the students with everything from books to football uniforms.
Some of the donated money stays with the few left behind to tend to repairs to the old academy and to plot a renewed presence in New Orleans.
"After the storm we tried to figure out where do we go," said McLeash, who is married and has a young son. "Memphis [where they first went during the hurricane] is a very cool city, but it's not New Orleans. At the end of the day, [New Orleans] is where we feel we've been called. This is the city we love. There are so many things broken. We could leave tomorrow and no one would blame us. But this is where we want to be."
The Falcons have gotten kids in on the relief effort, too. Saturday, 75 players from the Falcons Junior Player Development program, a youth football league sponsored by the team, helped on a clean-up day at the Seventh Ward Willie Hall Park. The Falcons had bused them in from Atlanta for a weekend that would include a scrimmage at the Saints facilities and a seat inside the renewed Superdome for tonight's game.
In another gesture, on Sunday Nike contributed 4,000 pairs of shoes to New Orleans high school athletics on behalf of Falcons star Michael Vick.
Back on St. Croix Street, it is as if an entire block has been lifted from the floodwaters of New Orleans and dropped on a quiet corner of Baton Rouge. A neighborhood is forming around the victims of the wind and fractured levees.
Nearly all 30-year-old Nina Isaac has to show for life back in Jefferson Parish are a few family photos retrieved from her flooded apartment. Their images have been eaten away at the edges by water.
Here at her Habitat home new images are taking form. "My children [a young son and daughter] are happy here," she said, tears pooling in her eyes.
Learning of the contributions Dunn and the Falcons made to this block of Habitat homes, she grew ever more emotional, "Please tell him he did a good job. Look at this, it's beautiful. I don't know where I'd be if not here."
The range of Katrina's damage is almost too great to grasp. Assess it one household at a time, though, and see what forces have come to shape a single life.
Moore was a surgical tech at Baptist Memorial Hospital, looking to put off retirement a few more years. Then came Katrina. The hospital was gone. The roof of her apartment was cast into the wind.
Her son drove through the barricades and obstacles to rescue her from a dangerous city and take her back to Baton Rouge. Nearly two months later, she returned to her old apartment, and about the only thing worth saving was her cat, Gucci, that somehow had survived all that time.
"It's like you've been in a coma or something, and you wake up and there's a whole new life," Moore said. Missing New Orleans, she clings to what she does have. "Having people from New Orleans in the same neighborhood, I can see where it's going to be a lot like home."
And if this Warrick Dunn fellow she has just heard about is ever in the neighborhood, she'd like him to drop by.
"Let me know in time, I'll have some gumbo ready," she said.
