Doing some research for a professor here on the minimum wage, I ran across this graph of the inflation-adjusted value of the U.S. minimum wage (which is a fairly common sight nowadays) plus the effective hourly bonus from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) added on. This was the first time I had ever seen such a statistic. Since the the organization presenting the chart, the Employment Policies Institute, is hardly non-partisan, I took the numbers with a grain of salt (case in point: they use the value of the EITC for an earner with two or more kids, which...

While your mother never made good on her threat to send your unfinished dinner to starving children in Africa, I recently heard about a local non-profit that just about will.

About two weeks ago I caught an episode of Frontline on PBS. Mohammed Yunus had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work developing microcredit and this episode focused on how the microlending was affecting Uganda. Much of the episode dealt with a non-profit in San Francisco called Kiva.org, that finds donors around the world to contribute to existing microfinance organizations through the internet. Potential lenders can view entrepreneurs in need and make targeted donations as low as $25 using PayPal.

The borrowers reside mostly in Africa or Latin America. Requested loans are usually less than $1,000 and fund simple businesses like selling fish or tailoring. Kiva provides a short biographical sketch of each entrepreneur and includes an expected schedule of repayment, usually 6 – 12 months. Donations go local partners that distribute the loans and collect repayments over time. Once repaid the lender can withdraw the loan or re-loan. Since these are loans, not donations, there is an expectation of repayment With that comes an element of risk. Amazingly Kiva’s repayment rate is 100%, just slightly above the 97% rate for microloans wordwide.

The day this episode of Frontline aired the number of people visiting Kiva’s website overwhelmed the servers and shut down the site. Kiva quickly had to ask for donations to pay for a new server to handle the newfound attention. Happily, Kiva is now back online an in need of contributions.

The week is over and I have returned to Berkeley. I helped gut two houses and met some amazing people in the great city of New Orleans. I wish I had high hopes for its renewal, but I am concerned.

If I were to write a list of I saw missing from the equation for the city of New Orleans, competent leadership would be the first item. The people of New Orleans need someone to step in and provide a vision for the future of the city that respects those who already lived there, and charts a course to a future where all residents benefit, not just the wealthy and well-connected.

Most of the houses in New Orleans have spray-painted crosses on them. It gives the city the eerie feeling of a plague, as if Albert Camus were alive and well in New Orleans. These were used to indicate if the military had gone through the home. A brief description...

Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.

Today we cleaned out Keith's house along the same avenue as Eddie's. Keith is a mid-thirties white security guard with both ears pierced, who grew up in the house we were tasked to clean out. Unlike Eddie's house, Keith's had not been touched since the hurricane seven months ago--making for more work but also telling a story with each room entered.

Water gets into everything. It seeps into all nooks and crannies, invading all it touches. And once the water recedes, mold grows and it develops this stench... we inhaled an indescribable stench. I couldn’t place it until later when I was talking to the owner. He had six dogs, five of which did not make it with him out. They had survived in the house for a while before eventually perishing before he returned. This is what made up the one inch layer of what we thought was mud in the back of the house. We were smelling a combination of brackish water, feces, mold, and dead animal. It was the smell of death...

Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.

For those of us who still read newspaper stories about Katrina victims (many begin to block out catastrophes after a measured level of mourning), there a few common themes: Looting, unemployment, insurance hassles, FEMA ineptitude, destroyed lives and feeling of helplessness. It adds texture to have one of these individuals in front of you telling the story.

Enter Eddie: A tall African-American in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a forlorn smile.

Today has been filled with great experiences. We met Eddie, an electrician and homeowner who had water up to two inches below the ceiling on his ground floor. We learned about how he built the back addition to his house and the care he used in building it to withstand the forces of nature. We also got a taste of the frustration and anger people are feeling down here from the perspective of our host.

Hello from the Camp Algiers Internet Café in New Orleans, LA!

Arrived in New Orleans today for a Spring Break helping folks who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. A classmate at GSPP has been working with Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN for the semester. She had kindly hosted us for some home gutting and meeting folks affected by this disaster.

I’m eager to get started.

In one of my favorite episodes of Sports Night, Robert Guillaume’s character said that he didn’t worry that money he gave to the a panhandler would be spent on beer. In fact he hoped it would be spent on beer because he didn’t have any illusions about his dollar changing that person’s life. That attitude strikes me now as blind to half the problem. What can be done to change the life for about the same amount of money.

A few months ago I heard about a program that gives free voice mail to the homeless to help them find jobs. Fifteen years ago Community Voice Mail started in Seattle realized that one of the greatest barriers to lifting yourself off the streets is the difficultly in getting a job. When a potential employer can’t get in touch with the applicant, her chances of getting the job disappear. The same holds for when she reveals her homeless. An employer’s discrimination against homelessness may be based on a firmer foundation than gender and racial discrimination. I especially like how the strategy helps obscure the person’s negative characteristics.