On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the Open Society Foundations is teaming up with MoveOn and ColorOfChange.org to raise money for social-justice organizations in New Orleans.

The two online advocacy groups have appealed to their members to donate to the Transform New Orleans Fund. The Open Society Foundations will match contributions up to a total of $500,000.

The money raised by the campaign will be divided equally among 18 government-accountability, social-change, and criminal-justice groups in New Orleans, all grantees of the Open Society Foundations.

“The challenge is not just to rebuild New Orleans—but to build a city that is stronger and fairer than the one that was devastated five years ago,” Ann Beeson, executive director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations, said in a written statement.

The Louisiana Budget Project, Puentes New Orleans, Juvenile Justice …

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Since Hurricane Katrina, Liza Cowan has been part of efforts to rebuild the Gulf Coast. The idea of home and community and what they mean in someone’s life—belonging, safety, and peace—are things she has thought a lot about in her professional capacity.

The issue crossed over into her personal life recently, when she found herself distressed by her neighbors’ protests at a meeting about a proposed project to rehabilitate a blighted building into low-income apartments.

“One meeting attendee compared the proposed project to an atomic bomb, fearing its impact on the neighborhood,” Ms. Cowan wrote on The Second Line, a blog run by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, where she is a program officer. “The African-American project manager for the nonprofit housing developer was told by another member of the audience, ‘We don’t want more people like you living here.’”

Ms. Cowan worries what kind …

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Following is a guest post by Geoff Livingston, co-founder of the consulting company Zoetica, a communications consulting company that works with nonprofit groups and other organizations that promote social change.

By Geoff Livingston

In June, I had the privilege of being a part of a four-person fact-finding mission to analyze how the oil spill has affected Gulf States. This fieldwork was just devastating, and it prompted us to create a series of efforts to activate national interest in helping the Gulf.

I’ve visited developing countries before in Latin America, Egypt, and the Caribbean, and, unfortunately, many of the communities in Louisiana could fall into the same category. Everywhere you go, you see poverty and a malaise resulting from successive crushing events. This area has been dealt many blows in the past five years, most notably Hurricane Katrina and the Deep Horizon accident, …

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As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the American Red Cross has published a report detailing its work on the Gulf Coast.

The combination of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma redefined what a big disaster looks like in the United States, says the charity.

Before Katrina, the 2004 hurricane season stood as the largest domestic disaster in American Red Cross history. Responding to the four hurricanes that battered Florida that year, the organization provided assistance to 73,779 families and individuals. After the 2005 hurricanes, that figure was 1,407,075—more than 19 times as many people.

The price tag for relief efforts after Katrina, Rita, and Wilma was more than 17 times greater than the cost of responding to the 2004 storms—almost $2.2-billion compared to $127.8-million.

The 2005 storm season changed the way the Red Cross prepares for large emergencies, says Joe…

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Since Hurricane Katrina, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has become an important source of information about the city’s recovery.

The small nonprofit group helped New Orleans successfully challenge the Census Bureau’s 2007 estimate of how many people lived in the city. The nearly 50,000 people the bureau added to its original estimate translated into an additional $45-million in federal dollars for the city.

Now, together with the Brookings Institution, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has released The New Orleans Index at Five, a report that looks at key indicators of economic growth, household income, and quality of life for the metropolitan area.

For example, median household income in the New Orleans area has grown since Hurricane Katrina, but at $47,585, it still trails the national average by 9 percent. In addition, the median household incomes for…

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