Toward a Just New Orleans (8:21)
Producer and Director: Luisa Dantas, Land of Opportunity

Rooted in post-Katrina New Orleans, the multimedia project Land of Opportunity explores the complexities of community redevelopment amid crisis. Through perspectives that travel across media, including a film and experimental interactive web platform, the project considers what kinds of communities we want to (re)build in the 21st century. The foundation is proud to support its efforts to tell a wide range of stories about post-disaster communities—stories that reflect the larger issues and tensions shaping American cities today.

Marking the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Land of Opportunity worked with us to produce this short documentary featuring some of our local partners—community advocates, residents, and non-profit leaders—as they consider the state of justice and equity in New Orleans a decade after the devastating, transformative storm.

More about our partners featured in the film

Alliance Institute provides community organizing training and capacity building assistance to non-profits and community-based organizations in New Orleans and across the gulf south. With a primary goal of increasing economic and social equity through community engagement, Alliance Institute works to provide individuals, families, and organizations with the skills and tools they need to fully participate in the decision making processes that affect them in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

Artspace creates, fosters and preserves affordable spaces for artists and arts organizations. In New Orleans, it is leading the development of The Bell School Arts Campus that would transform an abandoned multi-building, two-block Bell School campus into a thriving arts and culture center perpetuating the indigenous history of Tremé.

The Crescent City Community Land Trust is committed to the long-term, sustainable renewal of New Orleans. Supported in partnership with the Greater New Orleans Foundation, its mission is to increase opportunity and equity in New Orleans through community land trust-based commercial and residential development, helping local families access jobs, grow their own businesses, and live in affordable housing near areas of significant economic development and opportunity.

Efforts of Grace, Inc. uses art and culture to help build vibrant, sustainable and equitable communities. It operates the 18,200-square-foot multipurpose Ashé Cultural Arts Center, founded in 1998, and nearly three-dozen units of affordable housing for artists, culture bearers and community activists in and around Central City, New Orleans.

Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center works to eradicate housing discrimination throughout the Greater New Orleans area. It is the sole full service fair housing center in Louisiana. Since its inception, the Center has championed the fair housing rights of New Orleans consumers through policy advocacy, enforcement, education and homeownership protection.

The Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance is a collaborative of non-profit housing builders and community development corporations working to rebuild the housing stock in New Orleans. The collaborative advocates for the preservation and production of affordable housing for people within the Greater New Orleans metropolitan region, with emphasis on the needs of the most vulnerable in society: seniors, people with disabilities, veterans, low-wage workers, and low-income families.

Gulf Coast Housing Partnership Network (GCHP) is a nonprofit real estate development company working to revitalize the Gulf Coast through transformative development. In partnership with public, government, and for-profit entities, GCHP provides a full range of development services to ensure that its developments remain a long-term asset to the community and the populations they were created to serve.

New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice works across the South and nationally to expand democracy and build the power and participation of poor people across color lines, organizing immigrant and African American workers, families, and communities to advance a racial and economic agenda.

The Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is an independent organization working to address inequality and build a future grounded in justice. For more than 85 years, it has supported visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. Today, with an endowment of $16 billion, the foundation has headquarters in New York and 10 regional offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

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