Success Stories: Community Projects that Work

• Strategic Plan Focus
  
  
• Helping Farmers

• Self-Help Housing Committees
• Federation of Self-Help Associations
• Construction skills training programs
• Sustainable agriculture for farmers
• Support/lobbying for area commercial fishermen

The Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc., in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, has been helping poor people in Louisiana for 25 years, ever since the War on Poverty during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. For its 25th anniversary, instead of having a dinner to celebrate, said executive director Lorna Bourg, "we started all over again." The reason for the choice was the EZ/EC application process.

"Never before had the government set up a program that had to be done in cooperation with the community," Bourg said. "This is one of the more hopeful signs from government." Bourg said that years ago SMHA relinquished the federal funding it had been granted. "People thought we were crazy," she said. "But we were tired of trying to make `canned national funds' work. We could spend much more of each locally generated dollar on poverty."

The process called for in the EC process was what SMHA has been doing all along. "With EC, we started to work with government again," Bourg said. And for its efforts, the SMHA was designated a Champion Community. The technical assistance will allow SMHA to work on poverty and other problems created by the displacement of workers, use of pesticides, and monoculture farming. SMHA's successful strategies echoed its sentiments of cooperation with the government.

"We began working with the mainstream sugar cane farmers, the same ones that were impacted by our class-action years ago," Bourg said. They put everyone -- displaced workers, sugarcane farmers, and environmentalists -- in one neutral room at one of the local banks, "and we started a dialogue." The SMHA brought in Helen Vinton, co-founder of the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SAWG) and the Acadian SAWG to design new models. She talked about things like cover cropping, moving red ant hills to eradicate pests, diversifying crops, and ending burning in the cane fields.

"The farmers began to see that following the advice of the land grant universities and consultants was keeping them on the treadmill and they would eventually go broke," Bourg said. "The farmers bought into our program. One even created a slide presentation and took it to talk to other farmers." Bourg said the question with farmers is no longer about production, but sustainability. "They want to be known as people who did good for their community," Bourg said.

The Southern Mutual Housing Association, as the name implies, also has considerable experience with helping low-income people obtain housing. What started with training individual families to contribute "sweat equity" toward their homes has now developed into a series of communities establishing their own organizations. "We only go into communities that invite us," Bourg said. "We go in with two goals: self-development and partnerships."

After receiving construction skills training themselves, the members of each Self-Help Housing Committee must pledge to help other communities. Now there are three Self-Help Committees and they have formed a Federation of Self-Help Associations.

Bourg said part of the reason SMHA has succeeded through the years is: "We listen to complaints." For instance, the SMHA might help someone work on their house and six months later, the owner comes back and says there are problems with it. "An organization can't just fix up a house and say, `Now keep it up.' People who complain about how `they' never keep up `their' houses don't understand that often, the owners don't have the tools, they don't have the ladder to get up there and fix that high part on the house that's needing paint," Bourg comments.

So SMHA saw that it needs to provide more training to prospective homeowners. "They need to know money management, how to keep the house up, what tools are needed, how to create a momentum in the community for everyone to keep their houses up. Twice a year, there could be a weekend where everyone repairs houses," she comments.

This ability to be flexible, to see how the proposals they have made might need to be changed, is part of SMHA's success. For instance, said Bourg, SMHA had proposed in its strategic plan an all-fisheries cooperative. "But later, we attended a training session in Maine and were warned about the Gulf Coast Conservation Association which wants to supplant native fishers," she said. Now, in Louisiana, there are 45 bills or amendments in the state legislature to outlaw all gill nets, to allow trout fishing only by hook and only at certain hours "when they really aren't catchable by native fishers," Bourg said. "The problem we saw then was that the fishers weren't organized and there was no market for their fish," she says. "Now they still need an organized effort; it's just that they have to meet this threat before we can worry about markets or cooperatives."

SMHA has a busy next 25 years; the Champion Community designation will provide the technical help for many of the organization's programs. And SMHA will continue to take note of its successes. In fact, reflecting on their own successes is a vital part of continuing such an effort for over a quarter century.

St. Mary Parish, LA . . . is located in a census tract of 228 square miles with 6,834 people, of whom 51% are black, 43% are white and 6% are of other races. Average annual per-capita income is $6,659.