It takes more than a desire to help to get volunteers working in New Orleans. Rebuilders arriving from across the country also need a place to stay and connections to sites that need help – not to mention sites looking for their specific services.
Jocelyn Sideco has been a middleman for these people for the past two years, operating from a small office in the basement of the Danna Center.
Sideco, an employee of the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province, estimates that she has helped about 4,000 volunteers.
“We do a lot of troubleshooting,” she said. “It’s such a bottleneck to get into volunteering. There’s a lot of work to be done, and there’s a lot of volunteers who want to come. What’s missing is this management aspect.”
Sideco houses volunteer groups on the eighth floor of Buddig Hall when it’s available, and finds places across the city – from dorms at the University of New Orleans to spare rooms in Holy Name of Jesus – for the rest. She also has connections to agencies across the city such as Catholic Charities, ACORN Housing, The St. Bernard Project and Common Ground Mid-City, who provide jobs, equipment and instructions.
“There’s always a project,” Sideco said. “People are desperate to have volunteers.”
Never turning people down was one of the first things she learned in the office, Caitlin Dreger, an assistant in Sideco’s Katrina relief office, said.
“My first day I had all these voicemails of people saying, ‘We want to come down in less than a month, can we still do that?’,” Dreger, English literature senior, said. “I remember thinking, ‘Less than a month? And you’re in Indiana?’ … and Jocelyn would always say, ‘Yeah, we’ll figure it out’.”
Sideco directed nine different groups during spring break and 20 groups total for the month of March. These groups spent most of their time reconstructing houses and making them habitable again, but tasks can range from weeding to digging canals for water pipelines.
It’s also Sideco’s job to match the right volunteers with the right project. Many of the people who come are high school or college students with little to no construction experience.
When volunteers call her, Sideco said, “I ask the question, ‘How skilled are you? Do you get paid for dry-walling?” Bringing in volunteers can be a risk, she said, and it’s her job to make sure each group has the skill level that the sites require.
‘NETWORKS OF PEOPLE’
Loyola students occasionally work with the volunteers that come down, always with the encouragement of Sideco. Colby Bowens, accounting senior, has recently been working with Sideco and the Loyola University Community Action Program every Saturday as part of the “Giving Back to the Community” theme of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.
Bowens is a resident assistant at Cabra Hall, where Sideco is resident chaplain. At every weekly in-hall meeting, Sideco shares information about the volunteer jobs around the city. Most of her connections come about this way – either she knows people who want to volunteer or someone else is looking for volunteers.
“You’ll uncover that people do need help,” Sideco said. “They just don’t have access to these networks of people that we do … we’re introducing people to each other.”
St. Francis High School from Mountainview, Calif. came to know Sideco through her sister, who works at their school. That connection allowed them to come to New Orleans in previous years. They came down last week and worked on an area in the Lower 9th Ward.
“It was really amazing,” Erin Yip, a student on the trip, said. “You’re helping people, you’re building the community back together … people from past trips said the trip was really good and that we couldn’t forget about New Orleans.”
“You can’t really understand what it’s like here until you come here,” Elizabeth Baxter, another student, said. “You don’t even feel like you’re in the same country (in the Lower 9th).”
Sideco relies on connections like these every day to match volunteers with sites that need help.
“What happens when you’re able to offer groups from out there and groups here something as simple as a phone number to call?” she said. “If (the volunteers that call us) knew that our office was literally out of the basement of Loyola with one phone line and free volunteers, they would think that we were ridiculous for not turning anyone down,” Sideco said.
SIDECO HOPES TO START VOLUNTEER PROGRAM
Tulane University has developed a semester-long volunteer opportunity for students who want to study and rebuild in New Orleans.
“It could be a very lucrative experience for Loyola if they took advantage of this,” said Jocelyn Sideco, an employee of the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province who manages volunteer groups. “Some people transferred because they wanted to be here.”
Students like political science freshman Jonathan Trout and sociology sophomore Rob Harman decided to come to Loyola because of past experiences volunteering in New Orleans.
Harman transferred last year from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. After his fifth trip to New Orleans, “I decided I should just relocate,” he said.
“He says that his schoolwork gets in the way of his volunteering,” said Caitlin Dreger, English literature senior and a volunteer of Sideco’s.
Trout came down last year with a group that Sideco managed. Loyola was having a conference about racism and poverty while they were here, and Trout was able to experience the campus as well as the city.
“I just really liked the city and wanted to be a part of rebuilding New Orleans …. There are a lot of opportunities to help within the (Loyola) community,” he said.
Trout works part-time rebuilding a damaged house and also participates in Hunger Relief with his sociology class, taught by John Trahan.
As a high school student, Trout traveled with St. Joseph’s Preparatory School, which has traveled to New Orleans three times to volunteer. They plan to keep coming every academic break “until the city doesn’t need us anymore,” said Sam Deitch, St. Joseph’s volunteer coordinator, who was in town with a group of 12 students last week.
Katie Urbaszewski can be reached at [email protected].
