My Life. My neighborhood. Our world.

U.S. Congressman Dave Loebsack and City Council members Monica Vernon, Brian Fagen, and Chuck Wieneke joined 65 citizen volunteers to clear flood debris from 12 blocks of Ellis Boulevard in the Time Check neighborhood. Our distinguished legislators helped to make this first of our Saturday Clean-Up Blitzes a rousing success.

Michael Richards, President of Oakhill Neighborhood Assoc. organized the Americorps Green Corp.Team and 80 volunteers to carry out a block by block clean-up blitz in the flooded zone of Oakhill/New Bohemia on Saturday April 18, 2009. Don Steichen of Harbor Neighbors did the same a week or so before in the Ellis Harbor District. Now, this citizen initiative is a citywide effort in all of the flooded neighborhoods.

The African American Museum of Iowa will reopen its doors on January 17, 2009 with the premiere of its long-awaited exhibit “No Roads Lead to Buxton,” and an all-day open house to see how the Museum has changed since the 2008 floods. 
 

 Learning from the Past/Planning for the Future
(note: includes practical applications of sustainable models and green concepts)

December 9-10, 2008
Marriott Coralville Hotel & Convention Center
Coralville, Iowa

 Green Communities is the first national green building program focused entirely on affordable housing. Launched by Enterprise in fall 2004, Green Communities is designed to help developers, investors, builders and policymakers make the transition to a greener future for affordable housing.

A comprehensive offering of Green Grants, loans, tax-credit equity, training and technical assistance gives developers and builders the resources to bring green projects to life....

The Flood of 2008 in Cedar Rapids devastated the older core neighborhoods around Downtown Cedar Rapids. For one hundred years, these inter-generational, tight knit neighborhoods have provided modest, yet pleasant affordable homes. These are our working class, historic neighborhoods. Our City never officially designated these neighborhoods as historic districts, but the real fact is, the hands that built these historic homes are the very same hands that built the economic base of this City in factories, mills, machine shops and foundries.
 

This sentence captures the overall positive and supportive reply by Mayor Halloran to the Rebuild And Grow August 20th proposal to the Cedar Rapids City Council: "We share your confidence that the citizens of Cedar Rapids are capable of anything we undertake together, and we look forward to working together to help our neighbors." The full letter further explains some of the programs and resources available to our grassroots initiatives.

KGAN talks to Mike RichardsAs a companion "human interest" story to the excellent feature story on the Rebuild And Grow petition to City Council and civic leaders, KGAN News talked with Mike Richards to learn "more about the man behind the petition." (Actually, it's the man and woman behind the petition, but Lynette wasn't available when the story was taped.) This interview gave Rebuild And Grow co-founder Mike Richards an opportunity to drive home the message that each of us, whether flooded or not, need to reach inside ourselves and decide if we want to be pitiful or powerful.

Momentum is building city-wide to get behind the Rebuild And Grow program to mobilize ourselves, our friends, and neighbors as we swing back into emergency mode to prepare our flood-ravaged neighborhoods for the coming Winter. Just we we pulled together to sandbag before the flood, we need an aggressive, volunteer-powered effort to gut and seal properties before Winter adds further damage to what the flood has done. A Top Story feature on CBS affiliate KGAN is helping to spread the word about our recent petition to City Council and area civic leaders. In addition to the excellent on-air story, the KGAN web site has a detailed story on-line that includes details of our request and response from City leaders. In addition, the full petition copy is included. Click on the image at left or follow this link to the KGAN web site where you can watch the video and read the companion story.

The Green Shirts are coming to – or are already in – your neighborhood! We strongly encourage you to participate in the neighborhood assessments being conducted by the Linn Area Long Term Recovery Coalition (LALTRC).