My Life. My neighborhood. My world. Mike Richards.

One of the most important goals of Rebuild And Grow is to "help the self-helpers" as we work together to rebuild our lives and neighborhoods in flood-devasted Cedar Rapids. The Neighborhood Self-Help Resource Network will be a strategic program to address this mission. To accomplish our important help the self-helpers goal, we'll concentrate on two important roles:

• to identify best practices in neighborhood disaster self-help recovery programs used by people – like the folks in New Orleans after Katrina – and provide the training and support services needed to incorporate these lessons learned into our local neighborhood recovery programs, and
• as our neighborhood self-helpers grow and learn from our own experiences, to serve as a clearinghouse for sharing neighborhood self-help program models and methods that work in Cedar Rapids and apply to our special circumstances and experiences.

To implement our goal of helping our neighborhood self-helpers, Rebuild And Grow is launching the Neighborhood Self-Help Resource Network. We have identified five neighborhoods as priority targets for assistance. Our objective will be to form neighbor-helping-neighbor recovery teams in these neighborhoods:

• Oakhill-Jackson/New Bohemia
• Taylor School area
• Time Check-NW
• Czech Village
• Downtown

We recognize that most of these neighborhoods have already begun to form self-help groups and rebuilding initiatives. Our goal is not to duplicate such efforts. Rather, we intend to provide skill training and activity-enhancing services that will help these grassroots activists to achieve their goals. So our first order of business will be to identify existing self-help groups and self-identified community leaders and invite their participation in our Self-Help Resource Network.

Representatives from these grassroots groups and individual activists will form a team in each of the targeted neighborhoods. If any targeted neighborhood has not already formed a self-help group, we will work with neighborhood activists to form such a group.

Each neighborhood team will be expected to hold a weekly planning and activity reporting meeting. The Network will assist the teams with promoting these meetings and reporting the team's activities. In addition, the Network will provide short best practices briefings and serve as an organizing resource as the teams prioritize their goals and activities.

Each month, the teams will meet together for a full Network meeting to review progress, share information, provide peer support, and coordinate efforts across the five teams and their respective communities.

In addition, Rebuild And Grow will develop a robust and full-featured community organizing web platform for use by the neighborhood teams. The Rebuild And Grow staff will provide web site user training and will facilitate the teams use of this resource to best organize and deliver self-help services in the targeted communities.

By the end of August, we will provide further details about the Neighborhood Self-Help Resource Network and how individuals and grassroots community groups working in the targeted communities can become involved on the Network teams.

In the meantime, anyone with questions or an interest in becoming involved in the formation of this program is encouraged to use our contact form on the Rebuild And Grow web site.