One year after the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, three lifelong residents of New Orleans will speak on a panel commem orating the anniversary of the storm that changed the Crescent City, and much of the Gulf Coast, forever. The panel, "Katrina: One Year Later," will be held Thursday, Aug. 31, at 5 p.m. in Uris Hall Auditorium. A community reception also will be held at 6 p.m., Friday, Sept. 1, at the Southside Community Center. Both events are free and open to the public.

The panel also marks the kickoff for a yearlong Cornell fund-raising campaign for the Katrina Relief Fund, established by the Cornell Black Professional Women's Forum and Cornell's Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP), sponsors of the Aug. 31 event. The fund has won agreements from Cornell and Ithaca concerns for employees to make monthly payroll donations to the Greater New Orleans Foundation. Donors can also make one-time gifts. The foundation helps distribute aid to community and faith-based organizations that provide direct services to affected families and children. The university campaign will run for one year through Aug. 31, 2007. Sign-up for tax-deductible payroll contributions begins this coming Aug. 31.

Speakers on the panel include a resident of New Orleans and outspoken community activist who goes by the name of Mamma D and who testified at the Dec. 6, 2005, U.S. House of Representatives Committee Hearing on Hurricane Katrina; and Al Harris and Kimberly Richards, both New Orleans residents and community organizers. The panelists will speak for 15 minutes and field questions from the audience.

Cornell students who participated in the Katrina on the Ground project will present video and still images of New Orleans taken during a working spring break in 2006. Students involved in the project helped the rebuilding effort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The Cornell Black Professional Women's Forum has encouraged Cornell's policy for outreach to students, faculty and administrators of schools affected by Katrina. CRESP is a nonsectarian, action-based educational organization at Cornell.

For more information, contact Josephine Allen, associate professor of policy analysis and management, at (607) 255-1973 or jaa7@cornell.edu; or Margaret Washington, professor of history and forum co-founder, at (607) 255-6746 or mw26@cornell.edu.

For more information on the Katrina Relief Fund, send e-mail to katrinafund@cornell.edu.

Roots of women's forum go back to apartheid

The Cornell Black Professional Women's Forum, organized in 2003 under the leadership of Professors Josephine Allen (policy analysis and management) and Margaret Washington (history), advocates diversity and inclusion; addresses recruitment and retention of black faculty and staff; focuses on campus climate and professional issues; and seeks to enhance connections between the university and the larger community.

The organization originally sprang from the Black Faculty and Staff Forum, established in the 1970s to urge the university administration to demonstrate opposition to apartheid by divesting itself of investments in South African companies. In the 1980s, black women faculty members at Cornell, Syracuse and Binghamton universities and Hamilton College formed an intercollegiate network that eventually became the Black Women's Research Collective.

"We organized to support each other's academic pursuits, support black graduate students and to create a forum for discussing issues we felt our universities ignored," said Washington. This larger network disbanded around 1996, to be replaced seven years later by the forum.

The forum's Katrina activism began immediately after the hurricane and, according to Washington, "the resulting debacle from national neglect." "Katrina: One Year Later" is part of a nationwide commemoration of this tragedy. The Cornell Black Professional Women's Forum and Cornell's Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy are partnering with other campus and community groups in this fund-raising effort to make a lasting contribution to families in need.

"New Orleans is America. On this one-year anniversary, thousands of residents in one of our great centers of culture remain in distress," Washington said.