Beyond FUNDRAISING: IT TAKES A NATION to Benefit ACORN Hurricane Relief

It’s been a year since I launched BEYOND Understanding, and I’m happy to say this project has turned out to be much more diverse and enlightening than I’d expected. With the onset of Hurricane Katrina a week after my first post, I decided to highlight along the way various fundraising efforts designed to help people in need…any people in need. Surely such generosity crosses cultural boundaries and helps promote understanding; surely such efforts deserve as much exposure as they can get. So the archives of BEYOND Understanding include occasional posts about agencies and organizations and even book publishers that promote tolerance simply by doing the right thing: offering a helping hand and giving the general public easy ways to pitch in.

Last November, I highlighted Stories of Strength, an anthology that as of May 2006 had raised $4,000 for hurricane relief efforts. Hopefully by now that figure has gotten closer to the overall $5,000 fundraising goal. On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, another book designed to raise funds for hurricane relief efforts will be available. It Takes a Nation: How Strangers Became Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina is a collection of first-person accounts from Hurricane Katrina victims and the host families who offered all they had to help. Here’s the book’s plug:

“Edited by the cultural director of MoveOn.org, It Takes a Nation tells the extraordinary story of how thousands of Americans came together to provide shelter, sustenance, and hope to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.”

With a foreward by Illinois Senator Barak Obama and more than 40 photos from top photojournalists, the book’s sure to get some notice. All proceeds will go to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, “the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families.” ACORN sponsors a Hurricane Recover and Rebuilding Fund and a Rebuilding New Orleans project through which it’s already cleaned and preserved more than 1,400 homes in lower-income New Orleans neighborhoods. With profits from the sale of It Takes a Nation, hopefully ACORN will be able to rebuild many more.