Special Offering 2023: Mission Moment1/31/2023 Sunny Day Camp On a dark night in early December 2021, entirely out of season, tornadoes tore across eight states, killing more than 80 people and devastating many communities. Just eight months later, on a warm Saturday in July, two Disciples churches and several community organizations made sure that dozens of children impacted by those winter storms in western Kentucky spent time outside with friends and caregivers, reveling in a bright and sunny day.
Culture Brokers & Disaster Response1/18/2023 long-term hurricane response & the First Peoples Conservation Council On August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall over Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes in coastal Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour and peak gusts as high as 172 mph. Tied for the title of the strongest storm to strike Louisiana, Ida brought catastrophic damage to the Indigenous Nations of the First Peoples Conservation Council -- demolishing homes, uprooting and toppling trees, and leaving the vast majority of families in its path in need of temporary and permanent housing assistance.
It also affected Louisiana’s Coastal Tribes by destroying their collective gathering spaces, important for Tribal governance, rituals, the maintenance of cultural traditions, and the preservation of the French-Choctaw patois dialect (français de la Louisiane) that is unique to these communities and is considered a national treasure. These collective meeting sites are also where Native American residents of these unique Bayou regions come together to develop place-based climate change adaptation strategies that will allow them to continue to live in their ancestral homelands. Week of Compassion is grateful to partner with the Lowlander Center to support the Indigenous Resilience Disaster Case Management Program (IR-DCMP), which was launched on Sept. 6, 2022, to serve the members of five Tribes hard-hit by Ida in South Louisiana. |
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