- 12 hours ago
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
01:10We begin with a powerful conversation on 20 years since Hurricane Katrina.
01:15Please welcome Brent Craig, founder, Neutral Grounds, co-founder and principal, Black Equity Strategy Trust.
01:25Emile Washington, principal, Black Equity Strategy Trust.
01:32Maurice Scholes, MD, PhD, practicing New Orleans physician and board chair, National Medical Association.
01:40Shawna Young, CEO of Camelback Ventures.
01:45And our Linda Kelly, founding executive director of BNOLA.
01:50Good morning.
02:14Good morning.
02:16How's everyone doing today?
02:18We're getting started.
02:19We're rolling it in.
02:20First panel of the day.
02:22And thank all of my members on the panel for joining us.
02:25And thank you, Essence, for having us.
02:26And this is a very important panel because it's about 20 years since Hurricane Katrina.
02:33And all of us have our different stories.
02:35This is going to be a pretty quick panel, so we're going to jump straight into it.
02:38But this is basically to help us gain more awareness on the economic impact of Katrina,
02:43how we can grow as a community and move forward,
02:45and also be of service to other people going through similar situations.
02:50So without further ado, I would like to introduce my –
02:52or I'll let my panel introduce themselves, actually, and then we'll just jump right into it.
02:56My name is Shawna Young.
02:58I'm CEO of Camelback Ventures.
02:59We're a venture studio and capital social impact accelerator for entrepreneurs in education technology.
03:06We're based right here in New Orleans.
03:09My name is Dr. Maurice Scholes.
03:11I'm a physician, an entrepreneur, practicing doctor here in New Orleans,
03:14and I have a couple start-up businesses based here in New Orleans bringing technology and advancement to the city.
03:21I'm Adrenda Kelly.
03:22I'm the executive director of BNOLA, Black Education for New Orleans.
03:26We're an organization obsessed with making sure that black people shape what black children learn.
03:33Emile Washington, the co-founder of Black Equity Strategies Trust.
03:37We are a social impact consulting firm focusing on really bringing together the brightest minds to help our communities.
03:45And I'm Brent Craig, founder of Neutral Grounds and co-founder of Jam Around AI.
03:50And to get started with Shawna, tell me a little bit about where were you in 2005 when Katrina hit?
03:56I was thinking about this.
03:58I was a teacher in North Carolina, and my first thought was we need to get there.
04:04I need to be there.
04:05We have to help our community.
04:08And I felt like I felt helpless, actually, to see so many of my community not have what they need to really make out a really horrific situation.
04:20So I was there.
04:21I was a teacher, and I just remember being too far away, I will say.
04:25So I was actually practicing here at Children's Hospital, and I was working so hard I didn't see the news.
04:32And so my sister kept calling me, my friends kept calling me saying, what are you going to do?
04:38And I was like, what are you talking about?
04:39So I finally turned on the television and saw a hurricane filling up half the Gulf of Mexico, and I said, well, I guess I need to go somewhere.
04:45And I took a bag and went to Houston thinking I was going to stay for the weekend and didn't come home for two months.
04:51This is the first time I've actually talked publicly about Katrina, and it's been taking me 20 years of good therapy.
04:59But it was something to see people you know and love devastated.
05:05My patients, I saw them on TV at the convention center.
05:08It was powerless to help them.
05:10But then on the other side of it, I was in Houston to receive them when they got shipped somewhere, and it was nice to say, I know your doctor personally, and I can text them.
05:18It was a lot.
05:19I was actually in New York.
05:24I was working in education publishing at the time.
05:28And like you, Maurice, I wasn't necessarily deeply tuned in.
05:32My mother had evacuated thanks to her Jamaican husband who was like, I'm getting the hell out of here.
05:37And I'm so grateful because our neighborhood ended up being pretty flooded.
05:41So I wasn't worried.
05:42But I saw those same images.
05:45And I saw, you know, the days pass, no rescue.
05:48I heard the narrative shift from, you know, victims of a major natural disaster to talking about American citizens as refugees and, you know, showing people breaking into stores to get food and describing them as looters.
06:02I think what Katrina crystallized for me was how the power of narrative and who owns it and who frames it has real deadly material consequences on real people.
06:13Yeah.
06:14I was in college.
06:16It was my, we were going into our senior year.
06:19My dad is a pastor.
06:20So we were actually in Natchez, Mississippi at the time.
06:23And we had no idea.
06:26I was a senior at LSU.
06:30And there was no way to be prepared for something that you're not even informed about.
06:35As people forget, that storm was supposed to go up the coast of Florida.
06:41It went across the panhandle and got into the Gulf and got stronger.
06:46And so my parents, I believe, they didn't get back into their house until sometime in October or November.
06:52They were stuck in Mississippi.
06:54I drove, because you know those backwoods.
06:57So we drove 61 and went back to college.
06:59And the population of Baton Rouge doubled overnight, right?
07:04LSU became an actual trauma center.
07:07So while we were still in school going to classes, the indoor track facility was housing patients that was being flown in.
07:16So we're seeing the dichotomy of both things happening at the same time.
07:20So it's still surreal when people talk about it and thinking about the generations that really don't even have an understanding of what took place.
07:29And so this conversation, I think, is deeply needed at this moment.
07:33Yeah, and it's really important.
07:34When you think about the people who are affected by Hurricane Katrina, I was in seventh grade.
07:40So I was pretty much oblivious to what was going on.
07:43I thought we were going on, like, a little vacation.
07:45My mom said we wanted to pack up for three days.
07:48We wound up coming back three years later.
07:49So not two months, but moved to Houston.
07:52And it was a really, really impactful time for me, even though I was so young.
07:55And I feel like a lot of people have different stories based on where they were at their point in their life.
08:00So it's crazy to understand that you were not even there.
08:03You weren't there.
08:03Y'all were just witnessing from the outside looking in.
08:06And it's a great segue into our next point, which is how do you think Katrina affected the black communities?
08:11And I guess I'll leave that open to whoever wants to tackle that first.
08:14Sure.
08:14You know, I have never seen something so intentionally and surgically displace black people and people of lower socioeconomic status like that disaster.
08:25Because if you had the time, space, bandwidth, money to hold out, you could do something, still pay your bills, and come back when it was time.
08:35I was able, I had the privilege of being able to stay with my uncle in Baton Rouge, fight with that terrible traffic, and there being no food in the stores because everybody was up there eating it up.
08:45But I could do that and wait for potable water to come back and return to my house in the city and have a way to pay my bills.
08:54If you didn't have connections, disposable income, the ability to wait, the ability to be patient, how were you supposed to just do that?
09:04And so people went from living in a neighborhood that their family had lived in for generations to being in Montana or being in Idaho or someplace that you'd seen on a map that you'd never heard of.
09:15And I think when you go on vacation, you choose to go there.
09:18Your hurricane was forced on you.
09:21Nobody chose that.
09:22Hurricane, I never heard that.
09:23And if I could jump, because I think your point is very much needed to be double-tapped but also expounded because that worked if you had national banks.
09:34For those who had local banks, they didn't have access to their money.
09:37So it's a different type of economic status, right?
09:40Like you were maybe affluent, but if your bank was Hibernia or Liberty, you didn't have access.
09:46And so it forced an online banking component that did not exist, right?
09:51And so it really reshaped the black economic social class here in Louisiana, specifically in South Louisiana.
09:59And it changed just how we viewed everyone.
10:03And I think the biggest part is realizing that policy is not always connected to poverty, and it needs to be.
10:13And so people are not making – we're not making that connection as to what was happening at the state, federal, and local level
10:18and how that would impact them locally in order for preparation.
10:21And so that's, I think, the biggest thing – or one of the biggest things.
10:24And I would add that you have this other layer of people who are trying to take advantage of the situation when you're already desperate.
10:33You said sort of patience, just having the cash, but also, you know, really we see it happening in the fires in Al-Sedena
10:39where people are coming in and getting offers for just their land.
10:43And so when I come back to Katrina, come back to New Orleans, the CEO of Kempak Ventures, literally 19 years later, I was so excited to be here.
10:52And then I learned, like, there's no public school – there are no public schools.
10:56Yeah.
10:56All – I mean, Adrinda, I know you want to talk about it.
10:58Oh, my gosh.
10:59I mean, there are so many threads to connect here.
11:01Yes.
11:01I think Katrina, if anything, is the poster child for how natural disaster is used to disrupt concentrations of black political, economic, and in education, pedagogical power.
11:14And medical.
11:15Amen.
11:15And health.
11:16Absolutely.
11:16You know, we have – to talk about Katrina 20 years later, you have to talk about education,
11:21which is probably one of the biggest stories of transformation post-storm.
11:26And the 20 years of post-Katrina reform started with – and was significantly accelerated by the mass termination of 7,500 public school staff, 4,000 teachers, the majority of them black women.
11:43And we talk about the economic impact of that.
11:46Essentially, with that move, we unemployed 5% of employed black New Orleanians.
11:53And that particular population of educators was also very politically involved, you know, represented by a very politically active teachers union.
12:01And that move, you know, really changed the face of our city politically, economically, and educationally.
12:08And to double-click on that, Shawna, let's go into the transition of economic development because education, it breeds talent.
12:16The talent is what actually funnels the economy.
12:19So we talk a little bit about what was lost.
12:23But what is actually being built as a result of it 20 years later?
12:26Yeah, I really love the idea of talking about the opportunity.
12:30So for Camelback, we started 10 years ago, anchored here in New Orleans, investing by giving early capital, $40,000 to entrepreneurs in education and in technology.
12:40We're national, and we're intentional around still investing in the South and investing in New Orleans.
12:45And so from that, we have seen new school models come up that were started by black founders.
12:51We also look at ways in which we can support the ecosystem.
12:55So how are we showing up even if you're not a fellow or part of our program?
12:59I believe that 20 years ago, 10 years ago, right now, entrepreneurship and building new systems, new businesses is really our way to wealth development for black people.
13:11For sure.
13:12And I want to talk about the reality that I did not text message before Katrina.
13:18Now, this was 2005, and everybody texts now, but I was forced to text message.
13:24That wasn't something I chose to do.
13:27And as a result, I am an older person, more comfortable with technology, because I was forced to use it.
13:33Similarly, electronic medical records.
13:35When I was displaced, all of my patient records were in my office at Josephson's Hospital.
13:39So the hundreds of patients and families I took care of didn't have access to refills for their prescriptions, instructions for their wheelchairs, instructions for their PT, OT, or speech, because I deal with kids with disabilities.
13:53So I am now a diehard, staunch advocate for technology and medicine.
13:58And people talk about banks and people being conservative.
14:01Medicine is conservative in that we don't adopt new things well.
14:04So out of this disaster, medicine really got a classic example of why we needed portable medical records, why you now can access your medical record on your phone, okay?
14:18And that's something we take for granted 20 years later that was illustrated and forced by this disaster, Katrina.
14:24The opportunity.
14:26What's the opportunity in the challenge?
14:27You know, you use the, you're talking about technology, and it made me think about Dr. Ruha Benjamin.
14:36You know, we talk a lot about right now the need to, in education, the need to make sure our children are learning about AI, are becoming literate, right, in these new technologies.
14:46And that's right, artificial intelligence is important.
14:49But what Dr. Benjamin offers us is that ancestral intelligence is just as important.
14:55And when I think about one of the biggest misses in our education story post-Katrina, it's the fact that we built a new education paradigm that thought nothing good was happening educationally in New Orleans.
15:10I'm definitely an example of the bright spots that we had in pre-Katrina public education.
15:18My very black, very pre-Katrina public school sent me to Harvard in 1998, where I was just, you know, the only African American to matriculate that year.
15:28My point is my story is not supposed to be possible in our rendering of what education was pre-Katrina.
15:35And what it means is that we're not pulling into the present, the lessons and the strategies of how these folks did what they did, often in the face of massive state disinvestment, but somehow was able to ignite the brilliance of generations of black children in our city.
15:52So ancestral intelligence is something that I think about as a technology we need to embrace.
15:57I love that we have our naturally occurring social networks here.
16:00So I'm a member of Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club.
16:03Hail Zulu.
16:04I am King Athena, 2026.
16:07And for people that don't know Mardi Gras royalty, it sounds like something extra, but those naturally occurring social networks and connectivity are what brought us back together after this disaster and things tried to rip us apart.
16:21We knew who we are and whose we are, and knowing whose you are really reaches into your point about ancestral intelligence, because I didn't have to wonder how I would show my joy and my sadness.
16:34I know how to second line and move my feet.
16:36I didn't have to wonder who was going to sew for me, because my Indian brothers were going to sew hard for me when we came back to the city.
16:43And there's something reassuring about knowing what's waiting for you, because you know whose you are and who you are.
16:49Well, I know where my Zulu tickets will come from next year.
16:54So, first and foremost.
16:57And I think the biggest thing in the sense of opportunity is the cross-collaboration and being able to work together once again, right?
17:04Like, we sometimes forget how the Tulsa's were successful, and that was being intentional about keeping things local and in your neighborhood and going to the same doctors, having your teachers, having the free—
17:17Like, being in a space to be able to circulate your dollars, and that it didn't leave the actual neighborhood.
17:23And we're actually—what they're giving us without giving it to us is that opportunity to come back together again and realize that my brother is my brother, my sister is my sister, and they're not my enemy.
17:34And if we take that moment, we can do so much.
17:38And so I think that's one of the things I would love for us to really look at, just collectively, as we leave this for the 20th anniversary, how do we give back to some of our communities and rebuilding them and taking back what was taken from us?
17:51I think what you bring up, too, is, like, shifting from being consumer-based, which was intentional, to really being, as we are, creators and owners of our own businesses and opportunities.
18:04And so it's a mindset shift that I see happening, especially in New Orleans, but we have to actually come together.
18:11And we're intentional friends at Camelback Ventures.
18:14When we do our dinners, we go to black-owned restaurants.
18:17We're going to take our business there, you know, that type of thing.
18:19I love this.
18:21This is one of my easiest panels I've ever done.
18:24Because when you hear 20th anniversary of Katrina, you think, okay, this may be like a trauma panel, right?
18:31But this is more of a triumph panel, where we're talking about things that we've used to navigate these disasters.
18:38And with so much going on in the world, you have the fires in California.
18:41You were telling me this morning about the flood in Texas.
18:44Like, there was a flood in Texas, I don't know if y'all heard of, that is devastating Texas right now.
18:48We provide the framework for how these issues get dealt with.
18:53So to transition, and y'all just gave me a lot of good examples, I want y'all to hone in on what are some tips that you have for someone that may have just got displaced yesterday?
19:02And they don't know what to do.
19:04I know it's 20, 25, 20 years later.
19:05But what is some advice that y'all have for people who are going to be future, I would say, future leaders in the space of disaster recovery?
19:14I'll jump in that.
19:17In one of our roles in another capacity, we do a lot of rapid response for this.
19:24And I think it really goes into understanding who's already on the ground.
19:28There are people who are doing work to benefit the community and who are equipped to position themselves to receive resources to help others.
19:36So figuring out who are those organizations and be able to turn to them because they're going to know where the direct needs is.
19:43We are so eager to always give to the big four or five organizations where the money doesn't always trickle down.
19:51And so it still goes back to the economic impact.
19:53And what are the local organizations that are able to say that person actually needs some water, that person needs some bread, we don't need clothes right now.
20:02We need to figure out how do we resettle that land or figure out what is the space for that home or let's get this church back up because that was a food pantry.
20:12And these people know to go here to receive that, like, as opposed to just trying to parachute in and save the day.
20:18It's really figuring out who was already there doing the work, who's still doing the work, who was not impacted because not everybody is going to be impacted.
20:26And being able to lift those up who are not impacted so that they can be best positioned to be the strong warriors in that space.
20:34You know, I just want to, you know, say that and acknowledge how tender this year is, as you just said, for this whole city, right?
20:43There are a million Katrina stories, and many of them continue to be deeply painful.
20:49It lives in your body, you know, the trauma.
20:52And educationally, certainly, this year, there is an attempt, I think, to paint an overly rosy narrative, right, about where we are.
21:02Progress does need to be celebrated.
21:04There has been some made.
21:05But we are still a city where the vast majority of black children are not reading, don't have basic literacy skills by the third grade.
21:13And there is still a 50% achievement gap between black and white children.
21:18And so we do have a lot of work to do.
21:20One of the biggest lessons I think we've learned educationally is that it matters who's in the room, as you're thinking about rebuilding these systems.
21:29It matters that you have some sort of context about the history and culture of the community that you're about to work in.
21:37For example, in education, we completely ignored the role of 141 years of racism in addressing our education challenges.
21:47And so we fired the teachers, which was not the right solution.
21:50So, in short, it's echoing your point about being curious about what's there, being curious about why what's there, right, looks the way it does or doesn't, and then being willing to invest in indigenous models and indigenous solutions.
22:04You know, I really, really love the points that you all are making.
22:08And as a scientist, I'm an MD, PhD, arts matter.
22:13Arts matter, and I'm going to say it again, arts matter.
22:15The reason arts matter in trauma is it gives you a way to express what you're feeling when you don't have the words.
22:23You can't prepare for something you've never experienced in some ways.
22:27I can have a go bag, and I encourage everybody here to have, know where your marriage certificate is, your birth certificate is, your insurance policy, and have that in a go bag like you were getting ready to go to the hospital and have a baby.
22:38You want to have that ready for you.
22:40So part of this starts with preparation.
22:41But when things happen to you, what I find was most critical, not just for those that are resilient enough to be able to wait like I did to come back in two months when they could, or the people that were wading through the water, there needs to be a process for you to tell your story, have your story validated, and process your story.
23:01So shout-out to the mental health professionals out there that were available to help pick us up and put us back together.
23:08Shout-out to the systems of people that said, I might be all over the country, but I'm still here for you.
23:15And I ask people to lean into their community.
23:20My mama worried me to death after Katrina, so I gave her a job.
23:25She got to worry FEMA to get me my FEMA response money.
23:29And it gave her something to do, and it gave me material help.
23:33And I think that's an example of how you let people love on you in a way that's helpful.
23:38Yeah, in addition to being CEO of Camelback Ventures, I'm also co-founder of Onyx Black Wealth Collective.
23:45And the reason we started is because we recognized that we just weren't sharing information with each other.
23:51Like, being aware, just knowing what you don't know.
23:54And for me, it's like, I did not know how to actually build wealth.
23:58And when I'm coming back to Katrina, coming back to New Orleans, you know, 20 years later, I am in awe of what has been done here.
24:04I am in awe of how much success we have had.
24:06And I think about what we can do next.
24:09And so, as disturbing as it is to go through many things as black people, especially right now, these systems around us were not built for us.
24:20They were not built for us.
24:21And so, we're thinking about how do we use the next 10 years to set up the next 100 years of legacy.
24:26So, I say for right now, being aware, taking the time, ensuring all your stuff is in order.
24:33And then the joy that black people have every single day.
24:36What I love about New Orleans is it doesn't matter what's going on, we're going to laugh, we're going to have a good time, and we're going to still make shit happen.
24:44Yep.
24:44Yeah.
24:45And I would say what I would give advice to is understanding the narrative, controlling your own narrative.
24:52When Hurricane Katrina hit, this was not the information age that we're in today.
24:56We did not have – I think MySpace wasn't even around during that time.
25:00Email, like you said, text messages just started rolling in.
25:03And there was a lot of news, a lot of information that was misinformation.
25:07And it caused a lot of turmoil within a lot of different communities.
25:11So, when it comes to us controlling our own narrative, one of the big reasons why the Global Black Economic Forum is so important is because it's about controlling the black narrative.
25:19And if we control that narrative, we will be more prepared when things happen so that we can keep the information in a silo to where we can actually benefit from it.
25:27So, we have around two minutes left.
25:28I want everyone to kind of just give me your tip on how do you think we could control our narrative better, not just for disaster preparedness, but just for education, economic development, communications.
25:40How do y'all think we do that?
25:42Well, as the elder on the panel here, I think the way you do it is you make room for everybody to learn the new skills.
25:50I am able to tell my stories because I can work the Twitter.
25:53I can tell, I'm learning my stories.
25:56I'm terrible at TikTok, but I'm trying.
25:59And I say this because there are stories that only I can tell, but if I don't tell it in the medium that people are receiving the information, they'll never learn it.
26:08So, I really believe in cross-generational togetherness and making sure nobody's left behind.
26:14People are not expendable.
26:17I don't know.
26:17We might be going in the order of age, but I'm not going to say anything.
26:19But anyway, I think you have to tell your story.
26:25I agree with you.
26:26I spent a lot of time head down working, thinking that someone was going to find my story, and it wasn't happening.
26:33So, we have to take the time to tell the stories that we know we want everyone to know about what we're doing here in New Orleans and black people.
26:42I think how we frame the story and who frames the story is deeply important.
26:48When it comes to education, for example, we all want our schools to be great.
26:53We all want them to be high-quality spaces for every child.
26:57But we often look at schools and we say we knock them for the struggles that they're having about academic achievement.
27:03They should be accountable, no doubt about it.
27:06But we are less curious about, did they have the resources to invest in professional development?
27:12Did they have the resources to invest in high-quality educational materials, after-school tutoring programs, etc., etc.?
27:19And the fact remains, there's a lot of resource inequity that continues in our system that makes it tougher for some schools to do what they need to do and easier for others.
27:28And so, I think how we frame the narrative, how we ask and what we use and sort of contextualize around the questions that we are struggling with really matters.
27:39And I think that's something that Katrina taught us for sure.
27:44Real quickly, we're out of time, but give me an answer.
27:46Yes, I would say that being mindful of this city, what's happening this year outside of the 20th anniversary as we enter an election that will shape the next city, power is not a dirty word.
28:01We all have it, and we have the opportunity to utilize it and embrace it.
28:07And so, it is also our duty to recognize the power we have.
28:11And that power allows us to hire people and to fire people and be mindful of those who represent us or who claim to represent us and what that looks like, right?
28:21And so, as we're thinking about these next couple years and how that impacts and where the dollars are flowing and the cultural barriers and how we want to tell stories and all of that, it's all connected in every shape and fashion.
28:36There is a local election here.
28:38That matters.
28:40Be mindful of the candidates, what they say, how they show up, when they're showing up, in what capacity they're showing up.
28:47And this is from the mayor all the way down to the city council.
28:53And be earnest in how you invoke and use your power.
28:59And that is our panel.
29:00Thank you all so much for joining us.
29:03And, yeah, this is good.
29:04So, I appreciate you all.
29:05Thank you, Global Economic Forum.
29:06Thank you, Essence Fest.
29:07And we'll carry on for the rest of the show.
29:10This isn't like she's ready to blow.
29:37And we'll carry on for the rest of the show.
Comments