Reason Magazine - A Healthy Dose of Anarchy:
"I first heard about Common Ground in an email from my friend Jeff, a New York bohemian who frequented underground art parties and halfway legal street events. It’s fair to say that many of the people who organized and attended those events were of a type. They had odd jobs and even odder side projects; they made their own clothes, and it showed. And they threw really good parties.
So when I learned some of the same people were helping organize a relief project in New Orleans, I was both fascinated and skeptical. When I poked around further and learned that many were alumni of Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering, two of the nation’s biggest, strangest counterculture festivals, I was even more fascinated and even more skeptical. Could a bunch of middle- and upper-middle-class kids, many of them fresh from “alternative” experiences, connect with poor, churchgoing residents of the South? And if they could, would the experiment affect more than a handful of residents?
To my surprise, the answers were yes and yes. As I watched these groups in action, it became clear that they were connecting with the locals and that their services were invaluable. Residents used words like “heaven-sent” and “angels” when describing the volunteers, even the guy serving food in a cowboy hat and a dress.
...volunteers decamped in Waveland, pitched tents across from the police station, and started serving hot meals to the displaced. “The FEMA people said, ‘You can’t do this—it’s not in the manual,’ but we got away with it,” Sayotovich said with a grin.
Dubbed the New Waveland Café, the operation didn’t just feed residents. It encouraged them to participate in cooking, cleaning, and other details that went into running the aid effort, transforming the helped into helpers. Tales of how the residents of this small Southern town took to a group of hippies reached as far as the Chicago Tribune, which reported that the group ran its kitchen so well that one Red Cross volunteer quit to join them instead. The Gambit, a New Orleans alt-weekly, described a police officer looking the other way when the smell of marijuana drifted out of the Rainbow camp.
“You’re not just seeing a truck driving around passing out Styrofoam containers of food,” said Mark Weiner, taking a dig at the Red Cross. “You’re seeing life here.” Behind him a 40-foot geodesic dome—a tent repurposed from the 35,000-person Burning Man art festival in Nevada—was beginning to fill with the day’s lunch crowd. The 23-year-old Weiner is a founder and executive director of the nonprofit Eme...
That conversation was a sharp contrast with the measured words of the director of the New Orleans chapter of Habitat for Humanity, or the director of the Red Cross chapter, or any representatives of the large, traditional relief and post-disaster recovery organizations that normally claim the authority to perform this type of work. Those people had decades of experience managing crises. They had staffs of volunteers who expected leadership. They reported to national hierarchies and had a brand name to protect... But these big groups end up turning away the Young Turks who are ready to ride their bikes around a deserted city with nothing but a hunch that they will find people in need.
...Kay Wilkins, CEO of Red Cross’ Southeast Louisiana chapter, called Katrina “the great equalizer” of relief organizations. After its blunders with supplies and volunteers, the Red Cross’ reputation as the charity that could do no wrong has been squashed.
“I’ll go to any meeting now,” Wilkins says. “I work with groups I had never really worked with.” While the grassroots groups will gladly take help from the behemoth Red Cross, they emphasize that their lack of hierarchy and take-anyone approach were not merely born of necessity. They worked that way by design."
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