Lafayette Restoration Center
Lafayette, LA
“To women around the country, we are all mothers or surrogates. When you look into the faces of those throughout the Gulf Coast region, it could be your kids. We have to stand up for the injustice, to be their voices.”
CEO, Bishop Williams
Bishop Williams’ Story
As the first African-American female ever to be named bishop of the African American Independent Catholic Church, Bishop Williams is no stranger to challenges. Despite the sexism she knew she would face when she took on the job of leading Louisiana’s community of African-American Catholics, Williams, a trained life-coach and theologian, had no hesitation about taking the position when it was offered to her. “The archbishop wanted to ordain the first female bishop and I was that bishop,” Williams says matter-of-factly. “I guess that God has wanted me to be a trailblazer in life. To always be the first.”
As it turns out, this experience of being “first” has provided Williams with the vision that defines her work aiding parishioners in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Prior to the storm, Williams had become intimately familiar with the daily challenges of survival in the Southern Louisiana region: her ministry’s focus had always rested, of necessity, on issues of poverty, education and uplifting the voices of the disenfranchised. The Lafayette Restoration Center is an independent, African-American Congregation founded one year ago through funding from Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission International—though the group has been serving the community of Lafayette on poverty and elderly and women’s issues for more than three years.
In Katrina’s aftermath it became even clearer to Williams that the greatest her church, the Lafayette Restoration Center, could provide was to help those affected by the storm empower themselves. Overcoming her own challenges in assuming the role of bishop, Williams says, helped her understand that, though these families were going through a “wilderness”, her responsibility lay in “[getting] them to navigate for themselves. Not to give them a fish, but to teach them to fish for themselves, so that they always may eat.”
Williams had been the CEO of the Lafayette Restoration Center for 3 years when Hurricane Katrina hit. She was in the church’s Washington D.C. headquarters when she heard about the storm, and mobilized her community immediately. She quickly realized that many of her church colleagues from the Imani Temple #28 of New Orleans lived in the Lower Ninth Ward and had not yet evacuated. So she did what the government did not: she sent members of her Lafayette congregation to rescue them—first the seniors, then the women and children.
Lafayette Restoration Center: Meeting the needs of more than 10,000 evacuees
Upon her return to Louisiana, Williams found that many people had evacuated to Lafayette but had nothing. She also noted that the Cajundome, shelter for many, was on the Southside, an area notoriously unfriendly to African-Americans. The mission of the Lafayette Restoration Center became providing basic needs to evacuees: they found shelter for nearly 100 displaced African-American families, many of which were headed by women; prepared meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner for over 1,000 people; and provided clothes, counseling, transportation, and jobs to more than 10,000.
But as time went on, Bishop Williams realized that people needed more than simple commodities--they need to grieve. People were seriously depressed. She recalls, “People had not cried – they were still in a state of shock.” So the November after the storm Williams instituted “29 minutes of prayer” throughout her congregation: every Friday, the gathered group takes 29 minutes to allow people to tell their stories and encourage healing, while remembering the date that had brought havoc to their lives.
As the staff at the Lafayette Restoration Center began to understand the depth of need in their community, Williams expanded their work. They distributed over 1000 new school uniforms for kids, along with new tennis shoes. Williams remembers that “the children were so pleased not to have hand me downs, but that they were new. They walked with pride.” During spring break the Center created a camp, welcoming 115 children to the church and taking them on field trips. Williams was delighted, she says, “to see the children all come together just to be kids, and to feel safe.”
Williams and her team also focused on the elders. “It shook my foundation to see the elders…get into housing that is theirs and, for the first time, saying ‘I slept in my bed,’” she says. Her staff also realized that many people were getting sick and brought in a nutritionist to help deal with those issues. They arranged for Southern University to park a truck with phones and computers near the Center to help reconnect families and in December they partnered with FEMA to give out cell phones. They started parenting groups, and acquired and distributed gift cards and medicine.
And as time went on, when housing became a central concern, Williams’ group took steps to help there too. They began to work with contractors to build the Gulf coast Recovery Outreach Center. This building will house a factory that builds parts of houses to be built wherever land can be secured. They will train people and pay $20 an hour.
“We got money from wherever we could,” Williams reports. “The quilting group in Florida, the $5 from a grandmother—more than the traditional foundations or government.” She adds that funding mechanisms must change to fit the needs. “We are looking at Third World conditions in a New World environment. The only people I know with experience working in these conditions are missionaries; this region has become the new missionary field. Funders cannot approach this from a traditional model – they have to take resources and get them to the ground.”
Life post-Katrina: The challenges one year later
“One year later, the needs are greater,” notes Williams. In that time, the work of the Center has shifted almost entirely. “Katrina has been our work,” Williams says. “There isn’t much time to do anything else aside from deal with addressing the critical needs that Katrina has surfaced… We traditionally did 4 events a year – we now do an event every month of empowerment to get the word out.”
Williams remains enraged that people living in the wealthiest country in the world are being denied the ability to live their lives fully. “There were pockets of poverty before Katrina,” Williams says. “[But] the blankets of poverty were thrown off. We are still finding individuals today who are in need of the basic necessities of life that make one whole… Our mission is to assist people in saving themselves since Katrina.”
Their next phase and vision aims to help people continue to approach life post-Katrina in a holistic fashion, by developing a “one-stop-shop” that will provide mental health training, housing developments, spiritual and pastoral care counseling, parent training, and assistance for young mothers. Williams describes is as a way “to give people an opportunity for employment in a safe environment so that they feel whole, [and] can produce and participate as full citizens.”
Williams is also intent on re-building their church in New Orleans, which was badly damaged by the storm. The Sunday before Katrina hit they had burned the mortgage papers, to celebrate that the building was finally paid off. She is certain that they will be able to that once again.
As an African American woman, Williams deals with historic challenges
Williams reflects: “As a girl it’s been a rough road. On top of that, African-American. On top of that black skin. All of those historic issues to deal with.” She continues, “I think I really understand now that America is in our years of struggle—that we are still a segregated society. We don’t see people through the lens of love, we don’t understand compassion, we don’t walk in others shoes. We are not a nation that walks the walk and talks the talk.”
Redefining home
“For me, home is where my heart is now,” reflects Williams. “Now I really have to rely on memories, on faces – I have no idea how individuals are or even if they are alive. I have to, in my heart, depend on the love of touching them that I last felt, the voices I last heard, and know that all that we are ‘is only by the grace of God.’
“Home is definitely no longer bricks and mortar and ‘things,’” Williams says. “Things are so nebulous – they come and they go. It’s more about people and love. Love is really God. When you understand this, you understand that you can get things once again.”
Williams says she no longer takes anything for granted post-Katrina. “Tomorrow is not promised to you. Katrina has driven this home to me. We have to live our life like this is the last hour and the last second that we will be.”
The Ms. Foundation
Ms. Foundation funding will support the Center’s Katrina related work, which has a focus on addressing women and children’s poverty and health issues for in-state and evacuated survivors. Through a network of partners, the Lafayette Restoration Center will continue to advocate for the empowerment of women, their reproductive rights and encourage women of color to be a voice in both legislative efforts and entrepreneurial leadership.
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