Audrey’s Coming Home!!!  Love Knows No Bounds is heading down to NOLA on January 29th to finish Miss Audrey’s house, thanks to the amazing support of everyone who has contributed time, labor, funds, and love to the rebuilding of her home.

In the same week we said a fond farewell to LKNB founder Catherine Martinez, we
were granted our tax-exempt status, making us an official not-for-profit
organization! To bring greater awareness of and support for our mission, in
June we launched a vibrant new website, www.loveknowsnobounds.org,
which was soon followed by an improved presence on Facebook and Twitter.  Get updates, see photos, and more at: http://www.facebook.com/LoveKnowsNoBounds.

We are deeply grateful to all of our volunteers, donors, advisors, partners, and friends for the life-changing opportunities to serve amazing and resilient people!  This is what your support makes possible:

New Orleans

• To get beloved elder Miss Audrey back into her home, we collaborated with IthacaCollege group ReNew Orleans (formerly Audrey’s House), Cornell GEEKS, andLehman Alternative Community School (LACS). Because of our efforts, Miss Audrey will be back home by mid-January 2012!
• With many schools still closed and few positive outlets for youth, gang violence is on the rise in the 7^th Ward. To help combat this, we started a project to create a sustainably-built, solar-powered, community-empowerment center. The center will provide strategic programs for youth empowerment, such as academic support, GED preparation, mentorship for young entrepreneurs, employment preparation, and summer camp.
• To provide respite for community leaders, we collaborated with the PeaceWeavers of Bath, NY, to bring five Katrina survivors to their gorgeous retreat sanctuary for a week in August. During another respite trip to Ithaca in June, our New Orleans partners, Pastor Bruce and Deborah Davenport, marched in the Ithaca Festival Parade, officiated a wedding, were declared Honorary Ithacans by Mayor Carolyn Peterson, and feasted on love, laughter, and relaxation every step of the way.
• The PeaceWeavers and LKNB helped a family refinance their home at a favorable rate, and avoid losing it due to predatory lending that’s still prevalent in NOLA. This home is of special significance, since LKNB, LACS, and PeaceWeavers helped rebuild it.

Southern Tier, NY

• Following the devastating flood in early September, we helped families clean debris out of their homes in Owego and Johnson City, ripped up damaged flooring in Vestal, helped the Whole in the Wall restaurant in Binghamton re-open by providing skilled labor assistance, and distributed truckloads of home furnishings, clothes, and other essentials in Owego. During 2012, we will help rebuild homes, collect and donate more home furnishings, and create respite opportunities for our friends to the immediate south.

It is so easy to forget that recovery is a long and grueling process. People who are determined to keep their homes often deal with insurance loopholes, overwhelmed local agencies, trauma, extreme stress, brutal weather, and lack of funds. Long after the cameras stop rolling and the rest of the world has moved on, LKNB reminds survivors that they are not forgotten, helps them manage these challenges with strength, and return home. We think of ourselves as the “second wave,” but our friends in New Orleans call us, “The Cavalry.” We’ll take that, too!

We are so grateful to get to do service work that we love with people whose courage and tenacity so often move us to tears. Thank you for supporting our work and giving us the opportunity to help people rebuild their lives after catastrophe.

With deepest gratitude,

The LKNB Leadership Team

P.S.  We know money is a challenge for everyone.  That is especially true for
families recovering from catastrophe. Please consider giving what you can this
holiday season. A gift in any amount makes a world of difference. For example:

• $10 buys flowers or food plants for a garden.Gardens are especially healing on many levels for disaster survivors.
• $25 buys two sheets of sheetrock. These are theonly walls we like to build J
• $50 buys lumber for trim. Love may have nobounds, but rooms do.
• $100 buys an interior door. Help open new doorsof relief for disaster survivors!
• $200 rents a truck to distribute homefurnishings to disaster survivors
• $500 sponsors a week-long respite visit for acommunity leader

Contributions can be made on our secure website www.loveknowsnobounds.org,
or by sending a check made out to LKNB to:  Love Knows No Bounds, 230 Rachel Carson
Way, Ithaca, NY  14850

Article is here: http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20111123/NEWS01/111230345/Flood-giving-follows-flood-century-Tioga-residents?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CLocal+News&mid=5385.

With much gratitude,

Mike Ellis, Executive Director

The gifts we are offering this year are:

• $10 helps us plant flowers in flood survivor’s gardens in New Orleans and NY’s Southern Tier
• $20 helps us purchase and install sheetrock in homes we are rebuilding in New Orleans and, soon, in  NY’s Southern Tier
• $50 helps us purchase lumber for trim in homes we are rebuilding
• $200 helps us rent a moving truck to deliver donated household goods to families in NY’s Southern Tier.
• A gift in the amount of  your choice to assist LKNB to continue helping people rebuild their lives after catastrophe

The Fair will be held from 10 am to 6 pm, Saturday, December 3, in two adjacent locations:the First Presbyterian Church, 315 North Cayuga Street, and the First Baptist Church, 309 North Cayuga Street. LKNB will be at First Presbyterian.Stop by our table, help yourself to a Hershey’s Kiss, and chat with our volunteers about some of our new projects for 2012!

Each gift you buy comes with a free greeting card and an insert about the organization you are supporting. All of the money collected at the Fair goes directly to the participating organizations. The Ithaca Alternative Gift Fair is sponsored by the Center for Transformative Action and the Tompkins County Public Library with financial support from Alternatives Federal Credit Union.

We hope to see you at the Fair! It’s a wonderful way to learn about our community, share holiday cheer with others, support LKNB, and give gifts that have less impact on the environment and more impact on people who could use something to smile about this holiday season.

Ithaca Alternative Gift Fair

CHICKENFRIEDFUNDRAISER

The whole evening was made even more special by the sizzlin’ sounds of Lil’ Anne and Friends, a locally beloved zydeco band (Check ‘em out here: http://www.lilanneandhotcayenne.com/).  Believe me, it was not hard to close my eyes and imagine I was right back at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl in New Orleans, soaking up another Thursday Zydeco night, which has become an LKNB tradition on our rebuilding trips.  Lil’ Anne and Friends got us in a Big Easy state of mind, sure enough!

We could not have raised half of what we raised without the generosity of the businesses and people that donated excellent items for the raffle.  Throw your hands up and shout for the following SuperFriends who contributed raffle prizes: Sea Change Chiropractic, Island Health and Fitness, Rasa Spa, Maxie’s (once again), the Cornell University Athletic Department, Wings Over Ithaca, Applebee’s, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and our very own Board President, Erik Lehmann.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this delicious helping of much-needed support!!  Let’s do it again real soon .

With much gratitude,

Mike, for the LKNB team

I wanted to let you know of a new, fun, and interesting way for you to support Love Knows No Bounds while sharing your talents with the world.  This comes at the perfect time as we embark on several new projects to assist with the clean-up efforts from the devastating flooding in the Binghamton area and are in the last stages of our efforts to get Miss Audrey Armour back in her New Orleans home after 6 years in housing limbo!  We need all hands on deck right now, and we know not everyone has money to share, so…here’s something different:

A new website called GoodInKind.com just launched in Ithaca, and it provides a way for you to support us by either offering a service of some kind to other members of the Ithaca community or by purchasing a service offered by others.  The proceeds from the transactions are channeled directly to us to support our mission.

For example, if you’re good at tennis, you can offer a tennis lesson to someone for, say, $50.  When you post that offer on GoodInKind.com, you choose Love Knows No Bounds as the recipient of the funds.  When someone sees your offer, they contact you through GoodInKind to make arrangements for the lesson, enter their credit card information, and GoodInKind then channels the $50 to us.  I have posted a service on the site, and I can testify that it is as easy as can be.  If I can do it, anyone can.

A 60 second video explaining how it works can be seen at www.goodinkind.com.

GoodInKind is a way for you to support us by simply doing something fun, teaching or learning something new, or by helping out your neighbors.

Please visit our GoodInKind page here: http://goodinkind.com/nonprofits/30-love-knows-no-bounds.

Thank you, and I hope you will try this exciting new way to do something you enjoy while helping an organization you believe in!  You don’t even need to live in Ithaca to participate. If your service is able to be performed by remote, then you can offer it to an Ithacan from anywhere simply by posting the service on the GoodinKind page.  If someone in your neck of the woods or on your contact list wants to purchase the service you have posted, you can ask them to do their payment on the GoodinKind page (you will have to do your own awareness-raising of your service if you are out of the Ithaca-area, though, as currently GoodinKind is only promoting the service in Ithaca).

Who knows…maybe this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to get your hidden talent or passion out into the world and start on a new path!  And whether or not this appeals to you, please forward this opportunity on to friends whom you think might be interested.  There is no limit to what kind of support and momentum we can create with this…

Have fun!!  Do Good!!  Thank you!!!

With much gratitude,

Mike

Thanks to the continued devotion and generosity of the PeaceWeavers, who run Thunder Mountain Peace Sanctuary, LKNB has been able to offer this unique experience to Katrina survivors since 2007.

This year’s participants came into the experience stressed-out and depleted, on the edge of emotional and physical breakdown.  They shared stories of increased crime and violence in the city, especially theft.  One participant is dealing with a stolen truck which he counted on for his livelihood as a contractor.  He and his wife are also fighting to save their house, which is in danger of foreclosure, at least it was prior to this event (more on that in a minute).  Another participant continues to be displaced from the home she worked 30 years to afford, but lost after Katrina.  She is currently living with her extended family, but she is beyond ready to be back in her own space.  She has suffered theft of building supplies and rip-offs by unscrupulous contractors which have depleted her Road Home funds (federal re-building program) and delayed her homecoming.  Another participant spoke of several recent deaths of people close to him, and funerals he, as Pastor of his church, had to postpone while he was in New York.

Everyone placed their stress level as “off the charts” in the past month, but reported that, just by arriving at Thunder Mountain, their stress level went down to a “2 or 3 out of 10.”  As one participant put it, “Sometimes you are so deep in the rat race, you don’t even notice that you need a break until all of you sudden you get one and then it’s like, ‘Man, I didn’t even know how stressed out I was.’”  They shared that being able to experience a week of respite at Thunder Mountain gives them the strength and energy to continue to face the harsh circumstances of their lives back home with courage, grace, and tenacity.  By the end of the week, their stress level had dropped to a “0″ or a “1″ and they looked like years of strain and concern had melted away from their faces and bodies.

Everybody benefitted from having our NOLA brothers and sisters at the Summer Peace Gathering as they shared wisdom, spiritual insight, singing, important information about the situation in NOLA, cooking, humor, and their brave, noble being with everyone.  Other participants were so touched by spending time with the NOLA group, especially the family facing foreclosure, that they were moved to contribute over $3,000 to help the family negotiate a loan modification.  This was a HUGE and unexpected miracle which actually had the desired effect of helping the family stave off foreclosure and renegotiate their loan!!

Other highlights included spending time talking with Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Arun, who is an elder of the PeaceWeaver community, an impromptu lesson in gospel singing, a productive and inspiring brainstorming session about the community empowerment center we want to build in the 7th Ward, and countless hours of fellowship and conversation with other participants from all over the country, including Hawaii!

This is such a valuable aspect of our work, and one that we hope catches on with other organizations and retreat centers.  Trauma from community-wide disaster is so difficult to fully heal from because, until the community is completely rebuilt, there are daily reminders of the disaster in the form of empty neighborhoods, ruined homes, broken infrastructure, and so much more.  To paraphrase another participant, “At home we still see a lot of blight and ugliness but up here, just seeing the stars, the moon, green grass, and trees gives us strength and comfort.”

We are deeply grateful to the PeaceWeaver community for making this extraordinary form of healing possible!

Pastor Bruce Davenport, minister at St. John’s #5 Faith Church (in New Orleans), picked us up quite late on the first Sunday night of vacation.  Even though it was almost the next day, Pastor Bruce greeted us with good cheer and asked me to please stop apologizing for bothering him so late.  He couldn’t say enough all week about how much LKNB and St. John’s have helped him and his people over the course of time since Katrina.

As some of you have experienced, meeting people who have been humbled by a disaster such as Katrina brings so many emotions to the forefront.  The wonderful thing about LKNB is that they are very focused and allow participants to experience the people, culture, and tour devastated areas while doing hands on hard labor resulting in lives changed forever.

We worked on Miss Audrey’s house.  Her house sat quite low and after the flood was deemed unlivable, structurally not sound.  Builders from Ithaca, the “contractors” for the teams over the last years, shored up the house, saving Miss Audrey’s house.  While we all walked into a house that was very roughly framed on the inside, we left a house that was sheet rocked, mudded, moulding installed and primed.  Kitchen cabinets were installed and a very beautiful brick laden garden dawned the backyard.

I can think of no more rewarding work, kinder people, and an experience that will forever change how I look at each new day.

Written by Tina Hallock, Ithaca, NY

One of the unique aspects of Love Knows No Bounds’ work is that we offer opportunities for disaster survivors to come to our area and refresh themselves for the long road to recovery ahead of them.  To illustrate how desperately stress relief is needed in New Orleans, consider that rates of suicide have doubled since Katrina, at a time when mental health services in the city have dramatically declined.

BE PART OF THE HEALING PROCESS BY MAKING A GIFT TODAY

As a way to attend to people’s needs for healing and support, we have had the good fortune of partnering with an amazing group of people called the PeaceWeavers (www.peaceweavers.com), who run Thunder Mountain Peace Sanctuary in Bath, New York.  Since 2007, they have shown extraordinary love and generosity by welcoming close to 90 survivors of Hurricane Katrina to participate in their annual Summer Peace Gathering.  This year, they will be hosting 5 more people from New Orleans, including community leaders, Pastor Bruce and Deborah Davenport, and Miss Audrey Armour, whose house LKNB has been steadily rebuilding.

During the Summer Peace Gathering, participants have the opportunity to learn many different health and wellness practices, from nutritional counseling to yoga to talking stick circle to sweat lodge, all of which are excellent for releasing stress and reclaiming health.  Participants from New Orleans have said that this opportunity has been as important to them, if not more important, than having their house rebuilt. It gives them an opportunity to return home to themselves.

One powerful example of what this experience offers was in the talking stick circle in 2007.  In that circle, there were survivors of Hurricane Katrina, survivors of 9/11, a survivor of the atrocities in Bosnia, and a Tibetan monk who lived through Chinese assault and persecution.  They were able to relate to each others’ experiences in a way that only people who have lived through such horrors can, affirm the strengths they discovered in each other, and reflect on the lessons they have learned from their experiences.  Many tears were shed, and it was an important step toward healing and integration for all.

Beyond the wounds of Katrina, participants have also had the chance to heal deeper pains.  As one young woman from New Orleans expressed, “Being here was the first time in my life I ever felt what true love is.”

As the PeaceWeavers like to say, our health is our most precious possession.  Your support helps us provide opportunities for people to care for their most precious possession, who otherwise would not get the chance.  Please consider sponsoring one of this year’s Summer Peace Gathering participants by clicking here and sharing what you can.

Peace and gratitude,

Mike

P.S.  If you want to see the magic of this gathering in action, click on this link: http://centralny.ynn.com/content/top_stories/121589/new-orleans-residents-come-for-spiritual-rebuilding

By contrast, Ithaca’s mayor, Carolyn Peterson, and Ithaca Common Council members have recognized the Davenports’ efforts by working with LKNB to create a Sister City collaboration between Ithaca and the Davenports’ community of the 7th Ward of New Orleans, that is vital and transformative. The Davenports were on hand at the June 1st Common Council meeting to give an update about how the Sister City partnership has impacted their community. Council members and citizens in attendance were moved by stories of both triumph and success, and continued neglect and struggle with their leaders back home. From schools to streets to housing and more, the Davenports’ area of town continues to get a raw deal. However, they feel that Ithaca has been their cavalry and has given their community the strength and support to keep on keepin’ on.

If there is one thing we can be grateful to Katrina for, it is that it brought these two exemplary individuals into our lives. They are unsung heroes back home, but around here, they are recognized as the noble beings that they really are.