The Real Fixers

Like many volunteers after Katrina, educator Zack Rosenburg and lawyer Liz McCartney went to Louisiana to help rebuild. What makes them different, however, is that they stayed. And as they stayed, they learned not only how to rebuild, but to rebuild better.

Stationed in St. Bernard Parish, they created the St. Bernard Project, and gained corporate help—from Toyota and UPS—in learning how to make home construction more efficient, “unfettered by prior processes and structure,” as Rosenburg put it. “The goal is to reduce construction time by 30 percent and costs by 10 to 15 percent.”

But building isn’t the whole story. “We simply couldn’t go back to our lives and tell these folks ‘Good luck,’ ” says Rosenburg. The two created wellness and mental-health programs, because they saw that fixing homes was only the first step to fixing lives. The St. Bernard Project has received support from AmeriCorps, but Rosenburg says some government agencies have focused more on the risk of fraud than the risk to people. “If we don’t get it right,” he says, “people are going to dis- engage from government even more.”

—Christopher Dickey