Five Island Scholarship Fund
Originally created by the Grenada Relief Fund, the Five Island Scholarship Fund awards $5,000 college scholarships to students who have been affected by natural disasters – specifically in the Caribbean and a handful of states along the southern U.S. coast. PLAN!T NOW works with the different ministries or departments of education to identify students who, beyond academic merit and financial need, demonstrate the ability to better their home island or state through higher education.
For more information about the Five Island Scholarship Fund, to donate to the Fund, or to fill out an application, please contact Donna Lee at PLAN!T NOW.
Peer-to-Peer Little People's Network
PLAN!T NOW believes strongly in the power of shared information. In this spirit, we hope to purchase this year One Laptop per Child laptops to distribute to children in communities from Jamaica to Dominica, and similar laptops for kids in Alabama to Mississippi. The laptops are specially designed to be most effective to children in remote or devastated environments. Our hope is to connect children affected by natural events and give them a way to communicate about their experiences – both before and after the events – so they can begin to help themselves and each other.
For more information, or to donate to this cause, please contact Donna Lee at PLANIT NOW.
Tools for Preparation
PLAN!T NOW is working to provide information about disaster preparedness as well as vehicles for community communication. In the coming months, PLAN!T NOW will conduct interviews with experts in preparedness as well as with survivors of natural events in an effort to create a knowledge base specifically useful to people living in high-risk coastal and island areas. Click here to read more.
A message from our friends at Oxfam America:
Oxfam Designed to Last: New Housing Concept Holds Promise for Louisiana—and Beyond
Miss Betty Adams had lived through her share of hurricanes on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. But when Hurricane Rita hit in 2005, she lost everything. Water swallowed her house, taking with it all that she had spent her life working for. Nevertheless Miss Betty, 66, wanted to stay: Chauvin, Louisiana, had always been her home. Now, safely settled into a new kind of dwelling called the Lift House, she can.
A concept pioneered by architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Terrebonne Readiness and Assistance Coalition (TRAC) and Oxfam America, the Lift House offers hope that future storms may inflict far less damage on Gulf Coast residents.
Rising above the bayou on a series of pilings sunk deep into the ground, the house reflects both the local style and the need for the structure to withstand the assault of howling winds and hurricane flooding. Energy efficient, sturdy, and designed to allow plenty of outdoor living on its wrap-around deck, the Lift House is a prototype fit for replication along Louisiana's coastline and beyond.
Some of the ideas incorporated into the design are indigenous to the area, such as the large volume of attic space whose cushion of air serves as a natural insulator that helps keep the house below cool. And if a storm surge should wash through Miss Betty's neighborhood again, the debris it carries will flow under her house, not through it. (Elevating houses was once commonly practiced in the region, but when slab foundations became the new hot thing half a century ago, Louisianans started building them, too, setting aside their more sensible traditions.)
With the Lift House, those traditions have taken root again.
Find out more: