Executive director, Sankofa Community Development Corporation, Lower Ninth Ward

After Rashida Ferdinand earned her master’s degree in ceramics, she considered moving to New York for its energy and professional opportunities. “But I wanted to also be in a warm environment, physically and culturally,” she says. “Being around blue, purple, yellow houses. Being around my family. My grandmother was getting older. So it was a no-brainer.” She moved back home to New Orleans in 2001.

Rashida had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, a former cypress swamp that had become a working-class district with one of the nation’s highest rates of Black homeownership. As a child, she heard adults reminisce about the crawfish that used to live in the gullies, about the neighborhood’s informal bartering system, and about keeping their doors unlocked at night.

Four years after her return, Rashida’s neighborhood made national headlines. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city’s levee system failed, and the low-lying Lower Ninth Ward took the most catastrophic hit. Thousands of homes were inundated or leveled. Residents fled to their rooftops for rescue. The death toll exceeded any other part of the city. When Rashida finally saw the neighborhood again, she says, it looked like “a shell of nothing.”

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Rashida had evacuated to Atlanta, where she worked on her sculpture, but she wanted to be part of the rebuilding. “I knew there were people who were trying to return home,” she says. “And then there were folks who were organizing as well to support redevelopment of their communities, including this area. I wanted to be a part of that energy since I was OK. I was healthy.”  

So she made a career transition: switching from “sculpture-making to looking at the community itself as something we could recreate.”

In 2008, Rashida founded the Sankofa Community Development Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to environmental restoration, healthy food, and other neighborhood improvements. Sankofa runs an urban sunflower farm and a market that sells fresh produce. But the project that brings Rashida the most pride is a 40-acre wetland park that was converted from an illegal dumping site. Not only does the park provide a place for hiking, birdwatching, and environmental education, but it is also designed to protect the neighborhood from flooding.

“It’s small, but it’s a really significant example,” she says, “of how nature just returns back to its rightful space if we just allow it to breathe.”

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On the value of a healthy urban wetland:

“The water makes a big difference in what’s invited to live in this area. That’s what’s helped create these bird habitats. The riparian buffer where the little organisms, the macroinvertebrates, the smaller organisms that start to feed that eco chain are significant. 

“Having the space of this small, healthy wetland space is really returning it to what it once was, but also allows us to see what could be and understand what could be and be an opportunity for young folks who come for our STEM education or their workforce development programs to be invested in building and restoring more spaces like this.”

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“I think the market helped us understand what’s really possible and what’s needed, what we could do and who’s there to support us and what partnerships mean.”

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On hope in hard times:

“A friend of mine just sent me this note about turtles. A turtle just takes its time and keeps moving through the ocean. And it’s moving slowly, but it’s going somewhere, and it ends up where it has to go. It just takes its time and keeps moving. And it compels me that we all exist, and we have a right to exist, and there’s nobody who can stop the true life that we’re supposed to have from happening.

“I try to understand: Why do people do these things they’re doing? What is the catch? What are they getting out of it? What’s their stimulant?

“And I’m going to believe that we can prevail by being honest and authentic and positive, and speaking the truth. You know, I’ve been told by many of my elders, ‘We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen worse before.’ People who’ve lived a long time can see that cycle. Because it’s present to some of us right now, and we didn’t know that, it is scary. But I’m not afraid, because I think there’s enough folks in a community of goodness, in care, and love and kindness, and intelligence, just basic intelligence, that we still do this work that we’re doing. I don’t think we should just allow a few monsters to scare us out of our beautiful light.”

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To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
Still Here: Stories from a fragile coast

To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout

Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah