MUTUAL RESPECT
By Mary Tutwiler
TheInd.com, LA
9/20/2006
For 37 years, Southern Mutual Help Association has defied the odds
in its fight against rural poverty.
Soft-spoken Sister Helen Vinton (left) and dynamic Executive Director
Lorna Bourg are the yin and yang of SMHA.
One of SMHA’s partners, the Mennonite Disaster Service in south
Abbeville, sent a volunteer crew to repair a day care center after
Hurricane Rita.
The phone never stops ringing inside the little green cottage on
the banks of Bayou Teche. The receiver pinched between her ear
and shoulder, receptionist Monica Broussard mouths a hello while
Executive Secretary Andrea Ordodi rockets between her computer and
the copy machine down the hall. Stacks of neatly numbered boxes line
the hallway, thanks to archivist Fannie Godwin, who is cataloging
Southern Mutual Help Association’s 37 years of activism.
At the end of the hall, SMHA loan officer Clem Mathews works a client
through the intricacies of borrowing money to buy a house. Dashing
out the door to meet with a fisherman whose boat was destroyed in
Hurricane Rita is Family and Community Development Director Judy
Herring. Rural Recovery Response Co-coordinator Jackie Ducote manages
relationships and accountability between SMHA and the organizations
helping with hurricane recovery. Upstairs, shoehorned into the
dormer under the roof, Housing Administrator Marva Mimms Porter
continues Southern Mutual’s long-term goal of helping first-time home
owners. Back downstairs, on a sunny porch converted into an office,
Mary Delahoussaye oversees the finances of SMHA. Down the hall in
a newly built addition to the bulging cottage are Gordon Reese and
Lynn O’Shea, who write grants and find major donors for the nonprofit
organization. Construction Director Lurcy Marceaux is nowhere to be
found; he’s out in the field, working with volunteer contractors who
are framing up a house in hard-hit Delcambre.
At the center of this hive of intense activity are the two women
who run Southern Mutual Help Association – and they could not
be more different. Nobody gets in the way of Executive Director
Lorna Bourg. She’s wearing a blazing red western shirt and a bolero
tie, the shirt tucked into pants cinched at the waist by a leather
belt. Her graying hair springs into a halo of fine curls that frame
her rosy-cheeked face. Sister Helen Vinton, assistant executive
director, seems slight next to her colleague. Her short-sleeve blue
shirt floats on her thin frame, slacks and flat soft-soled shoes
finish an unobtrusive outfit.
Vinton’s ascetic face is narrow, and she speaks in a quiet voice,
halting its flow as she fine-tunes her phrases, intent on exactitude
of meaning. Bourg can be heard from everywhere in the building,
her Gatling-gun delivery punctuating a barrage of ideas on how to
fund housing, small business loans, bonds for hurricane rebuilding,
sustainable agriculture and mixed-income developments.
As opposite as the pair seem, they are working together to change the
way poverty is addressed in this country at every level of bureaucracy
– both in the public and private sector. And in a world where
government policy changes at glacial pace, they move like an avalanche.
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In 1965, 23-year-old USL student Bourg found herself in Dr. Ben
Kaplan’s sociology class with several French nuns from the Dominican
order. "They were the most interesting people in the class," Bourg
says, "and through them I met Anne." Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion,
then 40 years old, was sent by her order as a missionary to Louisiana
to help bridge the gap between race, class and gender. "I was living
in Lafayette," Bourg says, "when our lives became intertwined." Bourg
moved with the nuns into a house on Rabbit Hill in Abbeville. "It was
a very poor, forgotten section of town," says Bourg. "We decided to
remake Rabbit Hill."
President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty during his State
of the Union address Jan. 8, 1964.
The Office of Economic Opportunity was the agency responsible
for administering most of the War on Poverty programs, including
VISTA, Job Corps, Head Start, Legal Services and the Community Action
Program. Bizalion, a professional social worker, started the first Head
Start program in Vermilion Parish, and Bourg was her assistant. Head
Start is designed to prepare young children in low income families
for school.
"Part of our mission was to integrate Head Start," Bourg says. "When
we began it was 100 percent African-American. But there are many more
white people living in poverty in Vermilion Parish than black. When
you combined the two numbers, it was 52 percent of the parish." Civil
rights battles were still plaguing the South, and Bourg knew it was
going to be difficult to find a white family willing to integrate
an all-black program. "I started driving the back roads," she
remembers. "One day, after a heavy rain, I drove down a dirt road
and got stuck in the mud. The house at the end of the road belonged
to a family that was so poor they didn’t have any furniture. I think
the man was trying to pull his own plow to make furrows. The mother
didn’t have any teeth. She had three little blonde children.
"We talked for a while, and I asked her what she wanted for her
children. She said she wanted better lives for them. I told her about
Head Start, and I told her right up front that her children would be
the first white children in the program. She didn’t care, she wanted
them to go to school. After that it was easy, and we integrated all
the Vermilion Parish Head Starts."
Funding flowed into the program from the federal government. Edwin
Edwards was the congressman for the district, and Bourg says Louisiana
politicians saw controlling the money as a way to create political
patronage. According to Bourg, Edwards created a super board over
the Head Start board to handle the money, relegating the Vermilion
Parish Community Action Agency to advisory status.
Meanwhile, Bizalion and Bourg were busy expanding their duties. "We
found that we couldn’t simply teach the children six hours a day and
expect a societal change – we had to reach out to whole families,"
Bourg says. "We helped the Abbeville Head Start group plant a
garden. They were selling vegetables to raise money to supplement their
own meager incomes and improve nutrition in their own families. The
super board sent a message that they had to turn in the money they
made to be put into the general pot, and then make an application
for how they were going to use the money they raised themselves."
Bourg says she and Bizalion relayed the message, but also told
the parents they could decide whether they wanted to send in the
money. "After all, they had raised it themselves; it wasn’t government
money," Bourg recounts.
The pair were fired for insubordination, although Bourg says the
real threat they constituted to the status quo was their work in
integration. "We were sitting in the little house on Rabbit Hill
the next day, and there was a knock on the door. The minister of
the congregation in the neighborhood where we lived was there with
a handkerchief with $26 tied up in it.
They had raised the money and told us it was for our legal fees,
to get our jobs back. That’s when the idea of an independent agency
free of government control, which would in 1969 become Southern Mutual
Help Association, was born."
The fledgling organization’s mission was to help fight the poverty
and racism endemic in rural communities.
"We went looking for the poorest of the poor," Bourg says. Bizalion
had done some work with health care in her job at the tuberculosis
annex at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette in the early 1960s, but
neither of them had seen the living conditions of workers on the
sugar cane plantations.
In 1969, little had changed on Louisiana’s sugar plantations since
sugar cane was brought to the French colony in 1751. Many field
workers, the descendents of slaves, still lived in the tumbledown
shacks their parents and grandparents occupied. Award-winning
journalist Patsy Simms describes living conditions in the "quarters"
in a 1981 book, Cleveland Benjamin’s Dead!, based on a series of 1972
articles she wrote about SMHA for the New Orleans States-Item. "Gray
boards showed through the tattered imitation-brick tar paper,
and the tin roofs were patched, and the porches eaten away by time
and weather. Rusted screens bulged from windows and doors – some
shielded on the inside by faded fabric. Muddy tractor ruts separated
the houses from the road, with an occasional plank from a torn-down
shack stretching over the puddles, connecting the two."
Until mechanization arrived in the ’60s, field hands cut cane
with machetes and loaded it into mule-drawn carts. As tractors
and harvesters came to the plantations, families already living on
starvation wages lost not only their livelihood, but their homes as
well. Over the next 15 years, more than 100,000 men, women and children
would be displaced. Southern Mutual began its work with sugar cane
families on several fronts. The first effort was the Self Help Housing
program, started in 1969 in the Rabbit Hill neighborhood. Thirty homes
were renovated, which drew attention to the group and helped garner
federal funds for a Community Development Block Grant that financed
49 new homes for sugar cane worker families. In 1971, SMHA founded
the state’s first dental and medical community health center for farm
workers, the Teche Action Clinic, in Franklin. Before the clinic’s
inception, farm workers had to go to Charity Hospital in New Orleans
or Lafayette for any major health problem. Most didn’t make the trip,
and poor health was a way of life for field hands on the plantations.
A lack of education and basic literacy also impeded cane workers, most
of whom dropped out of school to work in the fields by the time they
were in their early teens. In 1974, SMHA started the Plantation Adult
Education Program, a basic adult education and job training program
teaching functional literacy – how to read the gauges on machinery,
how to register to vote, how to obtain a driver’s licence, how to
understand the federal Sugar Act. For the first time, plantation
workers learned what their rights were under U.S. law.
The most dramatic step for SMHA and the plantation workers was a
class action lawsuit filed against Secretary of Agriculture Earl
Butz in 1972 by Huet Freeman and Gustav Rhodes, cane field workers
from plantations around Thibodaux. The workers sued over illegal wage
freezes, and the 1974 landmark decision won more than $1 million in
back wages for workers.
Part of the ruling was a freeze in subsidies to sugar farmers until
SMHA, as court-appointed inspectors, examined the grower’s books to
determine the amount of money owed to workers.
The cane growers had begrudgingly tolerated Southern Mutual’s efforts
with field hands, although some growers felt that education was causing
dissatisfaction within the traditional patronage system of sugar
plantations in south Louisiana. But freezing subsidies planters counted
on to help finance the next year’s crop while SMHA pried into their
private finances was a violation the proud farmers could not tolerate.
The threat of violence became real. "It got really, really hot,"
Bourg says. "Our cars were run off the road at night." At a meeting
in Broussard one night, former Lafayette City-Parish President Walter
Comeaux, who had deep ties to the sugar industry, showed up uninvited
and railed against SMHA. "The farmers blockaded the roads around the
hall," remembers Bourg.
"They filled the meeting room upstairs and started screaming at
us. One farmer walked up to Sister Anne and stuck his fist in her
face and told her he was going to beat her up if his subsidies weren’t
released. The police, outside, instead of protecting us, were taking
down the numbers on our licence plates. We didn’t feel safe."
It took about 90 days for SMHA to review hundreds of books and pinpoint
the wage numbers before the subsidies could be released. "As a result
of the lawsuit against the Agriculture Department and other civil
rights stands we took," Bourg says, "every single program we ran
that had federal funds in it was defunded. Week after week, we’d get
a letter. Finally, [the Department of] Health, Education and Welfare
illegally defunded the Teche Action Clinic. We had a five-year contract
that had only run for three years.
We filed suit against HEW." These were tough times for the women,
who, like the farm workers they were trying to help, lived on almost
nothing. SMHA won again and used the settlement money in 1980 to buy
the property it now occupies on Bayou Teche outside of New Iberia.
At that point, they divested themselves of all remaining federal funds
they had previously used for operating costs. The funding came with
too many strings. "Government money was too expensive," Bourg says.
In the early 1970s, Cesar Chavez was earning rights and fair wages for
migrant farm workers in California, but federal dollars were slated
specifically for migrants. "We had to have federal law rewritten to
bring the monies to Louisiana," Bourg says. "We did this to ease the
job displacement from mechanization.
At the same time, people who expected to live their entire lives
on plantations were being thrown out of their houses. Plantation
conditions were still bad, but we made a lot of progress in health,
education, and job-training programs."
The 1980s brought a major change to the SMHA dynamic.
Sister Helen Vinton, who was raised on a Nebraska ranch and had a
master’s degree in biology and experience writing public policy for
environmental stewardship, was hired as an agricultural specialist.
"Helen came in and challenged our thinking," Bourg says. "She told
us there had to be a better way than constant confrontation. It was
hard to swallow. [The farmers] hated us. We were enemies in the courts
and in the news."
Vinton insisted her colleagues listen to the farmers’ point of
view. "Our work needs to be comprehensive," she says. "My coming
meant that we wanted to build bridges, solve problems."
There was a growing sense through the 1980s and ’90s that government
tinkering with the Sugar Act removed protections for sugar
farmers. Bad agricultural practices – including heavy reliance on
chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides – were also harming
the land. Mechanization brought huge increases in expenses, and small
farmers were getting squeezed out.
Commissioner Butz’s favorite saying, says Bourg, was "get big or get
out." Smaller farmers were plowing money into leased land, which could
be turned into a subdivision the next year. "As their expenses rose,"
Vinton says, "we began to see that the farmer’s lives had similarities
to the workers. It is our belief that if they didn’t own the land,
farmers are in as much danger of losing their connection to the land
as farm workers. And that makes rural communities vulnerable.
We began looking at ways to farm more economically."
In an effort to connect Louisiana’s isolated sugar farmers with
national farming movements, Vinton created the 13-state Southern
Sustainable Agriculture Working Group in 1990. Organic farming was a
stretch for traditional sugar planters, but chemical farming, coupled
with toxic herbicides like 2-4-5T and Silvex, was taking a heavy
toll on the soil and farmers’ health. Vinton formed an alliance with
fifth-generation sugar farmer Jackie Judice, a member of the American
Sugarcane League’s board. "In the early beginnings of Southern Mutual,"
Judice recalls, "the farming community looked at them as the enemy.
One day I decided to listen. That week, they were hosting the annual
SSAWG meeting in New Iberia. Helen and I sat down. We realized both
sides wanted the same thing. Instead of throwing hand grenades at
each other, we’d accomplish more if we’d sit at the same table."
Through SSAWG, Judice met Mennonite farmers who used a very different
approach to soil science. "They made me realize we had to pay attention
to not just the chemical composition of the soil, but the soil life,"
he says. "We had to feed the life of the soil."
Convinced that the organic approach would enrich his soil and cost
less than chemical additives, Judice gambled with his cane crop. The
first year, his fellow farmers scoffed at him. But the second season,
after he won the High Yield award for producing the most sugar per
acre, area farmers started to watch what Judice was doing.
"That was the beginning of change," Bourg says. Vinton continued to
branch out, helping traditional fishing and shrimping communities
struggling against state and federal legislation that favors
recreational fishermen and inexpensive imports.
In 1989, Southern Mutual began working with displaced field workers
– mostly women – in Four Corners, Sorrel, Glenco and St. Joseph in
St. Mary Parish. The communities were destitute, in need of decent
housing, sewer and water, and SMHA aimed to turn them into self-help
organizations. That’s when Bizalion and Bourg walked into IberiaBank
President Larrey Mouton’s office. "They came into the bank out of
the blue," Mouton says. "They were nice ladies. They had a nice
story. They’d been in existence a long time, and they’d worked for
years here in St. Mary and Iberia. I was impressed with their demeanor,
what they had to say and the good they were doing.
"They were trying to rebuild some houses that had originally been part
of a sugar cane plantation, some small two- and three-room shacks,"
continues Mouton.
"They were in pretty bad shape. I agreed to lend them some money." The
bank pledged up to $50,000 in loans to the self-help organizations –
$25,000 of the loans guaranteed by SMHA. A grant from the Federal Home
Loan Bank of Dallas, brought the total up to $250,000. The federal
government had recently passed the Community Reinvestment Act, a new
law requiring banks to loan money to low-income borrowers to build
houses. "When they came in," Mouton says, "they were looking for a
small loan, but I told them about the home loan bank program. They
got more than they were looking for."
Every year after that, IberiaBank made another loan, matched with
grant money.
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In 1992, Bourg was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation with a
Genius Grant worth $305,000. She spent about $30,000 locating and
interring the remains of her brother, who was shot down over Armenia
during the Cold War. She used the rest of the money to support her
work. Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion died in 1997 of cancer, and
Bourg took over as executive director. The organization was learning
how to leverage money, working with the USDA Rural Housing Service,
private foundations and local banks like IberiaBank, Teche Federal
and MidSouth. It was selected as one of nine community development
organizations in the nation to pilot the Rural Home Loan Partnership,
a multi-million dollar initiative for revitalizing rural America. Bourg
began creating nonprofit corporations to fund the expansion of SMHA’s
mission. The organization was recognized by the Fannie Mae Foundation
in 1998 with a national Sustained Excellence Award, one of 10 in the
nation, for a decade of excellence in housing.
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Mouton retired from IberiaBank in 2000 and offered SMHA his expertise
to help them set up another nonprofit, Southern Mutual Financial
Services, Inc., as a community development financial institution. SMHA
received a $200,000 donation to its fledgling financial arm from
IberiaBank, part of a $3 million capital campaign. "We were charged
with making low-interest loans to low-income folks," Mouton says.
"We made home loans and a couple of business loans, mostly to women
and minorities."
"We got engaged during the capital campaign," says Rusty Cloutier,
president of MidSouth Bank. MidSouth gave SMHA a below-market rate
loan of $500,000 as part of the housing drive, as well as a $100,000
grant to help with associated costs for first-time homebuyers.
"We think they do good work to develop the community we serve,"
Cloutier says.
The main thrust was to get low-income renters into their own
houses. "Most of their people had abnormally low income," Mouton
says. "Eighty percent of them made $24,000 or less. People who are
making $15,000 to $20,000 a year are stable but probably can’t buy a
house. If you could get them in a house, most of the time it required
some down payment assistance. They could make the payments and build
some equity. We had to determine how much they could afford and then
find or build a house in that price range. I bet they have 300 or
400 by now."
The bankers became impressed with how faithfully the poor paid their
loans, despite their financial struggles. "That began the whole piece
of work we’re doing now, where IberiaBank invested $10 million into
SMHA’s lending arm," says Mouton.
By 2005, Southern Mutual had expanded into 24 parishes, investing
millions of dollars in housing, sustainable agriculture and public
policy education.
They were working at the national and international level, redefining
philanthropy, intellectual property and food security and new financial
products for community development. On Aug. 25, 2005, MidSouth Bank
hosted a dinner for Southern Mutual at the City Club in River Ranch,
an event designed to introduce the organization to the movers and
shakers in Lafayette and discuss how to end poverty. That night,
IberiaBank announced a $10 million investment in SMHA. Gov.
Blanco and Rep. Charles Boustany were in attendance.
Four days later, Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana.
"I was sitting there thinking, 24 hours after Katrina hit," Bourg
remembers, "and I said to Helen, ‘This is so big; the rural areas have
to be devastated.’ Air Logistics provided us with a helicopter. We
landed in all the little rural communities in three parishes. We
started listening to what people said they needed."
Then Hurricane Rita hit. Because of its expansion, Southern Mutual
was already on the ground in communities that were devastated
and uniquely poised to help in the rural areas of the state. "We
developed a framework for all the work we would do in the future,"
Bourg says. "That became the Rural Recovery Response."
SMHA hired Jackie Ducote to oversee the hurricane recovery
effort. Ducote, former executive vice president of the Louisiana
Association of Business and Industry and former president of the
Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, reached out to her
myriad connections. Judy Herring, SMHA’s director of Family & Community
Development, took over as field coordinator for the Rural Recovery Task
Force. Herring coordinated nearly 1,000 volunteers from 35 states,
while Ducote identified new policies and innovative approaches to
facilitate rebuilding and redevelopment in the 17-parish area hit by
the two storms. To date, while many Louisiana homeowners continue to
wait for federal aid to rebuild their homes, SMHA, operating entirely
on private donations and volunteer efforts, has worked to rebuild 446
homes, helped 80 farm families with cattle feed and small cash grants,
and assisted 15 small businesses and two churches.
Acknowledging SMHA’s ability for swift and innovative response, the
Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund recently awarded a $1.25 million grant –
the largest awarded by the organization – to SMHA for its recovery
efforts in the eastern parishes of the state struck by Katrina.
In February of this year, Bourg and Vinton attended the Louisiana
Recovery Authority charrettes led by Andres Duany to create safer,
stronger communities in south Abbeville, Erath and Delcambre. Talking
to Duany and Lafayette architect Steve Oubre, who designed the new
Erath and Delcambre plans, Bourg came up with the idea to build a
smart-growth community in New Iberia.
A percentage of the homes would be designated for low-income buyers
through SMHA’s financial arm. Called Teche Ridge, the Oubre-designed
traditional neighborhood development will be built with private dollars
by Southern Mutual. "Look at all the housing stock we lost," Bourg
says. "We need to think about how to redevelop Louisiana and do it
better. We can’t segregate our housing by income levels or anything
else. If we don’t use smart growth strategies we’re going to use up
all our agricultural land, and our beautiful rural communities will
end up looking like urban sprawl.
"The very foundation of our work is getting rid of the things that
divide us," she says. "We cannot ghetto-ize poverty or ghetto-ize
wealth. We need to build diverse, vibrant communities. Southern
Mutual’s mission is building healthy, prosperous rural communities. It
was our mission from day one, and it still is."
For more information about Southern Mutual Help Association, go to
their Web site,
www.southernmutualhelp.org.