Mixed Blessings

Shannon and Kojo Livingston

Like most New Orleans residents, they knew the drill. They headed to Shreveport because they had family there, Kojo's mother and aunt, and brought with them clothing for about three days. Based on previous hurricane evacuations, it was all they would likely need. It would be all they had left within a matter of hours.

They took shelter with Kojo's aunt, June Phillips, an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Division at Southern University - Shreveport.

Kojo was a freelance journalist and publicist, an ordained Baptist minister and was employed at the Booker T. Washington High School. The school never re-opened after the storm.

Shannon had over 25 years experience as a case worker for the Louisiana Office of Family Support. Suddenly they found themselves and their three children, 4, 12 and 15 homeless. When Kojo was finally able to return to New Orleans to check on the home they had rented for years, his worst fears were confirmed. The flood waters had reached the roof of their home. Absolutely nothing was salvageable.

Like thousands of Katrina evacuees, the Livingstons had never accepted any kind of public assistance. Suddenly, they found themselves moving into a rental property in Shreveport with none of the basic necessities of life and dependent on FEMA rental assistance and later DHAP.

Like countless other faith-based organizations across the country, his mother's church, Lake Bethlehem Baptist Church, helped them with a refrigerator and other basic needs.

Shannon was able to transfer her employment to the Shreveport Office of Family Support. For Kojo, it was more difficult. All his clients and contacts had been in New Orleans. Like him and his neighbors, they were scattered to the winds. He found part-time work with the Shreveport Sun, the oldest Black weekly newspaper in Louisiana and continued to try to make contact with missing clients and to find new ones.

"It was a mixed blessing," Shannon said. "We met a lot of good people. Shreveport has been good to us."

One of the people they met was Pittre Walker, a member of Lake Bethlehem and coordinator for the Caddo Parish schools homeless children's program. With Pastor Dennis Everett, she had participated in a City of Shreveport "Faith Builders" Community Development Institute in the summer of 2005.

One of the first graduates of the program, they established a nonprofit community development corporation, "The Lake CDC". Their primary goal: to develop affordable housing in a market where it was scarce.

Named executive director of the new nonprofit, Pittre met with the Livingstons and told them about plans to develop a new neighborhood with homes affordable for families such as theirs. It wasn't just a dream. In 2007, construction began on land near the church using HOME funds from the City, leveraged by United Way and Community Foundation grants.

In the spring of 2008, Kojo and Shannon Livingston and their three children moved into a new home in the Lake Village neighborhood.

With help from Lake Bethlehem's CDC, they are now working to move from renting to homeownership. In a few months they will begin homebuyer education classes. In little more than a year, they will transition to a rent-to-own program to build equity, enabling them to purchase the home they now live in at a price below the cost of construction.

It's been almost three years since the winds of Katrina blew them to northwest Louisiana, and it's not been an easy time. The older children miss New Orleans still, but the community they now live in has been good to them, they say.

Kojo is writing a story for national distribution on the work churches did for Katrina. He is beginning to get some of his New Orleans clients back. You can see in their faces that they are survivors and will do well in their new home.

There have been many mixed blessings in their journey since that predawn trip to escape the storm. One is that this courageous family had to lose the home they rented in New Orleans, only to find they will become homeowners in Shreveport.