Group recognizes area leaders

• By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Jul 13, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Katrina survivor Denise Thornton was honored Saturday night as New Orleans Civic Activist of the Year for her volunteer work post-Katrina.

This morning, though, Thornton and a small group of activists were scheduled to hit the road with more than $7,000 in gift cards for flood victims in hard-hit Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“We’ve learned so much about our own recovery that we wanted to reach out to them,” said Thornton, the founding president of the Beacon of Hope Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for disaster victims that emerged after Katrina flooded most of the city in 2005.

“Some of the issues that the people in Cedar Rapids are facing are very similar to what we in New Orleans went through,” Thornton said in an interview.

“They are gutting houses but from the blogs and Web sites I’ve visited, they don’t know about mold remediation permits, flood elevation maps, and those sorts of things.”

The “Beacons” have prepared a manual on how to return and rebuild after a natural disaster, too.

“They will also conduct a workshop on how to set up neighborhood recovery centers without any help from government — it’s all volunteers and the private sector,” said Robert K. “Bob” Moffett, president of the Orleans chapter of the Alliance for Good Government, which honored Thornton Saturday night during its annual Legislator of the Year banquet.

An influential political endorsement organization, the Alliance each year salutes the efforts of elected officials in the four-parish metropolitan New Orleans area of Orleans, St. Bernard, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes.

However, the organization has increasingly emphasized the achievements of citizen-activists as government at every level has struggled since Hurricane Katrina swamped much of the New Orleans area Aug. 29, 2005. “We need leadership,” Moffett said. Thornton, 50, was an easy choice, he said.

After losing her home and business to Katrina’s floodwaters, Thornton founded Beacon of Hope Resource Center — inside the storm-damaged Lakewood home she shares with her husband, Doug Thornton, a vice-president of a private firm that manages the Louisiana Superdome.

The Beacon founder contemplated adding one more disaster resource center as she prepared to accept her award at the banquet.

n State Rep. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, is the Orleans Parish chapter’s Legislator of the Year. Morrell filed a spirited but unsuccessful bill to reorganize the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board and replace political appointees of the mayor and the city with qualified engineers, accountants and professionals. “It failed as a result of opposition from the political establishment,” Moffett said.