Katie Moore, Research Analyst
This past Saturday, LABB Emergency Response Team and Xavier University’s freshman seminar class deployed to Algiers to knock on doors and ask people about pollution as a part of our Emergency Response Team outreach. Even though it was an early Saturday morning with the threat of rain, the Xavier students went in to ERT mode full force and did a phenomenal job!
Caption: Map of the area covered during the Emergency Response Team deployment and the number of reports to the iWitness Pollution Map from the past year.
Getting people to report and save the iWitness Pollution Map number to their phone can be difficult for even a seasoned canvasser, so I was blown away after seeing my group knock on their first few doors. With a one hour training they were all able to talk confidently about the Bucket Brigade mission and the Pollution Map quickly and developed some great strategies for engaging with people. I heard the same from all the other team captains and the numbers show how successful they were. All together, we knocked on more than 650 doors and saved the iWitness Pollution Map phone number to 76 phones!
The Bucket Brigade has knocked on fewer numbers of doors in Algiers as compared to other communities around the state, so in many cases the residents had not heard of our work and in some instances were not aware of pollution in their neighborhood. Four people submitted reports while the Xavier University Emergency Response Team was in the field. Our Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, Molly, just approved a report from our canvass area today, so we’re continuing to see more results from our deployment!
I want to thank Professor Adams and the Xavier University students, on behalf of the Bucket Brigade, for all their hard work this Saturday. Y’all did an incredible job and we had a blast working with you!
Caption: Bria, Makayla, Lawrence from Xavier University and Katie from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade during the Emergency Response Team deployment to Algiers.
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