“You can’t conceive of how big it is until you see it,” said Daryl Williams, director of the Minority Entrepreneurshp Program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “As bad as New Orleans was, Mississippi was worse. I drove 75 miles and everything was literally flattened. When I got back to the office, I told my board that we cannot begin to solve this problem alone. But we can do our part.”

The Kauffman Foundation decided to fund centers that give New Orleanians tools and advice for starting new businesses. But one of their major activities in the first few weeks was arranging for housing. “You can’t work in isolation down there, because you’ll run into barriers you can’t overcome,” said Williams. “You have to collaborate.

“We’re trying to engage people in a process that will make life better than it was before Katrina. Things in New Orleans were not that good before the storm.” Williams recalled a late afternoon drive when he was saddened by the sight of families gutting their damaged homes. “And then we came to an area where the lights were on,” he said. “It was still pretty rough, but at least they had lights. We got out to talk to a man there, and he said that his block had not suffered any flooding. This was the way things had looked before the storm hit. We had not noticed much of a difference.”

As the speakers kept talking about collaboration and trusting your neighbor, it dawned on me that this was not just the standard feel-good conference rhetoric. These qualities actually are essential to the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. Inflexible, bureaucratic organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ineffective. Nimble, adaptable organizations like the State of Illinois’s mobile hospital have accomplished remarkable things.