The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is an advocacy group of low- and moderate-income families, with national offices in Brooklyn, N.Y. Contact Charles Jackson, press coordinator.

Henry P. “Hank” Sims is a professor of leadership and management at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. He has done research on leadership and teamwork and can speak about how relief organizations, including faith-based groups, respond to disasters.

Michael Eric Dyson is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Civitas Books, 2006).

National Disaster Interfaith Services, based in New York City, is a faith-based network provides training for clergy, religious leaders and faith-based groups, to help them plan for responding to disasters, and helps with recovery when a disaster does occur. Contact through executive director Peter Gudaitis.

Havidán Rodríguez is former director of the Disaster Research Center and professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Rabbi Daniel Fink leads Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel, a Reform congregation in Boise, Idaho. He is an expert on Jewish environmentalism.

Beverly Wright is founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans. She is co-author of a report, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and released in May 2006, which concluded that minorities and low-income residents have recovered more slowly after Katrina, in part because they have less […]

Manuel Sprung, assistant professor of psychology with a focus on social-cognitive development in children. He was one of the researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast in Long Beach, Miss., who studied how Katrina has affected children’s thinking – including the impact of intrusive thoughts about the storm on their concentration levels.

Ronald C. Kessler is a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He directs a project called the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group Initiative, which is studying the psychological impact of Katrina on survivors of the storm.