Don Paul

Rebuild Green

Rebuild Green was founded by Medea Benjamin and Don Paul three days after the flooding of New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina. They wanted to provide a channel for funding of relief efforts in Louisiana by their friend Malik Rahim (who soon co-founded Common Ground Relief) and to establish a beginning framework for sustainable, 'green' reconstruction of the Gulf Coast
region.

For the remainder of 2005 and throughout 2006, Rebuild Green focused on relief efforts in New Orleans, as Don Paul became Operations Director for Common Ground Relief and that organization accomplished the "gutting" or remediation of more than 2000 homes in the hard-hit city.

In 2007 Rebuild Green began to do renovations and new construction in New Orleans' Upper 9th Ward. Rebuild Green is primarily responsible for building the first house of Structural Integrated Concrete Panels (S.C.I.P.s) in New Orleans (stages of which can been at rebuildgreen.org) and for initiating the installation of earth-energy systems to provide low-cost, environmentally friendly
air-conditioning and heating to low-income residents of the Upper and Lower 9th Wards (see the Adopt-a-Well sections in the Spring and Fall Updates at rebuildgreen.org). An additional, current focus of Rebuild Green is fighting for the rights of Public Housing and homeless residents in New Orleans.

Prior to moving to Louisiana in January 2006, Don Paul was the youngest winner of a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University (1971), set a World Best for running 50 kilometers (1982), qualified for the 1980 and 1988 U. S. Olympic Marathon Marathon Trial races, published nine books (four of them collections of poems), and led or produced more than a dozen albums.