Second Thursday Lecture Series:
We Came to Rebuild New Orleans with author Dr. Christopher E. Manning

Join us for a virtual evening with Dr. Christopher Manning as we discuss his new book We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers (LSU Press, June 2025). This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Cabildo as part of the Second Thursday Lecture Series. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required. The program will take place on Zoom. Please register here and a link will be emailed to you on the day of the lecture: https://forms.gle/BraKaDLf4qYW6bhw6

About the Book

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the crucial role of nonprofit organizations in New Orleans’s recovery, scholarly examinations of these recovery workers’ experiences remain scarce. We Came to Rebuild New Orleans fills this gap, drawing on a vast corpus of interviews with more than fifty leaders and staff involved in Katrina recovery across various areas, including housing, criminal justice reform, legal aid, and wetlands restoration. The interviews seek to understand what motivates individuals to devote significant portions of their lives to recovery, and to assess whether nonprofit volunteer labor was an effective recovery strategy.

Analysis of the testimonies of participants reveals that most of the disaster recovery corps, even those in their early twenties, had histories of activism or civic engagement before committing to New Orleans recovery work. While significant, their recovery work in New Orleans tended to represent a single chapter in a broader life story of service and civic engagement. Despite the good intentions of the volunteers, their testimonies also highlight the limitations of relying on volunteer nonprofit organizations for disaster recovery.

We Came to Rebuild New Orleans thus offers an extraordinary new look at long-term disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Sharing the personal stories of nonprofit workers from many walks of life, the book emphasizes their persistent spirit of activism and civic engagement, while also reflecting critically on the effectiveness of volunteer-­based disaster recovery initiatives.

About the Author

Christopher Manning is an experienced leader and advocate for diversity in higher education. He was appointed chief inclusion and diversity officer in March 2021. Chris joined SDSU after serving as both an assistant and associate provost for academic diversity for nearly five years at Loyola University Chicago and serving three years as the inaugural vice president and chief inclusion and diversity officer for the University of Southern California.

At Loyola, Manning became the first assistant provost for Academic Diversity in 2016. He evaluated the campus climate and created practices to promote inclusion, seeking input from students, faculty and staff. Identifying barriers to student success and the retention of diverse faculty were among his top priorities. At USC, Manning solidified and built out new elements of the institution’s DEI infrastructure, including establishing faculty and staff peer-to-peer development programs, incorporating restorative justice as a form of alternative dispute resolution and proactive campus community building, facilitating the development of the university’s first demographic dashboards, and establishing its first university-wide diversity and inclusion council. At both institutions, Manning supported a range of issues and crisis management.

In addition to administrative experience, Manning was an associate professor of history at Loyola for 16 years, teaching subjects such as Black history, the civil rights movement and Black politics. He has written on African American political development in the 20th century and is completing an oral history of social justice movements in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (forthcoming LSU Press). He is also completing a memoir about race and identity entitled "Army Brat."

Manning also has a strong connection to the arts. He was a professional Latin dancer and the executive director and founder of the nonprofit dance company Inspiración Dance Chicago, which offered free youth and adult Latin dance training in Chicago.

Manning holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University.