Oprah’s Angel Network

How do you turn compassion into action? It’s a challenging question for anyone whose heart has ever tugged at them. To find an answer, look no further than three people who have played important and inspiring roles in the recovery effort in East Biloxi, Miss.

Sherry-Lea Bloodworth helped evacuate those in need when Hurricane Katrina struck.

© 2008 Oprah’s Angel Network

Sherry-Lea Bloodworth

As Hurricane Katrina whipped just south of the shelter where Sherry-Lea Bloodworth was staying in Alabama, she began to realize that the counties southwest of her in Mississippi would not be so lucky. At 2 a.m., she started to help organize bus trips into neighboring counties to bring people back to shelters in Alabama and Georgia. She ultimately helped evacuate nearly 1,000 Mississippians to safety, and became personally invested in making sure those displaced would have rebuilt homes when they returned. “I promised them they would be able to come back home,” recalls Sherry-Lea.


In order to help, she quit her teaching job to work pro bono for five months at Architecture for Humanity (AFH), a non-profit specializing in post-disaster rebuilding efforts. Her compassion and action proved valuable to the Biloxi community. She soon became Gulf Coast development director for AFH and development director for the East Biloxi Coordination, Relief and Redevelopment Agency. A savvy fundraiser and organizer, Sherry-Lea gained additional experience working with grants, setting up revolving loan funds and working closely with housing experts and financial advisors. In a short time, her total immersion in the situation made her an expert and a go-to person in the Mississipi Gulf Coast region. Sherry-Lea currently consults for the Hancock County Housing Resource Center in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

Michael Grote used his passion for architecture to help residents rebuild their homes.

© 2008 Oprah’s Angel Network

Michael Grote

A graduate student in Alabama when the storm hit, Michael Grote saw a job opening at Architecture for Humanity and decided he would put his academic pursuits on hold if he could get a job helping people affected by the storm. Michael applied and kept his fingers crossed. About a month later, he found himself in East Biloxi, ready to put his architecture education to use.


But what he experienced took on much greater meaning than just creating blueprints. “I’ve become very emotionally invested in the community,” he says. “Working with the homeowners has had the most profound effect on me, much more than learning about how to make a house stand up to a storm.”


Serving as program manager, Michael helped work on the Biloxi Model Home Program, which paired seven families with professional designers who worked with them to design new homes that would be both affordable and meet the area’s new building requirements. The seven newly designed houses now serve as ideal models for future construction in the area.


Reflecting on his experience, Michael says, “We are in the business of getting people back home, but I really think in the time that I’ve been here, we really are more in the business of maintaining and rebuilding some dignity in the lives of everyone here.”

David Perkes applied his years of design expertise to help the Gulf Coast region recover.

© 2008 Oprah’s Angel Network

David Perkes

Looking back, it turns out that the back-breaking work of cleaning up the trash, removing the debris and mopping up the muck after Hurricane Katrina was the easy part. Rebuilding homes and lives, however, is turning out to be more difficult.


Luckily, people such as David Perkes, the founding director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, have stepped into the void to lend their expertise. A former Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an award-winning designer who taught at Mississippi State, Perkes knows the rebuilding efforts are complex. “It involves all sorts of partners, dealing with building codes, zoning codes and hurricane loads … and there’s a point where you really need to bring in the right sort of skills.”

Perkes’ studio, located in East Biloxi’s Hope Coordination Center, did just that. They developed damage assessment maps, provided planning assistance and, once the time to rebuild arrived, offered design services that deftly navigated the new elevation requirements while still paying closing attention to the needs of homeowners. It was a tricky balancing of affordability, sustainability and livability. Since the disaster, Perkes’ studio has been involved in renovating hundreds of damaged homes and more than 50 new house projects in East Biloxi. “We really tried to design with (the homeowner’s) concerns so that the house becomes a long-term place for them,” says Perkes. “We want people to make sure that once they’re in the house that they’re in it for a long time. That they pass it on to their kids and that it becomes … a long-term sustainable part of the housing stock for the community.”