The Katrina Stories Project will bring healing to the New Orleans community through the stories of the survivors.

The Katrina Stories Project has three objectives:

• Promote individual recovery by offering survivors the opportunity to tell their stories.
• Promote society recovery by giving it the opportunity to listen.
• Establish an audio repository of survivor stories -- preserving a human-scaled oral history of storm, aftermath and migration still in progress.

Stories have a healing power, can even save lives. Survivors of horrific experiences often begin their recovery with the simple act of speaking their piece, knowing their story is being heard and accepted without judgment. For the listener, the act of bearing witness can edge past internal defenses to shed light on personal healing. Stories are our most ancient form of teaching and transformation. Stories are how a community talks to itself. In the courageous act of bearing witness, standing and being heard, the community can begin to bind its wounds. To heal from great tragedy or horrid atrocity, all who would speak must be heard. Hurricane Katrina has left New Orleans with stories that must be told, and listened to. The Katrina Stories Project will bring those stories, and their tellers, before the community so that the healing may begin.