SWACE Conference Report from New Orleans

I arrived today in New Orleans for the annual Southwest Association of Colleges and Employers (SWACE) conference. The last time I was in this area was as a volunteer a couple of weeks after Katrina hit. At that time, you couldn’t get into New Orleans because the city was under water. Today, the water is gone but the devastation remains.
Seth Gardner of Nechama: Jewish Response from Disaster joined me for a delicious lunch at Elizabeth’s Restaurant (home of the soon-to-be-famous Praline Bacon) and then a tour of various parts of the metro, including St. Bernard’s Parish. Those of us who live outside of this area simply cannot comprehend the scale of the destruction and how much work remains to be done. Almost every home suffered extensive water damage and very few have been repaired. Nechama and other non-profit relief groups like it are making a huge difference in the lives of the people they touch, but there are far too many people who need such help and far too little help being offered.
Seth showed me the inside of a house that Nechama recently gutted so that it could be repaired by its ex-fisherman owner and we then went to a free medical and dental clinic run by Operation Blessing. That organization is all over the place down here. It receives its funding from Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club. Love them or hate the parent organization, their Operation Blessing people are doing tremendous work down here.
We then headed to downtown New Orleans so that he could drop me at my hotel, the InterContinental. The downtown area is dirty and a ton of construction is going on to repair the infrastructure, but there is no question that it is open for business and more than capable of hosting world class conferences again. Which bring me back to SWACE.
Tomorrow is the first day of the conference and I was fortunate enough to be included as a speaker. I’ll be talking about blogging and podcasting, two areas that are definitely my passion. I’ll share with the career service office professionals and employers who attend my thoughts on how they can best use podcasting and blogging to help students find rewarding employment. They’ll also get a sneak peak at one of the video podcasts that we’re about to go live with. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.