Hurricane Harvey and 10s of thousands still trying to recover. How you can Help?

April 13, 2019 Cindee Klement

This past Wednesday, executives from HP were having a conference in Houston. They finished off their event with a visit to our exhibit, 51.88” Art of Resilience. Geraldina, and I were available to talk about the work.

I know corporations love to find projects to partner up with, so I reached out to Jeff Schultz with HoustonResponds to get an update on what type of help is still needed. I was able to pass the information on to HP. HoustonResponds is the organization that I donated the use of my Harvey drawings to for a publication used to get volunteers to help with the recovery.

I have pasted below the information that Jeff shared with me.

If you know any corporations looking for a good project, please have them contact HoustonResponds.

Here’s a link that may be as effective as anything to answer your question:https://www.houstonresponds.org/farfromfinished. We launched the “Far from Finished” campaign to raise awareness about the unmet need. The 90 second videos have been especially effective in communicating that as they put a face to the numbers.

There are still tens of thousands of Houstonians who are displaced or living in damage or gutted homes, many of whom do not have the resources to recover.

I would say that what most of these people need is a community around them that cares and is willing to walk through the recovery process with them, as well provide resources to rebuild their homes.

That’s part of what we do, and our strategy is to accomplish it through building coalitions of local churches that partner with any and all local organizations (faith-based and non-faith-based) involved in Harvey recovery.

How people can help, including corporations:

Funds/resources: We depend largely on grants to fund repair, but those funds are beginning to run out. We are beginning to cultivate relationships with corporations to continue to fund the work, and HP might be an example of that.
Volunteer: Our economic proposition is that substituting volunteer for professional labor and eliminating the profit margin can get homes repaired more quickly and economically, and sometimes with higher quality. We would love for corporations like HP to consider send volunteers to help with rebuild projects.

Hurricane Harvey Heroes- LIVEstock- “chica”

March 21, 2019 Cindee Klement

Happiness is finding your favorite goat Chica before the flood.

This piece was not inspired by a social media posting. I do feel it is a story worth telling.

Many thanks to my beloved niece Josette Travis for inspiring this piece. Thank you so much for helping me with this and being such a great Mom to all the kids. (Does anybody get that joke- all the kids).

Below are images of Josette and some of Josette and Eric’s kids.

Josette feeding one of Chicas babies

Josette and Chica modeling a goat rescue for me. Photo by Eric travis.

4- kids - Danika and Emma feeding 2 baby goats

Josette 😍 and kid

Chica chillin’

The Billy goat and my grand niece Danika . I love his beard.

Hurricane Harvey - sculpture day 37 “bringing home the bacon”

March 6, 2019 Cindee Klement

Photographer Nash Baker getting the lighting just right before we take the piece of the pedestal.

Hurricane Harvey - sculpture day 32 “bringing home the bacon”

February 20, 2019 Cindee Klement

Creating tension

Hurricane Harvey - sculpture day 16 “bringing home the bacon”

January 18, 2019 Cindee Klement

Hands, hands, hands= frustration

I thought I had a really good plan of attack: draw out a hand the size I want, measure how big each bone should be, cut the bones, and tack them together. Once they are tacked together, bend them into position. This is where the frustration began. Some of the tacks would either not bend or some would break, and I would then have to reweld them. I did finally get them all together. I was mentally exhausted, so I decided to attach them permanently to the arms tomorrow when I am more refreshed.
I did just tack them just to see how they look.

I hope I like them tomorrow.

FYI - I put really big welds on the knuckles because I like knarly fingers with big knuckles. If you deal with livestock, you probably have some pretty banged up fingers. :)