SANGITA NAYAK
Nayak is communications director of the Praxis Project, which coordinates the Katrina Information Network, an informational clearinghouse. She can arrange media interviews with grassroots groups and survivors from East Biloxi to New Orleans who can comment on the gaps in the recovery.
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TRACIE WASHINGTON
Washington, a lifelong New Orleans resident and civil rights attorney, is director of the NAACP Gulf Coast Advocacy Center.

She is a co-author of the report “Housing in New Orleans: One Year After Katrina,” which will be released on Monday and offers solutions and policy recommendations. (An embargoed executive summary is now available to media.)
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CHRIS KROMM
Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, which launched Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch last year and has just released the report “One Year After Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” The 100-page study features over 250 statistical indicators, as well as over 45 status reports, investigations, and community profiles in 13 key areas.

He said today: “Despite promises from national leaders to ‘do what it takes’ to rebuild the Gulf, many in the region have been left to fend for themselves — with tragic results. Without a bold, national commitment, the Gulf and its people won’t come back.”
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PRATAP CHATTERJEE
Chatterjee is director of CorpWatch, which just released the report “Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast.” He said today: “We see a pattern of profiteering, waste and failure — due to the same flawed contracting system and even many of the same players as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The process of getting Katrina-stricken areas back on their feet is needlessly behind schedule, in part due to the shunning of local business people in favor of politically connected corporations from elsewhere in the U.S. that have used their clout to win lucrative no-bid contracts with little or no accountability and that have done little or no work while ripping off the taxpayer.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167