Steve Friedman of North Potomac wants people to remember the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought on the Gulf Coast two years ago. He wants them to continue to be conscious of it throughout the year, not just during the news cycle that surrounds each anniversary.
“As soon as you go out of the French Quarter — the French Quarter and the Garden District were two areas that were not really affected — when you get out a mile or two outside of the downtown, that’s the area that is still massively hit,” Friedman said of New Orleans. “Those are the areas that were under water. They are going to need a lot of work for years to come.”
While New Orleans was the area most notoriously devastated by the hurricane two years ago, the rest of the Gulf Coast suffered catastrophic damage as well, and Friedman is intent on keeping the public aware of that.
To that end he recently created a new public television program called “Travel Television” to broadcast a series of documentaries about volunteer efforts going on in the region. He also created a Web site for Project Katrina Volunteers, which provides volunteers a forum to share their experiences with each other and with the world.
“It allows people who have been down there to come and tell their stories. People who are thinking about going down there can come and see the stories,” said Friedman.
He spent the past summer building the Web site with a team of Winston Churchill High School students. For Friedman, who works for the Voice Of America radio network, it was a chance to work with students eager to learn new skills — Web development, public relations, and project management — as well as to expose them to the importance and benefits of volunteerism, both in those areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, and more generally.
“Hopefully people will see the stuff and be moved by it and say, ‘You know, I want to do something,’” Friedman said.

FOR THE NINE students who spent one day a week this summer working with him, it was a chance to expand their skills. The students came from three of Churchill’s Signature Academies: the Mathematics, Technology, and Science Academy, the Creative and Performing Arts Academy, and the International Studies Academy.
Junior Alex Roca searched the Web for blogs and links to videos.
“I actually haven’t done anything like this before, it was a new experience, and I kind of enjoyed it,” Roca said. “I’m really interested in computers and so I figured that designing Web pages would be a pretty interesting start to that.”
Some students worked on the technical and visual aspects of the site, while others started MySpace and Facebook group pages to link to the Web site. Other students some spent hours calling and e-mailing television stations across the country and webmasters of other sites to generate interest in their site and to find more carriers for “Travel Television” and the Project Katrina Volunteers Web site.
Junior Ardalon Sabet said that his first taste of the world of public relations and promotion was “pretty tedious. It was difficult — people don’t get back to you.”
Sophomore Aditya Kolhekar worked the phones with Sabet, and just recently found a television station in Tennessee who is interested in airing “Travel Television.”
Small successes such as finally getting a return call are nice, but even greater is having something more concrete like a fully functioning, informative Web site to point to, said senior Elise Toplin, who wrote press releases and blogs for the site.
“It’s exciting because you can go onto the Internet and be like, ‘I designed that page or I wrote that or something like that,’” said Toplin.

FRIEDMAN SAID that while his “Travel Television,” which debuted on Aug. 29, will focus on volunteer efforts in the Gulf Coast and throughout the country, it will also have more broadly related travel features.
Some segments of the magazine-formatted show will be interviews with travel writers or features focusing on topics such as airport security, travel tips for those journeying to far-flung locales, for instance. Friedman hopes that those segments will draw a wider audience that will also be drawn to the volunteer-related stories.
“That’s really what the real guts of the show is,” said Friedman.
Exposing the students to the world of volunteerism was rewarding for Friedman, as was helping them to see a project through from start to finish.
“The kids have been instrumental this summer in creating all of those different platforms,” said Friedman. “Now that we’re up and running, we’re going to get the word out to all the volunteers. Essentially they’ve laid the groundwork for this citizens media project. And really there’s no one else, there’s no one collecting the stories, and that’s really what this project is all about.”
Apart from learning what it takes to work in a team environment to create such a multifaceted project, the students came away with a greater appreciation of what is happening — and in many cases not happening, in the storm-ravaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
“There still is a lot of stuff that hasn’t been touched since the storm and you really don’t get much of a sense of that through the normal media,” said Roca.
“Eleven of the twelve months of the year you wouldn’t even know that there had been a hurricane and then in August all this news starts to pop up,” Toplin said. “Now, after doing this project, you can kind of sense more the need that exists down there and how crazy it still is.”