When President Obama mentioned "levees breaking" in his inaugural address last Tuesday, Gulf Coast activists hoped that this was representative of a new attitude in Washington - one that would put rebuilding the Gulf Coast back on the national agenda.

As the Times-Picayune reports:

[There] was a common sense that three-and-half years after Hurricane Katrina, their efforts to restore and repopulate the communities they call home might no longer be running into what they viewed as stiff headwinds of resistance and indifference in Washington. And there was the hope that, with Barack Obama as president -- an African-American former community organizer -- they might actually have the wind at their backs.

Facing South continues to cover the efforts by a coalition of Gulf
Coast advocates and law makers campaigning for a Gulf Coast Civic Works program to be included in Obama's economic stimulus plan. Advocates are hoping that Obama will issue an executive order to create
the project, which stalled as legislation in the last Congress. The
project would train and employ at least 100,000 people who lost their
livelihoods in past storms to work rebuilding their communities.

Some activists are also hoping to see changes to the Stafford Act, which sets the rules for disaster relief and emergency assistance, to include a right to recovery and a right of return for disaster victims akin to what the United States and the United Nations call on other nations to provide their own displaced persons, reports the Times-Picayune.

"It's a new day," Pam Dashiell, co-director of the Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development told the Times-Picayune. "I think the people of the Gulf Coast are going to see a new way of doing things."