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Renew
Summer 2026—February 2027
2026 SFA Film Residency, with multi-city in-person experiences and monthly virtual workshops ⟶

Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: Mutual Aid Through Food: Community Care Networks in New Orleans

ORAL HISTORY

Chenier “Klie” Kliebert

Imagine Water Works

Chenier “Klie” Kliebert (they/them) was born in New Orleans in 1985, and has Creole, Cajun, and Indigenous roots. They are the executive director of Imagine Water Works, a group focused on climate justice, water management, and disaster readiness and response. Throughout the pandemic, Kliebert has moderated the IWW’s mutual aid Facebook group for New Orleans, where people can post requests or offers for things they need or can give. That group became a key tool for IWW’s response to Hurricane Laura in 2020, when many thousands of evacuees from southwest Louisiana were sheltered at hotels in downtown New Orleans, with varied access to food and ability to cook for themselves. Kliebert and others canvassed hotels and signed evacuees up for the Facebook group, so they could request items they needed on their own terms. A year later, IWW mobilized a prolonged food and resource distribution effort after Hurricane Ida hit the southeastern area of the state.

Date of interview:
2022-05-16

Interviewer:
Carly Berlin

Photographer:

Download Transcript

“

“There was a lot of moving food in between places because there would be a big drop of food at one place but then you have thirty other hotels that got none or their food was cold or bad, even. There was a lot of responding to specific food needs. Some things were just sweet. One person needed a birthday cake for their son, and someone in the group was, like, ‘Yes, I've been waiting to use my cake-baking skills!’”

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A musician and multi-disciplinary artist in New Orleans, Spirit Paris McIntyre was a founding member of Southern Solidarity, a mutual aid group that aims to secure basic needs for unhoused people in New Orleans.

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Dan Bingler joined together with a couple of friends in March 2020 to start the Greater New Orleans Caring Collective, a mutual aid effort to help people stay safely self-quarantined.

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