The civic action group MoveOn is enlisting the aid of celebrities to publicize its online housing location service. Tim Robbins, Green Day, John Cusack, and REM are among the actors and musicians who have joined the effort to find housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
“As a band, we felt that promoting the service is essential — literally a matter of life and death,” said Michael Stipe of REM. In addition to appearing in public service announcements, the artists are promoting the housing effort with links on their web sites.
In creating the web site, http://hurricanehousing.org, MoveOn asked its 3.3 million members and the public to post any available housing for the thousands of people left homeless.
The organization connects evacuees directly with volunteer hosts, and also provides housing information to the Red Cross and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Within the first 24 hours, people across the country opened their homes and offered more than 42,000 beds, 12,000 of them in the Southeast. The emergency drive specifically is seeking volunteer hosts within about 300 miles of the affected areas. Move On estimates that more than 100,000 people in Louisiana and Mississippi were left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
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