O2 Sends Donated City Bus to New Orleans Relief Effort

The Oxygen Collective delivered a 30 foot City Bus to the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans last week to aid in their ongoing hurricane relief work. Common Ground plans to use the bus to transport college students who are traveling to New Orleans during their spring breaks as part of their Freedom Ride campaign. The fully equipped Diesel Gillig passenger bus will then be used to bring groups of volunteers to and from their daily work sites gutting and restoring houses as well as to host tours of the city and Common Ground's network of relief operations.

The photo to the right shows Common Ground founder Malik Rahim showing the new bus to residents of the Algiers neighborhood.

Harold Hardesty, a resident of Ashland, Or, saw a local news story about the Oxygen Collective's upcoming "Bound for Common Ground" relief trip to New Orleans last December and contacted us with a generous offer of gifting the bus to the folks on the Gulf Coast who badly need reliable transportation for the hundreds of volunteers working at any given time with the Common Ground Collective. The bus is just out of rotation as a public transport vehicle for the city of Pasco, Washington, and is in good mechanical shape with all its seats and systems fully intact.

A local television news crew filmed the transfer of the title and a $200 donation from Harold to o2 member and Common Ground organizer Kerul Dyer just before she and a small crew boarded the bus and drove it to the Gulf Coast.

Posted by laurel at March 3, 2006 02:49 PM | Category(s): Gulf Coast Relief: Supporting Resident's Right to Return