Through two separate trips, students and faculty members of Ball State's College of Architecture and Planning recently helped victims of Hurricane Katrina clean up and rebuild.

One group, led by Ivo Rozendaal, a fourth-year architecture student from Valparaiso, Ind., raised $14,000 for relief efforts. Part of the money was spent loading a semi-truck full of food, water, bedding and cleaning supplies with the remaining $6,000 donated to a relief fund. Not satisfied with simply raising the money, the students contacted a church near Mobile, Ala., borrowed a church van and drove to the storm-damaged region to see if they could help out even more.

They stayed at a local church and spent a week going door to door, finding out what people needed and assessing damage to people's homes, said Rozendaal.

"We helped people put tarps over leaky roofs, and in some cases we helped them gut their homes," he said. "Many times, we just talked with people because they really wanted someone to speak to."

The door-to-door effort in the small town of Bayou La Batre, Ala., helped guide the town manager's effort in taking an inventory of the damage and in directing aid to the right people when it arrived.

The students also drove through the small town's streets making firsthand deliveries from their truckload of supplies. Supplies went quickly, and the students were thanked many times for their efforts, said Rozendaal.

"The people in the area know what to expect when church buses or Red Cross vans drive by," he said. "The people come running to the open doors and are so thankful for anything we can give them."

Rozendaal hopes a long-term relationship with the town can be established because it will take years for the area to recover. He already has plans to return over the semester break.

Architecture instructor Jason Johnson also led a group of students to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. Johnson first took the students to the swank coastal town of Seaside, Fla., a locale untouched by the hurricane. The purpose of the side trip was to study a planned coastal community that some are promoting as a model for the rebuilding of the Mississippi coastline, said Johnson.

"Before we went to Mississippi and Louisiana, I wanted the students to get a sense of the relative opulence of this place," he said. "Along with helping out hurricane victims, I wanted the students to be able to see both ends of the spectrum, opulence and poverty, and fully appreciate the need to design for both."

During their weeklong trip, Johnson and six students volunteered at a shelter in Louisiana distributing clothing and food and building temporary showers. In the small town of Oceanside, Miss., they interviewed area residents and documented structural damage to homes and infrastructure. These interviews and photographs will be useful in understanding how some buildings withstood the hurricane better than others.

"The students were shocked by both the destruction of people's homes and some of the living arrangements in the shelter," Johnson said. "By experiencing the shelter for evacuees and the destroyed neighborhoods the students were able to see firsthand the importance of providing temporary housing solutions that embrace not just the need for shelter following a catastrophe, but also the need to create an environment that gives dignity to those whose circumstances have brought them to these places."

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