What happened after BWB left the Gulf Coast (Hurricane Katrina)? 

After witnessing the incredible creativity that the Burning Man community brought to Katrina, Tom Price and Carmen Mauk returned to San Francisco with a desire to continue to grow BWB beyond the scope of natural disasters. They wondered what would be possible if the kind of participation and creativity they experienced in Katrina could be turned into our everyday lives in communities around the world. As a first step in encouraging community participation, they hosted a beach cleanup at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, on May 5th. By engaging the Burning Man network and former Katrina volunteers, this cleanup spread to five countries, and the first annual “Cinco de Playa” cleanup was born. This program ran for seven years and continued to grow to more than twenty cities around the world. Since then, hundreds of BWB projects have focused on both response and resilience, driven by a network of Chapters, Working Groups, Grantees, Project Leads, and Affiliates.