With many of its facilities in ruins, and its employees, customers, volunteers and donors scattered by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Audubon Nature Institute turned to the Web to raise the money needed to get back to its mission.

By Abny Santicola

“We were set up for a normal evacuation, which is where you leave town for a couple of days, you come back, clean up and open up because the storm hasn’t come anywhere near you,” Conkerton says. “Our facilities had resources to function for two weeks without contact with the outside world. But I don’t think anybody imagined that we would be closed for two and a half months after a storm went through.”