From GOOD, what Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation is getting right in New Orleans:
Before the foundation trained local contractors, no one in New Orleans knew how to pour the pervious concrete that absorbs rainwater. Training one contractor to do this for one house would be prohibitively expensive; MIR essentially shouldered this start-up cost. Throughout the project, the foundation has introduced new material streams, reduced the costs of learning to use them, and pioneered the path through a permitting office that had never seen any of this before. And it has evolved building schemes that use fewer resources and cut the cost of obtaining them by buying in bulk.
