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Maskarade, a mask shop.

NEW ORLEANS -

A crazy quilt jungle of high-fashion headwear, French Quarter boutique Fleur de Paris is already an overwhelming place to walk into. But 2006 College alumna Miji Park got more than she bargained for last weekend when, just seconds after she strolled in the door, owner Joe Perrino burst out from behind a hat rack and told her to get out. Immediately.

Park had barely made it out onto the street, though, when Perrino scrambled out to apologize. It wasn't that he was unhappy to see her - in fact, Perrino was thrilled to see Park, who works for a non-profit firm that offers free consulting services to him and another 19 of the Big Easy's most characteristic small businesses. It was just that, for once, he had customers in his store and he couldn't be distracted.

"Saturday's the only day I can make a buck," he huffed.

In short, business in the French Quarter stinks. Park says that of the 136 stores surveyed by her non-profit, most of their revenues have dropped between 50 and 70 percent since Hurricane Katrina. Across the city, tourism-dependent stores are closing by the dozen and shopkeepers will tell you that the only thing moving slower than the government is the flow of merchandise.

But Park thinks there's something she can do about it.

Last summer, the Urban Studies and Economics major turned her back on a lucrative job in her native California to take a post at New Orleans' Idea Village, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting (at this point, likely saving) local businesses. Without so much as a place to live or the promise of a regular salary, for Park, it was the academic equivalent of turning down an endowed professorship to do Teach for America.

Armed with the conviction that small businesses - once the driving force behind New Orleans' economy - are now the key to reviving it, Park has become a key member of Idea Village's five-person "Idea Corps" team. A shock troop of young consultants who've scoured the city for Katrina-bitten businesses in need of a lifeline, Park and her Idea Corps teammates are in on the ground floor of New Orleans' recovery efforts, consulting and providing grants to businesses they deem culturally indispensable to the city.

It's hardly a place she would've expected to be at this time last year, when she was a senior at Penn living 17 stories off the ground in Harrison College House.

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"I can't explain my attachment to this city," Park said. Since Katrina, though, she has somehow been irresistibly drawn to it.

Like many other Penn students, over spring break in March she travelled south to help with hurricane relief. She ended up doing clean-up work in Lafayette, La., but was frustrated that she never made it to New Orleans.

"I didn't feel like I did enough. I mean, we did good work, but I just wanted to do more," she said.

So Park enrolled in a course in the School of Design on Katrina recovery and signed herself up for a second service trip at the end of May, this time gutting houses in nearby Gentilly and New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

Still not satisfied, though, she sent out her resume with hopes of landing a short summer job in the city related to relief efforts, but unrelated to tearing down walls ("I'm not much of a gutting-type person," she admits).

Park wanted desperately to help, but had one major constraint: Any job could only be through June, because she had to return home to take up the real-estate consulting position in Berkeley she had already accepted.

Nevertheless, word came from Idea Village that she'd be welcome to come in for an interview while she was in town in May. The interview went well, and the day before she was supposed to return home with her service group, Park changed her airplane ticket and decided to hunker down for another month in the youth hostile she'd been staying in.

During June, though, it became clear to her that leaving would be hard. She wavered back and forth, changing her mind five times within a week at one point, but in late June made the tough phone call to her would-be boss in Berkeley, saying that she was, effectively, quitting before she even started. She would stay on at Idea Village.

"It was more fear that was holding me back. I had stability in Berkeley," she said. "Toward the end of June, I was just looking at [the Berkeley] job as a number and it didn't have any other meaning.

"And real-estate economic research versus coming down here and doing work that matters, rebuilding a city essentially. You can't compare that to anything."

Her mother, of course, freaked out, but Park was in New Orleans to stay.

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Last week, Park and her boss personally dropped off $5,000 in grant checks to all 20 businesses for whom they've been consulting. Their bet is that within the next year or two, the $100,000 grant money will blossom into an over $1 million revenue boost for the city, but the process of selecting the businesses was agonizing.

In all, 136 companies applied for the Idea Corps program, 61 were granted interviews, and just 20 of the most vital to New Orleans culture and history were selected.

"We wanted these funky little stores that New Orleans is known for," she said. "We were really looking at businesses that, if they went out of business, New Orleans would change."

Involved in every phase of the selection process, Park became immersed in a world of hat-makers, Mardi Gras mask-designers and even one particularly hard-bitten 80-year-old alligator-leather salesman.

With free-spending tourists seemingly all gone, Idea Corps has been trying to help these companies find a way to diversify their customer base.

For instance, Park and her coworkers have advised Voodoo Authentica, a French Quarter store filled with altars, incense and (of course) voodoo dolls to harness the power of the Internet. The cashier complains that business has slowed to a crawl, but Park says that since the store's Web site is already one of the Web's authoritative voodoo resources, they've recommended that the store use a little bit of black magic to rub some revenue out of increased online sales.

The jury's out on whether Idea Corps' work will pan out, but that hasn't stopped Idea Village Chief Operating Officer Allen Bell from planning for the future. In the next 18 months, he'd like to launch between two and five additional Idea Corps teams to complement Park's.

Bell says it was "by miracle" that Park arrived at his office, and concedes that he'll need many more like her to expand his program. How many aspiring consultants, after all, would give up Wall Street salaries to work way under market value in a city where boarded up windows have become an accepted part of the scenery?

Bell admits that "it really has to be from the heart," but says he's hopeful. For her part, Park has been reaching out to Penn to help recruit students and hopes that perhaps some of them will feel the same draw she did.

"Essentially, if you can solve these problems in New Orleans, you can solve them anywhere," she said. "And that challenge was just too important to walk away from."

Even if the shopkeeper tells you to get out.

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