The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the results of the first two years of collaborative practice and some critical reflection on the goals and realities of this model of collaborative community design in a post disaster context.