A Kansas City, Mo. neighborhood is about to get a new lease on life, courtesy of a little Hollywood royalty. Brad Pitt’s charity, Make It Right, has pledged a $2.3 million donation to turn a decrepit primary school into an urban community center, Fox4KC News reports. This is only the second project Pitt’s foundation has taken on outside of New Orleans, where he’s focused much his attention on rebuilding areas [...]

Rihanna, Sheryl Crow, the Neville Brothers and Seal will perform at the event for Make It Right, while guests include Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Spike Lee, Blake Lively, Bennett Miller and Djimon Hounsou. The stars will be out in New Orleans on March 10 for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right charity event, which will raise funds to build sustainable, affordable homes for New Orleans’ families who lost everything to Hurricane [...]

More than 100 New Orleans civic activists and leaders will present $150,000 donation today to actor Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation, to underwrite the building of a house in the Lower 9th Ward. The group has also commissioned a “New Orleans Oscar” to give Pitt, along with a director’s chair. Both were created by local sculptor Luis Colmenares. The A-list actor has been invited to the 11:30 a.m. gathering [...]

Homegrown home-reno crusader Mike Holmes’s one-man show Holmes on Homes (Global – 9 p.m.) has been a popular draw with viewers of HGTV for several years now, thanks to his no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is building advice. Tonight, in the first of a two-part special, Holmes in New Orleans, Holmes connects with Brad Pitt to help rebuild homes in New Orleans’ devastated Lower 9th Ward district.

Actor Brad Pitt is scheduled to announce plans to create more than 100 affordable, ecologically sound homes in the Lower 9th Ward. This weekend, big pink houses were installed in the flood-ravaged neighorhood as symbolic stand-ins for those homes. - – - Ivory Porter Webb was first perplexed, then giddy with excitement, on Saturday afternoon, just before dusk. As she drove across the Claiborne Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, [...]

Actor Brad Pitt attends with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) a press conference following a meeting to discuss the “Make it Right” project on March 5, 2009 in Washington, DC. The project, launched in 2007, helps to construct affordable and environmentally-sustainable housing for low-income residents of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans who lost their homes as a result of Hurricane Katrina. [...]

Given Brad Pitt’s high-profile activism, it may not have seemed too curious that he and Nancy Pelosi met with each other in Washington, D.C., Thursday, but it no doubt piqued people’s curiosity. After all, it’s not every day you get to see a Hollywood heavyweight mixing it up with the Speaker of the House. “I just want to say thank you to the Speaker for opening up the doors to [...]