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Creating Fair and Accountable Spaces in the Face of Flood Risks: How to Support Community-led Resilience Planning

Resilient Coastal Communities Project

MR 2025 - Columbia University

Bernadette Baird-Zars, Amelia Ding, Hellas Lee, Victoria Sanders, Paul Gallay

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[Victoria] We’ve talked with communities here in NYC and NJ and all around the country - like in Florida, California, and Louisiana - to find stories of where and how flood adaptation processes and outcomes were seen as successful BY the communities themselves.

These communities all had shared experiences and challenges that included ever growing climate and environmental dangers, lack of funding and investment, opaque top-down planning processes that didn’t represent their needs, concerns and lived experiences, and amazing communities filled with wonderful, capable people who wanted to help their neighbors, families, and themselves happier and healthier long-term.

�One example is El Puente, and organization that support the environmental justice communities within in Williamsburg and Bushwick (that’s Brooklyn for those of you who may not be locals) - and they fit this mould of incredible people who face a lot of injustices and challenges. Historically, they haven’t received the respect that their decades of work and community leadership deserves, with government and academic processes generally failing to support self-determination and uplifting the priorities and projects that they have identified and created. They and hundreds of communities like them have struggled to protect themselves, but there are some examples where community engagement and planning processes have broken the mould and yielded different, better results. For El Puente, an example of a better process is BQGreen, which this image imagines, which is different than many other initiatives because it was community led and visioned, they created this plan and the local government saw an opportunity to support and assist them with their goal. While this process is ongoing and uncertain, the way it began is as important as where it goes, because plans that aren’t grounded in community are rarely able to later incorporate community later on.

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Motivation + question

Unjust processes lead to unjust outcomes

Better stories exist.

Research question:

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What are the elements of cases that have had fair and accountable processes?

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Who we are

Resilient Coastal

Communities Project

Meets biweekly

Co-led with NYC-EJA

Advocacy with USACE and other projects

‘Co-produced’ research, honoraria, review processes with CBO leaders

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Methods

Questions co-produced by RCCP team

22 interviews, semi-structured

Snowball sampling

Content, institutional analysis

Triangulation between researchers + team members

Reviewed and prioritization of findings by practitioner-participants

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Findings: stretching beyond

Roles & relationships that

Go beyond comfort, job descriptions, project documents

Shift systems into new modes

Deliver different kinds of outcomes

Build lasting respect and collaboration

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build trusted dialogue between stakeholders

advocate against injustices

guide communities to long-term empowerment

foster knowledge exchanges

connect people and resources

[Hellas] We also identified five roles that help shape fair and accountable resilience practices, roles that can relate to whatever background someone comes from. Today we’ll be diving into two of these roles with more detail, providing context on when these roles would benefit resilience initiatives, and acknowledging that not all 5 of these roles are necessary for equitable processes.

We have facilitators who connect people with resources, breaking down traditional silos of work and encouraging interdisciplinary action for holistic results, and second, we have educators, who foster knowledge exchanges. Education in this sense has an emphasis on two-way sharing, so that communities, practitioners, agency partners, and researchers alike are all learning within the context of the community.

Our other roles include mentors, who help communities find their own power, like providing technical expertise on a community-designed and led project; defenders, who fight against past or present injustices, like a community advocate who stands up against policies; and mediators who help diverse stakeholders talk to each other, resolving conflicts for productive conversations.

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Facilitators

The funding is “often not flexible enough to consider the fact that I might go somewhere. And then there's all these other partners that I need to work with, but I have no resources for them, because I didn't know they existed before I started the grant, or I go there, and the need is different. And then we're pivoting a different way."

-- Academic researcher

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Facilitators

The goal is to “[build] long-term champions, and [see] them as the torch carriers for implementation” and “to be their partners until infinity, … or until they don’t want us there anymore”.

-- Planning practitioner

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Had to get all 41 households to agree to USDA funding terms in order for buyout to be successful

Built trust with individual households and assisted each with financial paperwork

Advocated for community to receive further state funding to reflect different individual’s finances

Silverleaf Buyout Program

Louisiana

“We could have never done this through public meetings. We had to sit in their homes and build the trust… to make the initiative successful”

Here is an example that encapsulates successful facilitation along with aspects of education and mentorship. One of our interviewee’s teams had a contract to facilitate the Silverleaf buyout program south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For the program to continue forward, all 41 households in the community had to agree to the USDA terms. To achieve this, their team interacted with each household individually, sitting down with them to gain their trust, which was especially important because of the discussion of personal finances. They assisted with describing the program and their household needs, as well as helping fill out the paperwork for each household. Through their interactions, though, the team realised that the buyout funds would not be sufficient for the community and further advocated for the state to provide more funding, not just as a blanket check, but as funds that would account for different financial situations. In actively seeking financial opportunities, they successfully secured additional funding to align with community needs, and gained the trust of community members. As our interviewee said, “We could have never done this through public meetings. We had to sit in their homes and build the trust… to make the initiative successful”. In their individualised approach grounded in respect, this project team equipped the community with institutional and financial resources, and also provided households with a deeper understanding of them, which leads us to our second role of Educators, as Amelia will describe…

In actively seeking financial opportunities, they successfully secured additional funding to align with community needs, and gained the trust of community members.

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Educators

“We need to speak to our community in our own language. You might not understand us, but [our community members] will, and so we are the ones best positioned to convey these concepts…and then also translate it back…to policymakers and scientists…studying us unto death.”

-- Community leader in historically Black community along the Eastern seaboard

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Educators

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Educators

“Getting people to understand why our resources matter for this very like almost visceral perspective. For example, we have individuals see and touch seaweed. And then we explain, like, why seaweed is really important”

-– Agency partner in Florida

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Underpinning conditions

+ the ecosystem of roles

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Time

Respect

Shared interests

Shared

values

Relationships

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Thank you!

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Who we are

Resilient Coastal Communities Project

Meets biweekly
Co-led with NYC-EJA
Advocacy with USACE and other projects
‘Co-produced’ research, honoraria, review processes with CBO leaders

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Why planning?

Current structures are unfair

Default is broken

Examples of exceptions

What are the components - and underlying conditions - of flood planning processes that foreground community leadership and priorities?

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Our initial findings suggest that equitable actions stem from long-term relationships and networks of respect underpinned by values, such as the understanding that everyone engaged brings valuable knowledge and experiences. Further, we identified key roles and arenas for action that dynamically interplay to foster equitable planning processes. These roles - facilitators who connect people and resources, educators who foster knowledge exchanges, mediators who create spaces for diverse stakeholders, defenders who advocate against injustices, and mentors who guide communities to long-term empowerment - collectively inspire new modes of action and lay the foundation for successful, relationship-centered planning.

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FINDINGS

DIFFERENT ROLES ARE NEEDED - OFTEN THESE AREn”T IN JOB DESCRIPTIONS

CASES / STORIES

[IMAGES FROM CASES]

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Are boundary spanners, those who break down traditional silos of expertise

Create connections to build networks and further resources for communities

Are the backbone of interdisciplinary action and collaboration

Institutional

Academic/ Informational

Structural accountability & collaboration

Financial

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Are boundary spanners, those who break down traditional silos of expertise

Create connections to build networks and further resources for communities

Are the backbone of interdisciplinary action and collaboration

Save Our Compost Campaign

New York