Stop the insanity! Two distinctly different climate resilience events share key theme

7.10.2024 — LISC StoriesCommunities on the Linee-Blasts

Whoever said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results could point to the disproportionate impact of climate change on systemically marginalized communities as a tragic case in point.

Seeing climate resilience — the ability to prepare, recover and adapt to the impacts of climate change — for what it really is, is to see the direct impact of redlining, displacement and disinvestment all over again. It’s the insane continuation of decades and generations of policies and practices designed, often with clear intention, to maintain racial hierarchy and classist structures.

LISC Phoenix recently helped folks see reality with a community-centric focus on climate resilience. The work was a necessary early step, practically an intervention, to do things differently from the past for the sake of the present and future.

At two distinctly different climate resilience events on consecutive days in June, experts in race, culture, community development, science, government and finance, said a lot of the same things: Climate resilience requires strategically turning systems upside down and inside out to avoid repeating mistakes and harms in historically underserved and undermined communities. Most immediately, that means centering the conversation about solutions for climate resilience on the lived experiences of people in places most impacted.

“I believe that the future is place-based,” Augie Gastelum, interim executive director of RAIL CDC, said during a panel discussion inspired by the recent book release of “What’s Possible: Investing Now for Prosperous Sustainable Neighborhoods.”

“The solutions are place-based. … The people that live and work in that place — they have the solutions,” Gastelum said. “Those solutions can be replicable. … The responsibility that I seek is learning and listening and working to develop the systems for that change to take place, to hopefully change the systems and the delivery mechanisms where the money comes from to get down to that place.”

An unprecedented amount of new investment in the climate sector, about $1 trillion, is in the pipeline. But advocates say they already see indications that typical, dominant-culture ideas and practices are at work. Ill-informed, biased perceptions of certain populations are seeping into climate resilience work, and they say, they hear dated, condescending language about systemically marginalized communities.

LISC Phoenix and its partner, Raza Development Fund, sponsored the “What’s Possible” book tour event on June 10 at the Walton Center for Planetary Health at Arizona State University. LISC Phoenix also sponsored on June 11 a curated community conversation about climate resilience at Cahokia, an Indigenous-owned art and social-tech space in downtown Phoenix.

Annie Donovan is CEO of Raza Development Fund and one of the masterminds behind “What’s Possible,” a tome featuring essays from experts on several topics related to community development and climate resilience. The book is the work of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Enterprise Community Partners, who are among the largest community development financial institutions in the nation.

“Climate change is a threat, a real threat,” Donovan said in opening remarks of the “What’s Possible” event in Tempe. “Here it’s expressed in extreme heat. We’ve already had our first heat dome and it’s only the beginning of June.

“But climate change is also an opportunity. ... As financial opportunities roll out, they’re based on old ways of thinking. It means we have to work harder and work with intention, because the old ways are just going to bring us the old results. That’s why we’re here today. We’re here today trying to figure out how we can do this differently. How can we do this better? How can we do this together?”

One step toward climate resilience, place-based leaders said at both events, is to engage in narrative repair and acknowledge historical truths that shape the present. Addressing the impact of climate change is to be clear-eyed about patterns and practices that have caused significant ongoing socioeconomic, health and community development harms, including atrocities inflicted on Indigenous people that are in the first chapters of the nation’s story and the African diaspora.

Vanessa Nosie, a leader of Apache Stronghold and an archaeology aide in San Carlos Apache Archaeology Department and Tribal Historic Preservation Office, and Collette Watson, co-founder and director of Black River Life, were panelists in the “What’s Possible” discussion on “Community-driven Practices Toward Climate Resilience” and participants in the curated community conversation at Cahokia, which centered on heartfelt sharing of lived experiences and thoughts about the future.

“As indigenous people, we think seven generations ahead,” Nosie said at “What’s Possible.” “What kind of world are we going to leave our children? What type of world are they going to be able to survive in?”

“In order to protect our future and to have a future, we have to protect our past and to show that we’re still here,” Nosie said. “(Indigenous people) are not people of the past. We, as Indigenous people, are at the forefront. We’re protecting all people, especially when it comes to environmental issues and religious issues. We’re not just protecting our own way of life, but everyone’s survival, because that’s where we’re at now. It’s a survival issue.”

Watson, whose work lies at the intersection of race, place and story, said narrative harm is the “pretext for racial hierarchy, for the myth of Black inferiority, which we then know often becomes the pretext for regressive policy around climate, around housing, food.”

“When we don’t have that understanding of the ways communities have taken shape today, then it’s very easy to miss out on all of the ways that we can begin to redress that harm,” Watson said during the “What’s Possible” panel discussion. “The ways that we redress that harm, the ways that we look at harm, the ways we look at racial hierarchy has been the pretext not only for stealing labor but also for stealing and exploiting resources and in that way poisoning and harming our environment. When we follow that thread and understand those things as interrelated, we become so much more powerful.”

Mary Stephens, founder of InSite Consultants, was a moderator of the “What’s Possible” panel discussion and a facilitator for the curated community conversation. There was resonance from one event to the other, she said.

“We can do absolutely better,” Stephens said after both events. “We have the practices. We have the analysis. And we do have better leaders, and that pushes us and advances our practice. When we have the same thinkers in the room, the same type of white, upper middle-class practitioners, then we are falling into a mediocrity that deserves to be critiqued.”

“What’s Possible” includes an article from LISC Phoenix executive director Terry Benelli on “Growing Community-Based Resilience in the Valley of the Sun.” Benelli was part of a panel discussion at the book tour event on “The Increasingly-Important Role of Community Development (and CDFIs) in Confronting the Challenges of Climate Change.”

LISC Phoenix invests intentionally in capacity building and reaps added benefit from doing that, Benelli said.

“The community is building our capacity,” Benelli said of LISC Phoenix’s work. “We’re figuring out ways to lift up those folks in the community so they can do the work that they know is going to bring a ton of … ROI, return on investment, of their time in the community.

They also need funds to live and to engage in this work, because no one can work two jobs to try to put food on the table and also go out and volunteer, which I think is what the systems kind of expect of folks. … Meantime, folks like us are getting a salary for being at things like this.”

Lisa Churchill, founder and principal of Climate Advisory, suggested during the CDFI panel discussion that there’s much potential in systems disruption to achieve better outcomes for systemically marginalized communities.

“If we’re too comfortable with the status quo, we’re not doing enough,” Churchill said. “I’d like us all to become a little uncomfortable.”

“As practitioners, we not only have the opportunity we have a moral obligation to have intentional disruptions within this space, to really start to think differently, start to think creatively and to bring other voices in,” Churchill said. “We’re in this place now because as the dominant culture we created these problems. So, it kind of doesn’t make a lot of logical sense to me that we be the ones to solve it. We need to hear from others that are on the outside of that circle that have lived very differently, that have different types of knowledge.”

David Erickson, senior vice president and head of Outreach and Education at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York encouraged young people in attendance at the “What’s Possible” event to seize the moment.

“This is your time,” Erickson said. “You will never have a moment like this in your career again where you can remake the system. You can rebuild how you approach and create an opportunity in making places more opportunity rich.”