In New Orleans, food is the language people use to speak to one another. It is how neighbors greet each other, the center of every gathering and one of the main characters in the city’s own story. So when farmers across Louisiana faced a sudden and severe drought in the summer of 2023, they reached out to who they trusted most: each other.

“Farmers really didn’t know what to do,” Mina Seck, community food director at Sprout NOLA, said. “We’re used to growing in extreme heat. We’re not used to it being so dry. It made everybody realize, oh, we have to pay attention to climate in ways we’re not used to thinking of.”

So Sprout, a New Orleans organization that supports small-scale and sustainable farmers across Louisiana, brought farmers together to share what they knew, what they didn’t, and what they needed.

That gathering became the Louisiana Farmers Climate Convening, which is now an annual event. Three years in, it shows that climate, food and health are not separate problems waiting for separate solutions. They are one conversation.

At a recent webinar hosted by Grantmakers in Health, Seck joined Arianna Mack from Environmental Health Watch in Cleveland to share how they are responding to the interconnected challenges of climate change, health and food security at the same time. Both organizations are implementing community-driven solutions at the local level as part of Kresge’s Climate Change, Health & Equity initiative.

Separate buckets

Historically, philanthropy tends to organize its work into discrete buckets: a grant for food security here, a grant for climate resilience there, another for public health. But in communities where people are actually experiencing these issues, these hard lines do not exist.

“It’s all embedded,” said Mack, program manager of healthy communities and climate at Environmental Health Watch. “We cannot separate environmental justice from economic justice from democracy. We do everything in our power to make sure those things are integrated, as well as food systems and arts and culture.”

Connecting on the ground

In Cleveland, Environmental Health Watch, a 45-year-old organization at the heart of the city’s environmental justice movement, works with residents of the culturally-rich Buckeye neighborhood to address overlapping crises in housing, health, and access to fresh food caused by decades of disinvestment.

But before jumping into a project plan, Environmental Health Watch’s Eco Village Buckeye initiative began by taking a look back. Residents, led by a steering committee member from the neighborhood, gathered the stories of where they had been before deciding where they wanted to go. From that foundation, the work expanded outward to housing, climate resilience, food access, and the cultural identity that make their community unique.

“We have to know where we’ve been before we can know where we’re going,” Mack said. “Then we build on it and look at how we can combine the knowledge of the neighborhood with our own technical expertise and look at community development with a climate action lens.”

“By partnering with different environmental justice organizations and climate resiliency efforts and experts in the Cleveland area, we work to collaborate to develop a Buckeye that is healthier, thriving and more resilient,” Mack said.

To celebrate culture, music, entrepreneurship and food, Environmental Health Watch hosts FreshFest Cleveland, an annual event that draws more than 15,000 people each year to an urban farm on the city’s east side. What started as a small gathering in 2015 has now become a model for how arts and agriculture can drive equitable economic development.

In New Orleans, Sprout tries to offer as many resources as possible to small scale growers and farmers, Seck said. This includes grants and loans, learning cohorts and community classes, a tool and seed library and cooperative development and market support.

It’s flagship community garden, which is soon expanding to a larger farm along the Lafitte Greenway, opens its gates three days a week for neighbors to grow and harvest food, as well as share meals.

From those potlucks time spent together in the garden, conversations about climate emerge. These are conversations that, in a region facing displacement and disappearing coastline, can be too heavy to start any other way, Seck said.

“Climate is not just climate change here,” Seck said. “It’s am I going to lose my home? It’s not an easy conversation. But through the garden, we’re able to have it, because we’re building so much trust.”

Last winter, when federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts and immigration enforcement left families across New Orleans unable to afford food or even afraid to leave their homes, Sprout’s team responded. Over two months, they moved $98,000 worth of food into family pantries, $83,000 of it purchased from local farmers, feeding 3,800 households. It was not in their typical scope of work. They did it anyway.

The funder’s role

Philanthropy should move towards strategies that better reflect the interwoven nature of issues like food and environment and follow the lead of communities doing the work, said Jan Delatorre, program officer with Kresge’s Health Program.

What that requires of funders, according to Mack and Seck, is patience and humility. Long-term, transformational investment instead of short project cycles. Funding for coalitions and personnel, not just programs. Flexibility when policy shifts force grantees to change their language, or their plans, overnight. And the willingness to visit, listen and invest in people as much as in deliverables.

What’s next?

Sprout is now developing the New Orleans Food and Urban Agriculture Plan, a community-led effort to put food and farming into a city climate framework. Environmental Health Watch is preparing to open a year-round cooperative farm stop in Cleveland’s Central and Kinsman neighborhoods, a community-owned market built from the ground up with residents at the table. Environmental Health Watch is also focused on expanding its Healthy Homes Electrification Model by retrofitting homes to remove indoor pollutants, reduce energy burdens and improve air quality.

Neither organization claims the work is finished.

But in a community garden two blocks from a planned greenway, and on a farm on Cleveland’s east side where thousands of neighbors will gather this year to celebrate, something is being built that does not fit in a single bucket. It is a way of working that begins where communities begin: with each other, and with the place they call home.

To learn more about the CCHE initiative and how organizations around the country are strengthening the leadership and power of community-based advocates to advance climate solutions, visit kresge.org/initiative/climate-change-health-and-equity-cche.