It was 2010, and Tap Bui was 24, riding with 60 elders from New Orleans East’s Vietnamese community to the state capitol to advocate for a bill that would shut down a toxic landfill planned near their homes. The elders, many of whom had settled in the neighborhood in 1975 and rebuilt again after Katrina, had organized the trip themselves.

Bui had been asked to interpret the Senate proceedings in real time, but when she got there, she told attendees at a recent webinar hosted by Next City, she froze. All she could do was summarize what happened on the ride home. What stayed with her wasn’t the failure itself, she says now, but what it revealed: that language access was never really the point. “It was about cultural power and cultural narratives,” she said. “We were in this for the people.”

More than 15 years later, Bui, now co-executive director of Sông Community Development Corporation, has carried that early lesson with her. Culture isn’t a layer you add on to climate and health work: it’s the infrastructure the work depends on.

Sông Community Development Corporation, whose name means river in Vietnamese, works to strengthen neighborhoods for the people who live in them and protect their right to remain, return and thrive.

In New Orleans, Sông is leading the development of a heritage garden, transforming 10 acres of vacant, flood-prone land into a cultural gathering space designed by residents themselves. Shaped through design sessions with elders and young people, the vision blends climate function with cultural meaning. Native plantings tell the story of home. Added shade offers relief from rising heat. A retention pond helps manage the flooding that returns again and again and a fishing pier honors a livelihood that has been passed down through generations.

Trust is not transferable

In Houston, Carmen Cavezza explained that she came to climate work sideways as a trained physician who relocated just before Hurricane Harvey and found herself confronted by the city’s environmental injustices. She’s now the senior climate justice organizer for the Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience, known as CEER, a coalition of 31 nonprofits that formed in the hurricane’s aftermath.

CEER recently wrapped up a three-year home weatherization assistance pilot across five neighborhoods, driven not by what outsiders assumed residents needed, but by what residents said they wanted.

“What they said is Carmen, we want to live in homes that we feel safe in during natural disasters,” Cavezza said.

On paper, it should have been simple: identify homes that need weatherization, connect residents to funding and then get the work done. In practice, half of all applications were denied for being incomplete, and most of the rest were denied on income grounds because the income limits were so low that a single person had to earn under $23,000 a year to qualify.

So they pivoted, Cavezza said, and created “a pilot inside a pilot,” to help residents access the program. Instead of focusing on educating people about the impacts of climate change and referring them to the weatherization program, CEER began to help residents with the applications. They hosted weekly office hours for residents and bought fax machines and made copies. They raised additional funds to rent storage containers to clear homes that had been disqualified and helped repair foundations and roofs.

And actions are important, but it was a comment from a resident that made her realize just how important words are as well, Cavezza explained.

“We had been drafting a grant application to get additional funds for home repair, and I kept on talking about deferred maintenance,” Cavezza said. “A resident stood up and said, can we talk about something other than that phrase, because saying deferred maintenance is just putting the blame on residents.”

“Words are very powerful, and we have to use words to reflect what the community is going through,” Cavezza said.

“Our communities are not communities of deferred maintenance. We are communities always in disaster recovery and never fully recovered.”

But the clearest lesson from Houston was one Cavezza had not anticipated.

“The bigger lesson is trust is not transferable,” she said. “I assumed that because the community knew we were working with two partners to help weatherize homes, they would automatically trust them. That was not the case,” she said.

But residents would not answer calls from the contractors, Cavezza said, so CEER coached its partners to send a text with their name and purpose first, and reminded residents to expect the call. Trust had to be built one relationship at a time.

“Cultural organizing is really understanding where people are,” Cavezza said.

Benny Starr, the hip-hop artist and U.S. Cultural Policy Fellow at Stanford University who moderated the webinar and serves as an advisor to Kresge’s Climate Change Health and Equity Initiative that Song CDC and CEER both participate in, describes cultural organizing as being “in right relationship with a place, with people, with labor, our history and the spiritual life of a community.”

It can look like a heritage garden. It can also look like sitting beside someone to help them enter a code into an unfamiliar form.

What comes next

The Houston pilot concluded in early 2026, and CEER is now pressing its partners to demonstrate that major home repairs can be done at scale. In New Orleans, a heritage garden is moving from vision toward construction, shaped by generations of residents who intend to pass it down. Both organizations continue to build a culturally responsive system of care, one that honors the histories of the communities it serves and keeps residents at the center of every decision.

In the Gulf South, where hurricanes, floods and industrial pollution arrive with a punishing regularity, communities continue to prove that creativity and cultural rootedness are not extras to be added once policy and infrastructure work is done. They are the foundation of community power, resilience and lasting change.