Katherine Prevost has walked the streets of the Upper Ninth Ward in New Orleans so many times that she can tell you, block by block, what happens when it rains. Due to geography, a lack of drainage infrastructure and more intense rainstorms, the Upper 9th is literally a small bowl, which creates chronic flooding issues. And when streets flood, water often flows right into houses, destroying possessions and damaging structures.

Prevost, who leads the Bunny Friends Neighborhood Association, is an official partner of the City of New Orleans on a FEMA Flood Mitigation Assistance grant where 10 community-led green infrastructure projects are being planned with residents, as well as a member of the New Orleans East Green Infrastructure Collective.

A few blocks away on the other side of the Claiborne Avenue overpass, Cynthia Guillemet knows the same water in the Lower Ninth Ward. When Poland Avenue floods, which it does regularly, it does not just fill a low spot. It severs the connection between two neighborhoods, stranding people who need to cross the bridge to go to work and school, buy groceries and get to medical appointments.

“We use that bridge every day,” she says.

Guillemet, president of the Lower Ninth Ward Homeownership Association, has spent years working alongside neighbors, engineers and designers to plan green stormwater infrastructure for her own streets. Thanks to their efforts, the city and state cleaned clogged catch basins, and the situation at Poland Avenue, for the time being, is much improved.

Both women collaborate closely with Water Wise Gulf South to better address flooding in their communities.

Water Wise Gulf South partners with community-based organizations throughout the city, including the Greater Treme Consortium, Healthy Community Services, Upper 9th Ward Bunny Friend Neighborhood Association, Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association, New Orleans East Green Infrastructure Collective and Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association.

Together they have installed more than 150 green stormwater infrastructure projects that collectively hold more than 200,000 gallons of stormwater per rain event; educated more than 5,000 residents on stormwater management; and supported more than 200 Water Wise Neighborhood Champions to take leadership roles in their communities.

Their collaboration, together with other partners in New Orleans, illustrates what is possible when government and philanthropy invest in communities and trust community residents to take the lead in implementing solutions.

A city that lives with water

New Orleans knows water in a way few other American cities do.

“Water has a depth of meaning to New Orleans that not many other places have,” said Grace Vogel, a landscape architect in the Environmental Affairs Department at the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans. “We embrace living with it but have been traumatized by it, some many times over in their lifetimes.”

Hurricanes get a lot of attention, but the threat most headlines miss are the smaller storms that happen constantly and are ever increasing in intensity and frequency with climate change.

While investments in improving climate resilient gray infrastructure are still crucial, green stormwater infrastructure is an important tool.

“Green infrastructure is more important to New Orleans for our average pocket storms that dump inches per hour within a single drainage basin before the water can even get to the pump stations,” Vogel said. “We need rain to be detained where it lands because the amount of runoff creates choke points at every drain, especially when a lot of the small drain lines are partially or fully clogged.”

Investments in improvements to gray infrastructure are still critical to flood defense, but gray can work with green infrastructure to prevent water from overwhelming traditional systems and flooding people’s streets and homes.

Though storms may dump water at a steady rate, the flooding has never really fallen evenly in the city.

Black neighborhoods like the ones Guillemet and Provost live in have been ignored for decades.

“Because we are a 99% Black community, we’re neglected. We’ve been ignored since Katrina. The only way you can get anything done is by being vocal. It’s not easy, but you have to do what you have to do because you want to see more for your community,” Provost said.

Slow it, spread it, sink it

Green stormwater infrastructure works with the pace and nature of the rain. Rain gardens, bioswales, French drains and trees capture water where it falls. They let it soak in slowly, easing the strain on the city’s pumps and help keep the level of moisture in the soil steady. This is important because as soil dries out between rain events it shrinks. Constant cycles of flooding and drying out causes cracking that ruins buildings foundations and buckles streets.

Guillemet saw how green infrastructure worked in her own yard. “I went to see the process of how the water went into my rain garden, and I was like, oh my god, look at the amount of water that would have been going into the ground around my house.”

Prevost has watched a simple French drain change a household. Homes in New Orleans often sit low to the ground. Before storms, families lifted their belongings onto beds.

“Something as simple as a French drain going around the side of the house keeps the water from infiltrating into your house. Now, the house is actually dry,” she said.

And while one project can be incredibly impactful for one family, if multiple houses and public spaces install French drains, a neighborhood can collectively reduce flooding.

Building it together

Both neighborhoods have identified more than13 future green infrastructure priority sites.

In Prevost’s neighborhood, what was once a blighted triple lot is now a green infrastructure site that is not only beautiful, it can manage 20,000 gallons of stormwater. <photo 0674>

When funding came through during the pandemic, COVID did not prevent investments and planning – the Neighborhood Association ran the design process through Zoom meetings and residents weighed in on what they wanted to see.

A contractor working with Waterwise Gulf South took that input and combined it with his technical expertise. He designed the site exactly the way they wanted it to look, Provost said, but told her that water was entering the lot from the wrong direction, pushing toward the street instead of away from it.

So the final design routed the water in from the back of the lot instead, so it could absorb there rather than be pushed out onto Congress Street.

“It was a nice combination of technical expertise and neighborhood needs put together,” Provost said. “That’s what made the difference.”

That same sequence — a community-identified problem, matched with technical capacity, refined by people who live with the consequences — played out at Oliver Bush playground, where Guillemet’s organization worked with residents on tree plantings and green infrastructure improvements. Residents chose everything from benches to solar lighting.

When residents can go and see it for themselves and compare the before and after, it makes a huge difference, Guillemet said. People in the neighborhood can see what green infrastructure is and how it benefits their communities.

“They understand that flooding doesn’t have to be normal,” Guillemet said.

Waterwise Gulf South serves as the connective tissue, said Jeff Supak, executive director and co-founder of Water Wise Gulf South.

“Water Wise has never done anything alone,” he said. “It’s always been in partnership with people like Katherine and Cynthia. The community organizations are the ones that are making it happen.”

Vision 2 Reality

Not that far away in the 7th Ward, where the Claiborne Avenue Expressway runs today, there once stood a thriving Black business corridor. That neighborhood was destroyed and paved over in the mid-1960s to make way for the elevated highway.

Where a 200-year-old live oak forest once stood became a dump, said Todd Reynolds, executive director of Groundwork New Orleans. Street contractors stored pipe and concrete at the site, and when it rained, the water sat for days and the air filled up with swarms of mosquitoes.

In 2024, in partnership with Dr. Angela Chalk and Healthy Community Services and Earth Economics, Groundwork New Orleans completed phase one of the Vision 2 Reality Stormwater Park on North Claiborne Avenue.

The new park has transformed the flood prone corridor under the overpass into a climate resilience hub and community asset. A 200-foot long bioswale captures and filters runoff naturally. Permeable pathways, native vegetation and new trees cool the area and dampen noise. Solar power helps the park serve as a resilience hub during grid outages.

To help get the job done at Vision 2 Reality and sites throughout the city, Groundwork New Orleans hires and trains young New Orleans residents to install green infrastructure through its Ground CREW (Climate Resilience Environmental Workforce) apprenticeship program.

Program participants are paid and can earn high school credits as well as industry-recognized credentials in green infrastructure and solar installation.

“We do training with a purpose, and that purpose is one to make sure that our young folks are getting the skills that they need for whatever they decide to do and making money while they do it. We are not training in a classroom, we are training on actual green infrastructure, solar and reforestation projects. We’re leaving assets in communities,” Reynolds said.

The process is not always smooth, and the public sector in particular could be challenging to work with, Reynolds noted.

What changed was not a single decision. It was nearly a decade of visible, well-documented work that became impossible to ignore. Today Groundwork manages a significant share of the city’s green infrastructure maintenance and partners with city departments on permitting and planning in ways that would have been unthinkable when he started.

Their work continues, including a project on Touro Street on a stretch of road that previously only had one tree across four blocks. It will feature a solar gazebo, native plantings, and bioswales capable of holding thousands of gallons of water. It is a physical footprint of what community-led climate resilience planning looks like.

Reynolds feels strongly that community members are the real experts.

“Our biggest strength is our partnerships with our community folks. I can be called in, but they really know the history of their neighborhood and what’s going on in their communities,” Reynolds said.

“We’re not coming in to fix anybody,” Reynolds says. Most projects start because a community partner brings one to him. “Someone’s saying, hey look, we saw what you did over here. We have a similar problem, so let’s put our heads together and figure out how we design, fund and implement a project in the community.”

Data driven

The Earth Economics team provides the data and translates the benefit of green stormwater infrastructure into dollars for partners in New Orleans like Healthy Community Services and Water Wise Gulf South.

“Nature provides us with a lot of benefits, and we can translate those into dollar values,” said Olivia Molden, project director with Earth Economics. “For example, a tree will provide us with cleaner air, it helps manage stormwater, it helps reduce temperatures, which help people stay cool.”

According to a 2023 report, in 2022, the Upper 9th Water received more than $37 million in ecosystem service benefits by installing green infrastructure that helped regulate floods, reduce heat exposure and improve neighborhood aesthetics. Ecosystem services describe the benefits people receive from resources like plants, animals, soils, minerals and energy resources.

But it’s not just handing over numbers, said Communications Manager Natalie Valentine.

“It’s understanding what actually matters so we can position the analysis for our partners in the best way possible so they can present the information confidently to their own neighbors,” Valentine said.

For example, each year, the Vision 2 Reality Stormwater park:

• Absorbs 305,000 gallons of stormwater
• Removes 70 pounds of air pollution removed
• Creates more than $76,000 in annual combined benefits from bioswales, trees, and pavement
• Returns $5.62 for every $1 invested

Earth Economics knows where its expertise ends and the communities’ expertise begins. When the team mapped environmental justice issues for a fact sheet, residents told them what mattered most.

FEMA flood maps only tell one story, Molden said.

“The communities we work with in New Orleans experience constant flooding. They said you need to highlight the Claiborne corridor that used to be a huge green space that they turned into the highway. That’s our main environmental justice issue,” Molden said. “Those are the sorts of things we wouldn’t have highlighted otherwise, without them calling it out.”

Looking forward: Lessons for other cities

For municipal leaders and community groups in other cities facing climate threats, New Orleans offers a blueprint. The partners point to three core lessons.

First, recognize who holds the expertise.

“Understand that people in the community are the experts,” Molden said. “If they say they have this issue, investing in a solution that’s community-driven is the best way to go, rather than coming in from the outside and trying to impose a solution.”

Second, pay people for their labor. True partnership requires moving past the model of relying on free community labor. “We have to stop asking community leaders to work for free under the guise of passion,” Supak said. “When we value their time and expertise with real contracts, the quality of the projects and the trust in the process both go up. Invest in community organizations.”

Third, show up consistently. Trust is not built through a single public comment period or a photo opportunity.

“Community partners have risen within their neighborhoods as leaders because of their commitment to their people. They’re looking for tactile support and solutions, not photo ops and paperwork. Working with them means showing up consistently over time,” Vogel said. “You can’t shortcut relationship building.”

“The New Normal”

Sooner rather than later, the hope is that people living in New Orleans and around the country see less flooding and cleaner air as the new normal.

Normal is not seeing flooding in front of your house. Normal is more solar power. Normal is good quality air. Normal is trees creating shade without anyone having to explain why that matters.
“I would like to see all communities, especially our community, look like just like any other community that is thriving and healthy,” Provost said.

“Years from now, I hope that everyone recognizes the importance of green infrastructure and having a clean environment,” Guillemet said.