New Orleans sits below sea level, holds two decades of hard-won recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and is home to some of the most inventive community-led climate work in the country. That makes it the right place for the next chapter of PathBreakers, the Kresge Foundation’s video podcast.

Season 2 asks one question in four cities: who has power to shape what happens in their city? In New Orleans, the answer starts in the soil and the bayous and reaches all the way to City Hall. The four-episode arc, “Where Climate Meets Community,” follows that power across three scales: the community food system, a neighborhood that rebuilt on its own terms, and the city’s public health leadership.

The arc began with Kresge President & CEO Rip Rapson in conversation with Mayor Helena Moreno. A new episode airs each Wednesday through October, as hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett sit down with three leaders whose work shows what resilience looks like when residents define it. The four episodes show that resilience is not the work of one person or one organization. It lives in who grows the food, who tends the waterways and who leads at City Hall, and it grows strongest when all of them work in relationship.

Guests include leaders Mina Seck from Sprout and Tap Bui from Sông Community Development Corporation, both partners in Kresge’s Climate Change, Health & Equity (CCHE) initiative. In October 2025, Kresge awarded $18.6 million to 32 organizations in the initiative’s second phase, building on a first five-year, $30 million effort launched in 2018. CCHE backs community-driven solutions that protect people’s health from extreme heat, flooding and pollution. The third guest will be Dr. Jennifer Avegno, who heads the city’s Department of Health and Human Services as deputy mayor.

Episode 4, Dr. Jennifer Avegno, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New Orleans

A native New Orleanian and Louisiana State University-trained emergency medicine physician, Dr. Jennifer Avegno is one of the most prominent public health voices to emerge from New Orleans in a generation. As director of the New Orleans Health Department during COVID-19, Avegno became the city’s steady, data-driven voice during the crisis that brought the city one of the earliest and most severe outbreaks in the country. Her appointment as Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services in 2026 has put her in a position to shape health policy in an expanded role that brings the health department, EMS, youth and family programs, violence prevention, and homelessness services under her leadership. In this episode, Avegno explores what happens when community-level climate and health work meets city government. She brings the perspective of someone who has spent nearly a decade trying to translate community health priorities into institutional action — and who now has more power to do that than ever before.

Episode 3, Tap Bui, Sông Community Development Corporation

In New Orleans East, the Vietnamese American community that resettled there in 1975 has rebuilt after Katrina, organized through the BP oil spill and is now getting ready for the next storm on its own terms. Tap Bui, co-executive director of Sông CDC, talks about helping residents change their relationship to water. Paid “water leaders” design green infrastructure like the bioswale the community built in New Orleans East, and a long-held neighborhood vision in Algiers is becoming a heritage garden with a stormwater pond and a fishing pier. Tap also shares the advice she carries from Father Vien of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church: “Make sure you have a seat at the table, not be on the menu.”

Episode 2, Mina Seck, Sprout

We begin at soil level. Mina Seck, co-director of community food at Sprout NOLA, supports small-scale farmers, community gardeners and farm workers across Louisiana. She talks with hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett about why land and food are climate questions in a below-sea-level city, how Sprout’s Truck Farm Table opens market doors for small producers, and what the organization’s shared leadership model says about who holds power.

Episode 1, Mayor Helena Moreno

Listen and watch

A new New Orleans episode releases every Wednesday in October:

• October 14: Mina Seck, Sprout
• October 21: Tap Bui, Sông Community Development Corporation
• October 28: Dr. Jennifer Avegno, City of New Orleans Department of Health and Human Services

Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Catch up on the Detroit, Fresno and Memphis arcs at pathbreakers.kresge.org.

About PathBreakers: PathBreakers is the Kresge Foundation’s video podcast featuring community leaders reimagining American cities. Season 2 visits Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans and Fresno to ask who has power to shape what happens in their city. Season 1 won three Timbre Awards, including Podcast of the Year.