Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked this question from Memphis in 1967. He was tired. The movement had won historic battles and was staring at something harder, not a single law to change, but an entire architecture of neglect to dismantle. He wasn’t asking out of despair. He was asking because he knew the answer required more imagination than what had gotten them there.

Nearly sixty years later, community-based advocates and national health and public health practitioners of the Climate Change, Health & Equity (CCHE) initiative gathered in that same city and found ourselves sitting with a version of the same question.

Systems are strained. Federal public health infrastructure is eroding in real time, deepening fractures in trust between institutions and communities that were never fully repaired. And the communities at the center of climate and health inequity are not waiting for permission to respond. They are already doing the work of imagining what comes next. The question, for those of us in philanthropy and public health, is whether we will be useful to that imagination or adjacent to it.

My first reflection from Kresge’s 2026 CCHE Convening in Memphis is that culture is the infrastructure of this work. That’s before any policy wins. Before the data partnerships, before the messaging campaigns, there has to be something that holds people together — a shared story, a shared identity, a reason to fight for something rather than just against it. Memphis showed us what that looks like when it’s real.

The clearest answer I saw came from a group of young people from Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood.

They spent the past few months learning about urban flooding from the initial findings of a research partnership between the University of Pittsburgh, RAND, Homewood Children’s Village, and Black Girl Green World. As a part of the study, community researchers went door to door, setting up equipment in basements, and collecting air quality data in homes written off by city planners for decades.

What they found was alarming: microbial levels three times higher in the more flood prone areas. And “nearly one in four homes across the study tested above (Environmental Protection Agency) action levels for radon.” The EPA’s “action level” is the threshold at which the agency recommends remediation because prolonged exposure raises the risk of lung cancer. That statistic is not just about radon; it is about Black neighborhoods sitting in housing and under infrastructure that has not been maintained to protect them, even by the federal government’s own minimal standard.

But here is what stayed with me: before these young people could write about what they found, they had to understand what it meant to them. They used music and poetry to make the data mean something to turn basement mold readings and radon levels into stories people could see themselves in. One student said she kept asking “is this right?” and second-guessing herself until someone told her to just write and see where she landed. She did. And what came out was both true and moving in a way that no data table could be.

That is not a feel-good add-on to the research. That is the research becoming useful.

What Homewood Children’s Village built over years, the relationships, the trust, the long view of working with young people since they were in second grade, made that possible. You cannot recruit teenagers off the street for a six-week engagement and get that result. The infrastructure was relational before it was programmatic. The Children’s Village, youth and adult community members weren’t props in a university-driven process. They were co-investigators, co-authors, and ultimately co-communicators of findings that affect their own lungs, their own families, their own futures.

Youth as agents

This is what cultural power looks like in practice. Not youth as symbols, but youth as agents.

The path forward runs through communities, not around them. And within those communities, young people are not the future of this work they are doing it now.

For those of us in philanthropy, that should prompt some honest questions. Are we funding relationships or just programs? Are we giving grantees enough time and resources to build the trust that makes co-production with young people real, rather than performative? Are we measuring what actually matters, which is rarely what’s easiest to count? And are we willing to be changed by what communities are already building, rather than arriving with a framework and asking people to populate it?

The political moment makes all this harder and more urgent at the same time. Federal stopgaps are gone. State-level fights are exhausting and uneven. New technologies are being deployed faster than accountability structures can catch up. The temptation, under pressure, is to contract to retreat to what’s safe, to wait for the climate to shift before taking risks.

At Kresge, we understand that environmental and climate justice as fundamental to a healthy democracy. Communities can’t fully participate in civic life or decision-making without clean air and water, climate resilience, and meaningful power over the policies and systems that shape their lives.

Where do we go from here? We go toward the young people who are already writing the answer. We resource the organizations that have done the slow, unglamorous work of building trust over the years. We get honest about what systems were never designed to protect in the first place, and we stop asking communities to reform them from the inside while bearing all the risk. We demand that new technologies, including AI, be built with the communities most likely to be harmed by their failures. We hold the grief of this moment, and we organize inside of it.

And we remember what King also said in that same book: the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind. Extremists for hatred, or extremists for love.

Memphis already knows which one it is. The rest of us are catching up.