This year marks the 10th anniversary of Kresge’s Climate Resilient and Equitable Water Systems (CREWS) initiative. Today CREWS includes more than 30 organizations working to advance equitable solutions to climate-related storm and flood impacts on low-wealth communities. This summer, we asked CREWS partners to share photos that answer the question “How do you help keep the communities you care about safe from the impacts of flooding?”

Working with community

In May, Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) organized a flood resource community event in Chicago with Grassroots Empowerment Mission for Belmont Cragin neighborhood residents. CNT invited different government agencies and organizations to share information to help residents deal with flooding. In the above picture, the City of Chicago Department of Environment provided an opportunity for attendees to submit feedback to the updated Green Infrastructure Strategy. Green infrastructure, when considered with gray infrastructure solutions, creates a more resilient flood management system and provides additional benefits to vulnerable communities with disproportionate impact.

Informing policy

Center for Neighborhood Technology is a member of the Flooding and Sewage Coalition in Chicago and developed a flooding and sewage vulnerability index with community advisors. At the event, the Coalition engaged residents to understand their flood experiences and discuss immediate and long-term solutions to inform policy opportunities.

Climate Safe Neighborhoods

Groundwork USA’s Climate Safe Neighborhoods partnership equips residents with the data and tools to identify local climate risks and drive community-led advocacy for flood and extreme heat solutions. That work has led to creative nature-based innovations like microforests — tiny native forests that absorb stormwater, clean the air and lower neighborhood temperatures where it’s needed most.

10 years of recovery

In 2024, Fair Share Housing Center brought together some of our longstanding partners to reflect on what 10 years of recovery has meant since our historic 2014 Superstorm Sandy settlement — still the largest in federal Fair Housing Act history. Kisha (pictured in the jean jacket, laughing) and Millie (not pictured) transported us back into their neighborhoods and spoke powerfully about the impact of that settlement, which directed nearly half a billion dollars to renters and to residents who experienced inland flooding in places like Elizabeth. Celebrating these hard-fought wins reminds us of all it takes to keep our communities safe.

Protecting homes, schools and streets

“We’re trying to combat the water. We’re trying to live with the water.,” said Atlanta resident Michael Cooper in a video for Water Hub’s Stop Flooding Us campaign. In Atlanta’s Hunter Hills, Cooper has watched storms flood the AU Center dorms, Central Methodist Church, and his neighbors’ homes. Families are left dealing with damage long after the rain stops. That’s why residents are pushing the City to capture 36 million gallons of stormwater in The Gulch to protect homes, schools, and streets and make Atlanta safer for everyone.

Reducing flood risk

Detroit community groups are documenting and mapping flooding using Freshwater Future’s Flood Focus App and pushing for solutions that reduce flood risk.  Community leaders shared their successful solutions and innovative projects to build climate resilience on a recent tour that included guests from New Orleans.

Connecting experience with strategy

To better understand where green, gray, and hybrid infrastructure can make the greatest difference, New York University’s Urban Systems Lab worked with Healthy Community Services and the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association, alongside local residents, to connect lived experiences of flooding and drainage with new resilience strategies in New Orleans. Through two in-person workshops and site visits, including the 1.8-acre Elmwood parcel in Algiers, the team identified opportunities to strengthen stormwater management while advancing community priorities, resilience, and equity.

Green Schoolyards

This student is helping bring a new green schoolyard to life by planting native plants in a space designed to capture stormwater and reduce flooding. Getting students involved in planting gives them a direct role in creating and caring for these spaces. Teaching them about how this green infrastructure works is incorporated into lesson plans and helps teachers bring the classroom outside.

The entire school community and community members play a central role in shaping the green schoolyards that serve their neighborhoods. Here, they are reviewing concept plans with the Space to Grow team at Healthy Schools Campaign and Openlands, and sharing feedback that the design team will use to refine the next iteration of designs.

Drainage and displacement

This highway development in St James Parish District 5 is one example of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development underbuilding drainage features in an environmental justice area. Purposefully under engineering drainage projects in African American residential areas constrains real estate investment for homes, while facilitating industrial development in Black communities. This is a program of displacement, and this internal displacement is one of the reasons that Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the nation. Local organizations are bringing civil rights litigation into the courts. Healthy Gulf uses wetland and coastal technical review periods to make the connections between saving our wetlands and keeping our homes dry.

Healthy Gulf prevents the massive concrete fill of agricultural fields for petrochemical development. These fields hold hundreds of millions of gallons of water that flood rural environmental justice communities when projects are built. In the River Parishes of Louisiana, historic sugarcane plantations are targeted for large petrochemical development. The rural nature of the roads and local drainage is unsuitable for industrial development. The lack of drainage and underinvestment in these residential areas is also due to the long legacy of discriminatory infrastructure neglect in African American communities in Louisiana. Industrial developments flood local residents by filling wet meadow fields, which naturally retain hundreds of millions of gallons of water, with large amounts of concrete. The Base Flood Elevation of rural residents’ homes rises as wet meadows are converted to concrete wastelands. By preventing the fill of these wet meadows, we allow these agricultural wetlands to keep communities resilient.