Roll up Your Sleeves for Climate Resilience Summer

We are now in what we used to call the “dog days of summer”—the hottest, steamiest, sultriest days of the year. As a child, I looked forward to these days of playtime outdoors, eating what we called “cool pops” aka popsicles and watermelon, and catching fireflies at dusk. Now, I wake every day to look at alarming headlines of a planet at boiling point. And the worst part is that it takes square aim at Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

Each year, we’ve seen climate change produce hurricane and fire seasons that are more intense and less predictable. And this year, the government infrastructure that is supposed to help us prepare and respond to those impacts—including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—was hollowed out before the season even started.

Still, in all of this scarcity, I bring an abundance mindset to my work as the leader of The Solutions Project. We are a public foundation that works to solve the climate crisis by reallocating resources to grassroots communities. We believe that the people closest to the pain understand the problems the best. Thus, they are closer to the solutions. There is power at the front lines, and that power is abundant.

When I invoke “abundance,” I am coming from a Black, feminist, Southern perspective. My abundance eschews wealth inequality and materialism in favor of community, care, and interdependence. It rejects competition and thrives in collaboration. In this abundance, we recognize, celebrate, and tend to the bounty of the Earth just as we care for each other. In this abundance, there is no need to hoard resources and no need to “other” anyone because there is room for everyone.

None of us can survive this alone, but we can thrive together.

It’s the abundance that I learned from my grandmother in Mississippi who grew collard and mustard greens, the largest red tomatoes, juicy melons, crunchy cucumbers, and more. When it was time to harvest her crops, she shared with families in her community. I learned it from our church potlucks where everyone brought a dish—like macaroni and cheese, pound cake, or potato salad—and everyone went home with full bellies and leftovers. I learned it when I overheard Mr. Jones tell Mr. Williams, “I’ll do your taxes, if you fix my car.” Or when I saw neighbors carpooling to the grocery store or driving each other’s kids to school. Abundance was everywhere.

Even though the climate crisis creates real limits on resources, I see this abundance at work every day through The Solutions Project’s grantees. To date, we’ve supported over 350 grassroots organizations across the country, with a segment of them cultivating “resilience hubs” in their communities. These are trusted spaces that are a part of the existing local infrastructure such as churches, community centers, and libraries—and they work together to support the community before, during, and after climate disasters. These folks are pushing forward with this work even in the midst of drastic federal funding cuts and manufactured chaos.

For example, West Street Recovery’s hub house in Houston and The SMILE Trust’s hub house in Miami have proven invaluable in the face of storms that have become more intense and unpredictable due to climate change. These homes provide food, shelter, and backup generators in the face of devastating storms or power outages and facilitate neighbors meeting and helping each other out.

Resilience hubs are a collective response, representing a groundswell of people and organizations and businesses working together. They are also hyperlocal, which allows them to adjust to the local context and needs. What works in a large city in California, for example, might not work in rural South Carolina. That collective response is what creates a vibrant, thriving, energized culture in each individual community. This is the “abundance” approach that will help us thrive and take care of each other through this crisis.

These are efforts that we can all join in and support, becoming part of the solution and adding to the abundance in our own communities. Whatever your skills and talents are—growing, cooking, fixing, creating—they are needed in your community now. It’s important that we get off our screens and into our streets because local solutions are often the most powerful. None of us can survive this alone, but we can thrive together.

This builds on the type of support systems that my ancestors created in the wake of Emancipation and into Reconstruction. They organized themselves and pooled their resources to help one another survive the horrors this country inflicted on them. Even in the teeth of such violent oppression, they believed in interdependence, interconnection, relationship, and community. Abundance, for communities of color, is a tradition.

This August, I’ll be spending time at my altar, as I often do to commemorate days of Black and Indigenous resistance and celebration. I will say a prayer and light a candle. I will pour libations and put out offerings of fruit to honor my ancestors. I will thank them for their fortitude, their sacrifices, and, of course, their vision and practice of abundance.

I invite Black, Indigenous, other communities of color, and all frontline communities to share the traditions that are important to you and your families, as part of our Stronger Together campaign. We encourage us all to go back to our elders and recover generational wisdom and rituals that may be at risk of getting lost. It can be something as simple as planting trees or maintaining a phone tree (even if you didn’t call it that.) The more that we share, the stronger we become.