On a humid June morning, Dr. David Padgett from Tennessee State University stood in New Orleans' Seventh Ward with a group of community organizers, showing them how to map flooding hotspots using their phones. The workshop, co-hosted by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, was teaching neighborhoods across the city a skill that Pontilly—a historically Black neighborhood in New Orleans East—figured out seventeen years ago: if you want infrastructure that actually works, design it yourself.
The Pontilly story keeps coming up in these sessions because it's proof that communities can engineer better solutions than the experts who've never lived with the water.
After Katrina flooded the neighborhood with 10-12 feet of standing water, residents didn't wait for the city to fix the drainage system. In 2008, homeowners brought their own designs to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority: a network of retention ponds and bioswales that would hold water where it falls instead of overwhelming the existing pipes.
"The homeowners and community within Pontchartrain Park were the biggest advocates for the development of the project," said Meagan M. Williams, the city's stormwater program manager.
That's bureaucratic language for: the city didn't come up with this. The community did.
The $15.5 million project, funded through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, was built to community specifications. The new system holds water in strategically placed retention areas, giving the old drainage infrastructure time to do its job without the neighborhood flooding. Pontilly's design works with the natural drainage process—water stays where it lands until the pipes can handle it.
Hurricane Ida in 2021 was the test. The same storm that knocked out power across Southeast Louisiana and left parts of New Orleans underwater for days barely touched Pontilly. Actor Wendell Pierce, who lives in the neighborhood, posted on social media:
"EUREKA IT WORKS! Pontchartrain Park has returned to its green glory. The Pontilly Stormwater Project, of retention ponds & management of the rainwater flow, worked. I had my doubts. The water is gone."
Nineteen community organizations have now completed intensive training through the Water Justice Training Institute, learning both technical expertise and organizing skills to shape local flood policy. The June tours took organizers through Seventh Ward green infrastructure projects, showing them what community-led design looks like on the ground.
The city needs about $1 billion to upgrade its drainage system over the next decade and doesn't know where that money will come from. Meanwhile, neighborhoods are learning to document their own flooding patterns and design their own solutions.
Energy infrastructure is following the same pattern. Last July, residents gathered for a workshop on solar backup systems and battery storage—learning how to keep critical medical devices running when the grid fails. In March and April, the Power to the People Coalition held sessions for community organization leaders covering home energy efficiency, weatherization, renewable energy opportunities. This is technical knowledge that utility companies prefer to keep opaque, now being taught in community centers across the city.
The organizing is producing policy wins. The Energy Future New Orleans Coalition has secured a renewable energy portfolio standard, banned utility campaign contributions to City Council, prohibited carbon capture projects in Orleans Parish. In December, they organized a press conference demanding a freeze on utility disconnections after learning that Entergy New Orleans disconnected nearly one in five residential customers last year for inability to pay.
Nineteen percent of households losing power not because of hurricanes but because the utility decided they couldn't afford electricity.
An hour upriver in St. James Parish, Sharon Lavigne is teaching a different kind of infrastructure knowledge. The 71-year-old retired special education teacher founded RISE St. James in 2018 and has since defeated construction of a $1.25 billion plastics plant. Time Magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2024. But she's not just blocking petrochemical facilities—she's running an annual Black History essay contest asking students in grades 4-12 to research the connections between enslaved plantation sites and today's chemical plants, to trace their family ancestry and understand how their neighborhoods became industrial sacrifice zones.
"We want to educate, and we want them to do research. We want them to learn about their culture, their environment, the place that they call home," Lavigne said.
This February, RISE St. James will honor residents who successfully blocked Formosa Plastics thirty years ago. "They were successful back then, and we are successful right now," said Shamyra Lavigne.
Communities aren't waiting for institutions to change—they're building their own expertise in flood engineering, solar installation, and environmental justice history.
The Pontilly flood design. The solar backup workshops. The youth researching plantation-to-petrochemical histories. Communities are building expertise that institutions either can't or won't provide. When the drainage system needs a billion dollars nobody has, neighborhoods learn to map their own flooding and design their own retention systems. When the utility disconnects nineteen percent of customers, families learn solar installation. When petrochemical companies keep proposing plants in Black neighborhoods, teenagers research why this keeps happening and what their grandparents' generation did to stop it.
The June tours through the Seventh Ward: organizers from across New Orleans learning to document flooding, design green infrastructure, advocate for investment. Dr. Padgett demonstrating mapping tools on his phone. Community leaders sharing strategies for navigating city bureaucracy and accessing funding. Neighborhoods teaching each other what Pontilly proved fifteen years ago—that communities living with the water every day understand it better than engineers working from drainage models.
The city still needs that billion dollars for drainage upgrades. Entergy still disconnects thousands of customers annually. Formosa Plastics is still proposing a $9.4 billion chemical plant in St. James Parish.
But the communities facing these challenges are building parallel systems of knowledge and infrastructure, becoming their own engineers and energy experts and historians.
When Hurricane Ida hit and Pontilly barely flooded while other neighborhoods went underwater, fifteen years of community members insisting they knew how water moved through their streets better than anyone studying maps at city hall had paid off. Now, on June mornings in the Seventh Ward, that knowledge is spreading—one retention pond design, one solar panel installation, one mapped flooding hotspot at a time.
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Stormwater fee proposal: The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans is pushing for a new fee structure that would generate $38 million annually to fund drainage upgrades, charging property owners based on how much impervious surface they have rather than relying on property taxes that exempt many large landowners.
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Louisiana Gulf Coast grants: The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice launched a $1.82 million regrant program in October 2024, distributing $50,000-$100,000 awards to approximately 24 community organizations working on water quality, pollution, and climate adaptation across the Gulf South.
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RISE St. James cemetery action: Organizers are planning a ceremony and memorial markers for enslaved people buried on land now owned by Formosa Plastics, using cultural preservation as a strategy to prevent the proposed $9.4 billion chemical plant from being built.
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Power grid resilience funding: The New Orleans City Council approved a $30 million power resiliency plan in December using settlement money from Entergy's reliability failures, with Together New Orleans pushing for distributed backup power systems in vulnerable neighborhoods.