‘Solutions are Hyper-Local’: Brooklyn Climate Organizer On Facing the Next Big Storm As Feds Pull Support

On the heels of torrential flooding City Limits caught up with Sunset Park group leader Elizabeth Yeampierre to talk about federal cuts to natural accident protections and how communities can come together to survive extreme weather BROOKLYN N Y Elizabeth Yeampierre executive director of UPROSE a grassroots organization promoting environment justice in Sunset Park Brooklyn Wednesday July As New York City grapples with extreme weather like last week s torrential rains which halted traffic and flooded the subway system a Trump administration decision from earlier this spring to cut federal funding for natural accident protection hits hard But Elizabeth Yeampierre executive director of the grassroots environmental organization UPROSE says the way forward is to create a neighborhood plan to face severe weather events that grow stronger as surroundings change worsens People are starting to realize that the solutions are hyper-local and that their relationships with each other are going to be central to us being able to survive the next big storm Yeampierre explained function d u ac var s d createElement 'script' s type 'text javascript' s src 'https a omappapi com app js api min js' s async true s dataset user u s dataset campaign ac d getElementsByTagName 'head' appendChild s document 'u kmqsczew vunxutxmd' In Brooklyn s Sunset Park her organization has been training people to take on green jobs hosting workshops on how to prune trees and build society gardens that collect stormwater before it floods the streets And they host community-led conversations on how neighborhoods can respond to severe weather That could include building an inventory of residents that have exigency preparedness skills from nurses who could care for the injured to leaders who could act as first responders or construction workers who could help rebuild This approach Yeampierre says protects communities at a time when they can t count on the federal governing body to protect them from flash floods and storms In April the Trump administration decided to shut down a venture run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA that supports critical infrastructure across the country protecting communities from disasters before they happen New York s Attorney General joined a coalition of states last week in suing the Trump administration for shutting down the operation Known as the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities BRIC effort the initiative gave nearly projects billion over the past four years to safeguard cities from conditions catastrophes according to the New York Attorney General Given that coastal communities face the biggest threats from flooding New York is among the states that received the the greater part money from the operation totalling over million for BRIC projects That included for instance a million grant for the Central Harlem Cloudburst Flood Mitigation Project which paid for flood prevention measures to protect over city residents from flash flooding of the Harlem River But the Trump administration questions the importance of the initiative The BRIC effort was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA activity FEMA reportedly announced in a news release at the time which has since been taken down from the agency s website FEMA should be terminated as the agency has been slow and totally ineffective President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social Among the defunded BRIC projects was a million grant for flood protections along the Harlem River Photo by Adi Talwar Individual states should handle storms etc as they come Big savings far more efficient he added on the social media platform But Yeampierre says FEMA provides food vitality care and shelter when tragedy strikes and that undermining it will hurt communities across the city An activist and co-chair of the Environment Justice Alliance a national non-profit that also suffered federal funding cuts Yeampierre spoke with City Limits about the slashes to FEMA and how a neighborhood approach to the setting problem could save lives This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity Tell us about the work that you do and why it s key to your group UPROSE was founded in it s the oldest Latino district based organization in Brooklyn Next year it turns And next year I will have been here years so I ve seen a lot Basically our organization listens to the society and follows the neighborhood s charge So when it comes to context we are doing environmental justice work because that s what the locality reported was critical It did take a while to get the district involved because not everyone saw how situation change was affecting them back in the early s But then there was a tornado that hit this part of Brooklyn in and after that people started showing up We started having sinkholes in Sunset Park and then Superstorm Sandy happened Sandy became sort of like the marker where all of a sudden the base of people interested in environmental issues in Sunset Park started growing Old oak trees were uprooted and fell all over the place Being in the park was dangerous because anything could fall and kill you But Sunset Park was not impacted the way that Red Hook was which is our sister locality we detected them under seven feet of water So people here set themselves up to help Red Hook to help the Rockaways so it kind of became this place where people were dispatched to go to different places to help them What was that group effort like Right after Sandy happened we called for a meeting and it was packed Everybody came and I remember because it was a storefront that we had before we moved into our current office and there were just so various people And all we did was ask what do you want us to do what should it look like and what are your ideas And the ideas were mind-blowing One was a block-to-block organizing effort where we could identify one person per block who could act as a first responder In everybody s block there is unfailingly a lady at her window who knows which of her neighbors is on dialysis who knows everybody s business who is hooking up with who And that s your first responder that s your organizer And so we started organizing block by block and identifying projects that they would want to do together on each block to prevent flooding in the future We identified places where people could grow gardens behind their houses to soak up the water when it rained and then share food We did workshops on how to build a stormwater barrel and what it cost and where they could get the supplies and our young people made a video about that So we started identifying interventions that were accessible and affordable to people Because the other thing that we heard from the society is that addressing environment change was expensive and only the gentrifiers could afford these things and that they couldn t And so little by little we basically started educating the group about all the different kinds of things that they could do together How does losing FEMA funding impact the area in times of problem First let me begin by saying that I don t want to romanticize FEMA It requirements to be reformed because it doesn t serve our communities in the best way The materials have been allocated in a discriminatory way We have seen surroundings disasters where communities of color died in the thousands but white communities got so much more money from FEMA even though they lost fewer lives Flood damage in Woodside Queens following Hurricane Ida in Michael Appleton Mayoral Photography Office But FEMA funds do make it practicable for people to get up from under the rubble gather their lives and recover from serious life-threaning events When you think about the need for FEMA think about tornadoes Think of a Category hurricane think of an event that is massive in size and leaves places looking like a war zone right So FEMA is supposed to make it viable for people to get soundness care and a place to live And so basically what the federal administration is saying by defending that it should be terminated is that at the hardest moment in a family s life in a person s life when they need the federal regime to show up the greater part so that they can survive that they are not going to be there for them That s what they re telling them and that s not an exaggeration They re basically telling them that you re on your own So I think that message to our communities has to come through we are on our own And what do we do when the regime fails us when it s not available What do we do for each other We build population We work to complement each other and work in a way that is deeply collaborative and complementary What are selected examples of what can be done We ve been meeting with churches and people from our own base and teachers that are really pretty freaking badass and we are forming a collective of people from the neighborhood to build our own sustainable society Saturday we had a workshop that was packed with everybody who came to learn to get their certificate on tree pruning because that s a green job During the winter we have these learning circles in the basement of a local church where we talked about what do you do if there s an extreme weather event what can we do on the block The questions were really open to get the neighborhood and the people to really think critically about what they could do One woman commented well we can find out who in our building knows how to do first aid and who is a nurse Who knows how to do construction and who knows how to fix things who knows how to grow things And then somebody can check in on the elders and we can find out what medication they take What do they need We can make a list We can create a list in our building and then on our block We can create an inventory And they went on and on Once they were urged they were already thinking about how we take care of each other So that is the conversation that s been happening in a real granular way People are starting to realize that the solutions are hyper local and that their relationships with each other are going to be central to us being able to survive the next big storm You have to invest in communities Communities have the solutions They have the answers and you have to trust that they know how to do it To reach the reporter behind this story contact Mariana citylimits org To reach the editor contact Jeanmarie citylimits org Want to republish this story Find City Limits reprint framework here The post Solutions are Hyper-Local Brooklyn State Organizer On Facing the Next Big Storm As Feds Pull Endorsement appeared first on City Limits