When working on building resilience in the face of increasing hazards, there can be a sense of urgency.
Those of us in the workspace tend to ask ourselves: What are we missing? How do we continue to help spark action? Who are the people we haven’t reached yet?
Tied up in that conversation is a long history of underserved and historically disenfranchised groups that are often at the frontlines of weather and sea-level rise impacts. Recently, there has been increased federal guidance and momentum to build a concerted effort to connect with these communities and provide support to address their resilience needs.
Building relationships and engagement
With increased attention and resources comes another issue that’s been a recent hot topic: capacity.
Capacity refers to the availability of resources, such as people, time and money, to focus on addressing these issues. That’s why the work done by extension-focused organizations, such as Sea Grant, is so vital. We are a trusted source that people turn to for information, which is why it’s important to make sure we’re actively seeking ways to improve our engagement methods and build trusted relationships with our underserved coastal communities.
So, what are some effective ways to do this?
The PLACE: SLR team, through funding from the National Sea Grant College Program, has been diving into this question. Although Alabama and Mississippi boast similar coastlines, no two communities in these states are the exact same. Each one is built upon its own complicated networks of local history, relationships and cultures. Your location, whether it’s in a city or an unincorporated rural area, can also have a big influence on what your community needs are and what resources are available to address them.
To shed some light on these parallels, we developed a series of community resilience trainings that draw upon local flood experiences and concerns. The end result was to collaborate on a community-led action that addressed their identified flooding issues.
We collaborated with a community in Biloxi, Mississippi, specifically the southeastern peninsula known as East Biloxi. We also worked in the encompassing area of Bayou La Batre, Coden and unincorporated South Mobile County in Alabama. Both of these communities were significantly damaged after Hurricane Katrina (2005) and have a history of chronic flooding issues. They are also made up of dense pockets of people from many cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Yet, their identified needs, available resources and capacity for action are very different between the two locations.
Collaborating in East Biloxi
In East Biloxi, our team met with local nonrofit leaders to identify the community's information and resource needs. The conversations were pivotal and restructured the way we initially planned to run our trainings. Together, we were able to develop Resilient East Biloxi, a series of community leadership trainings and community engagement events that build upon a holistic vision of resilience designed by the community. Although the program itself has grown and expanded beyond the original funding, we still remain actively engaged with this collection of community stakeholders. Partnered with Steps Coalition, the nonprofit organization leading the Resilient East Biloxi program, we provide technical support as their needs to address identified resilience issues evolve.
Addressing resilience in South Mobile County
Over in South Mobile County, we’ve taken the lessons learned from our time in East Biloxi to guide our methods of engagement. We are also paying careful attention to the differences in community needs and capacity. By partnering with existing efforts to address resilience of community health and conversations with nonprofits and faith leaders, we’re able to further shape the resilience trainings to provide locally relevant information.
Our first South Mobile County listening sessions on current and future flood risk will be held September 21 and 22. They will be followed by two more sessions designed to openly collaborate on a desired community-led resilience action. For more information on our upcoming events, please visit our PLACE: SLR Facebook page.
Putting communities at the center
With the influx of funding opportunities specifically meant to address the Justice40 Initiative, it’s important to remember to not only engage in a high level of communication with your community of interest, but work to make sure they feel centered in your work. Previously, I mentioned capacity as not only being about money, but people. Any funding opportunities you can provide will not be effective if the community doesn’t have the people available to manage or enact them.
Listening to and supporting the needs they asked for can be a more effective option than overloading them with resources that they don’t currently have the capacity to use. These engagement values are relevant to all aspects of Sea Grant and can be applied regardless of our specialties, whether that’s education, fisheries, or coastal ecosystems. Working in our coastal communities requires a targeted effort to build trust, open communication and reciprocity that ultimately works to strengthen all of our ability to build resilient communities across the Mississippi-Alabama coast.
Meet the author
Qiyamah Williams
Coastal Resilience Specialist
Qiyamah Williams is a community resilience specialist based at the Mississippi State University Coastal Research and Extension Center in Biloxi. Her work focuses on flood risk and the effects of... Read more
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