Stuck in the Mud: When Communities Can’t Escape Climate Crises
The introduction below is lifted from a recent post by Funds for Trans Generations Program Director Dominique Morgan.
“If you don’t evacuate, you will die.”
This was the warning issued by Tampa Mayor Jane Castor shortly before Milton, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall in Florida, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene, a Category 4, devastated communities in the state and throughout the Southern U.S.
But what happens when you can’t evacuate—not because you don’t want to, but because you’re a marginalized person that is disproportionately impacted by incarceration, lack of financial resources, or restrictive laws?
Environmental justice is deeply intertwined with issues like mass incarceration, homelessness, and the unique challenges faced by trans individuals and others on the margins. In moments of crisis, how do we ensure the safety of incarcerated individuals, people in long-term care facilities, or those on probation who must notify authorities before leaving?
These are life-or-death questions that demonstrate how the environment and social systems are interconnected. Far from distracting from environmental justice, addressing these issues strengthens the movement by ensuring that we leave no one behind.
As we demand investment in environmental solutions, we must also ensure those solutions consider the most vulnerable among us who cannot simply evacuate when danger strikes.
The Power of Green: Funding Social Justice as Environmental Justice, Environmental Justice as Social Justice
We proudly fund folks organizing towards environmental justice, and responding to climate crises like Hurricanes Helene and Milton, by centering the lives, experiences, and needs of those pushed to the edges of our country’s power structures.
The Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund, Emerging LGBTQ Leaders of Color (ELLC) Fund, and Communities Transforming Policing Fund (CTPF) awarded a collective $160,000 in rapid response funding to support the repair, recovery, and mutual aid efforts of the six North Carolina-based organizations listed below:
- A Better Chance, A Better Community
- Enlace Latino NC
- JMPro Community Media
- NC Bloc
- ReNforce
- Southern Vision Alliance
The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, a national grantee partner of the Disability Inclusion Fund (DIF) is offering support to disabled individuals impacted by Hurricane Milton.
Our grantee partners are combating the devastating impacts of climate change not only in their climate disaster response, but in their year-round work to provide communities with housing, health, and autonomy in their own relationships to the climate and land. We’re excited to share more of their thought leadership on this connection below.
- Southerners On New Ground, a Georgia-based grantee partner of the Spark Justice Fund, writes on their Hurricane Helene mutual aid and rapid response resource page: “It is not natural for police officers and militiamen to guard stocked grocery stores in areas without food or water. It is not natural for workers in Erwin, TN to be missing after being forced to continue working as their town flooded. It is not natural to leave people in cages while cities evacuate. It is not natural to plan to pave over forest wetlands to build a Cop City when flooding in Atlanta worsens each year…In the face of it all, we must do the most natural thing we can, we must turn towards each other.”
- The Center for Urban & Racial Equity, a DC-based grantee partner of the Racial Equity to Accelerate Change Fund, produces the podcast “Embodied Justice.” On a recent episode, host Dr. Judy Lubin interviewed Black feminist writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs how the actions of figures like June Jordan and Fannie Lou Hamer inform the Black feminist movement today, particularly in addressing reproductive justice and climate crises.
- People’s Advocacy Institute, a Mississippi-based grantee partner of the Black-led Movement Fund, has waged a lengthy, two-year battle against the city of Jackson after damage to a treatment plant left residents without safe water. Recently, a federal judge added them along with other advocates to the Environmental Protection Agency’s lawsuit, giving city residents a direct say in who rebuilds and how the vital infrastructure is rebuilt. “This isn’t a uniquely Jackson problem. We need ways for all these cities that need infrastructure repairs to get clean water to their communities,” said Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People’s Advocacy Institute.
- Scalawag, a North Carolina-based grantee partner of the REJ Fund, published a piece on American disaster capitalism. Author Cierra Chenier writes: “America’s abandonment of New Orleans during and after [Hurricane Katrina] continues to serve as the cautionary tale of how anti-Black racism, negligence, and exploitation determine who receives “relief” in the face of disaster. In the 18 years since the storm, the persistent climate threats impacting the country continue to demonstrate the ways post-Katrina New Orleans serves as the blueprint for America’s default disaster response: neglect and mass abandonment.”
- UTOPIA Washington, a Hawaii-based grantee partner of the ELLC Fund, houses the Systems, Policy, Environmental & Culture (SPEaC) Change program, which seeks to effect change not just through individual change but through larger environmental changes. This work is supported through voter registration, community education, candidate forums, legislative advocacy, social media campaigns, coalition building, immigration support services, and regional organizing.
- Prism Reports, a national grantee partner of the DIF, writes in a piece responding to the state’s Hurricane Helene response efforts: “It wasn’t just a hurricane that devastated North Carolina: It was climate violence…Our political aims are so often measured against the limitations of the collective imagination, those limitations being known as what’s “realistic” to demand of those vested with power. But we have so many reasons to believe that we can and should demand life-giving rather than life-destroying policies.”
As we navigate the pressing challenges of climate crises and their intersection with social justice, we invite funders who share our commitment to equity to get involved. Your support can help amplify the vital work being done by grassroots organizations addressing the urgent needs of marginalized communities. By investing in initiatives that prioritize environmental justice alongside social equity, we can create a more inclusive and resilient future for all. Learn more about how to join us in this essential work by emailing us at development@borealisphilanthropy.org.