This June, A Community Voice (ACV) members took their planning on the road. Alongside partners from the Climigration Network and Buy-In Community Planning, they traveled to two communities in Mississippi: Vicksburg and Natchez. The group drove up from New Orleans and spent the first afternoon touring Vicksburg before sharing dinner at the home of an ACV leader who once called New Orleans home.

However, considering Vicksburg as a site to relocate presented some challenges. Local partners were difficult to reach, and, when driving through the town, they passed Confederate monuments and streets named after the dark history that often haunts the South. For Black New Orleanians searching for a place to call home while navigating a crisis, these signals matter.

Natchez told another story. The group met at the district field office of Congressman Bennie Thompson with other municipal leaders, organizers from New Orleans-based groups, and Katrina survivors who moved there after the storm and chose to stay.

With residents looking to welcome people facing displacement, a vibrant downtown, and a culture that reminded residents of New Orleans, Natchez felt more like home. ACV members returned with a renewed focus on Natchez as a welcoming community for short-term evacuation and, potentially, long-term relocation.

"Nobody else is doing this for us," Beth says. "There's nobody better equipped to figure it out than the people who are most adversely impacted…It is absolutely critical to fund community organizing because all of this, every bit of it, would be impossible without organizing. Stuff doesn’t happen by magic. There might be some magic to it, though.”

In the absence of government action, people living in the 7th, 8th, and 9th Wards, who face some of the highest risk in Louisiana of hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat, and air pollution, are building their own path forward. Beth says that philanthropy can support every phase of the local organizing that will be necessary to make their vision for a safer future a reality: meetings, site visits, household surveys, and relocation housing design, feasibility and financing plans. They can also support evaluation and selection of potential relocation sites, plans that prioritize sustainability and well-being, dialogues that bring together residents, governments, and institutions in New Orleans to reduce risk for those who decide to stay. The sky is the limit for philanthropic support.

Beth wants ACV’s model to be an approach that other Gulf Coast communities facing intensifying storms and industrial expansion can use and make their own, as they build pathways to safety for the coming storm season and the decade ahead.

With the support of the Next Step Cohort, A Community Voice has turned an unspoken fear into a plan in progress. For Beth’s community, and many others the Next Step Cohort serves, that investment is the difference between being swept along by crisis and having the tools to move on their own terms.

About the Next Step Cohort

The Climigration Network’s Next Step Cohort is a group of community and Indigenous leaders from across the country sharing learning, funding, and capacity to build pathways to adapt to worsening displacement from climate and toxic pollution. Together, we:

Care for each other and ourselves more fully, sustaining strength, energy, and optimism
Leverage and share resources, ensuring that precious time, funding, and resources don't duplicate efforts
Have the time and energy to implement ideas, developing responses that make sense locally, with local partners
Scale feasible, thoughtful, dignified, and innovative responses, building on a broad base of experience and expertise
Build collective power to shape funding and policy systems and make community-led planning common practice across the nation

“We're now able to truly go forward with a community-driven relocation plan. I feel like that would not have happened if we hadn't been together, working with everybody in the Next Step Cohort, and really just constantly having the information, the support. From the beginning of our time partnering, we've really felt like we could have a way to be together and be comfortable to listen, align, grow, intensify.” – Debra Campbell, Chairperson, A Community Voice