Creating Climate Resilience through Civic Engagement

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policy-making.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Sarah Jacob spoke with Dominika Parry, Founding President of 2°C Mississippi, about climate change and community engagement. Dominika established 2°C Mississippi to promote a bipartisan, science-based dialog and support climate resiliency efforts among frontline communities in Mississippi. Her work focuses on partnering with community organizations, local leaders, and community members to co-create adaptive solutions in Jackson, MS.

Can you give us an overview of how 2°C Mississippi was founded and what the organization does?

When I moved to Mississippi, I found that people don’t just avoid talking about climate change, they often aggressively deny and ridicule it.

The goal of 2°C Mississippi was to build resilience for local communities in Mississippi through education, adaptation, and mitigation. We started with education because we were able to work on it without institutional partners. We developed a first in the state climate science curriculum for public schools. It was written to address the limited budgets public schools in Mississippi have. Lessons were provided in two versions, one assumed access to the internet and the other assumed no access.

In those beginning stages, we tried reaching out to different types of organizations seeking partnerships. We made several attempts to work with the state’s governmental organizations and quickly found out they were very unlikely allies.

Since working with the state was not an option, we tried to reach out to municipal governments. We finally caught a break with the City of Jackson, when after numerous attempts, the mayor agreed to meet with us. The meeting was incredibly supportive and filled us with optimism. We started developing climate projects and initiatives for the City of Jackson and for a moment had the attention of the mayor’s office. Unfortunately, this success was short lived, since the municipal administration, similarly to the teachers, were underfunded, overworked, and needed to prioritize immediate crises and needs. As a result, our work was stalled and hope for change was disappearing. This required rethinking our approach and resulted in us pivoting to carrying out projects while working directly with communities and without involving governments. This strategy finally paid off. With patience and persistence, we managed to slowly start establishing trust.

Starting partnerships with historically marginalized communities is a complex task, for new organizations, especially, when led by a white foreigner, speaking with a strong accent. At the beginning we had to accept and adapt to mistrust and lack of interest. We tried to be persistent without being overwhelming, optimistic without sounding naive, and most of all transparent and honest.

We were an unknown commodity, asking people to give us their time and attention, which is why we made sure that people understood we valued their time and effort. We made sure that everybody willing to work with us was compensated for their time through gift cards and felt appreciated through sharing a meal. In Polish culture, food is a way we express emotions, and based on our experience in Mississippi, frontline communities are very similar to Poles in this aspect.

We also made sure that we met the communities at their convenience by setting up meetings in the communities rather than asking people to travel to our office. Overall, we wanted to make the experience of working with us enjoyable.

How does the process of developing projects work? Can you give an overview of the project that you’re currently working on?

It always starts with very broad visioning, sometimes about the whole city, but we usually try to narrow it down to a particular neighborhood. We try to get people to imagine what that place should both look and feel like, and we encourage people to think big and as abstract or as specific as they are comfortable with.

One of our current projects is green infrastructure design and development to mitigate Urban Heat Islands in Jackson, MS. The project site is located on historic Farish Street, known as a “Black Wall Street” during segregation, and now an example of urban decay. The street is a symbol of success and resilience of African American communities in Jackson, and as such its redevelopment is particularly important to most Jacksonians. It took us almost a year to narrow down the project’s location to Farish Street, but we are considering this time well spent.

We would always have new people coming in, but we needed a core of participants that would be with us from the beginning to the end.

I think by being very consistent and fully transparent about every step of the process, we managed to secure a group that always returned. So that core group of people participated in the design process and they feel ownership and stake in the project, which was the whole goal. The idea is not for 2°C Mississippi to come up with projects but to allow Jacksonians to come up with projects and designs that they want and they need.

This process, led by a facilitator, starts with a large group discussion and then moves to several smaller groups where it is easier to ensure that everybody’s voice is heard. Small groups are also led by facilitators and are meant to develop individual visions or plans for the project site. This results in several designs that are then merged by our partner-architecture group, Jackson Community Design Center, Mississippi State University. This group is led by an architecture professor, Jassen Callender, who works with several of his fifth-year architecture students. After the designs are merged, they are presented to the community group during the next meeting. Then, the community members give us feedback on the design, and the architectural group makes adjustments based on the feedback. The following meeting, the conversations become more specific. We start talking about elements such as trees and benches. With the Farish Street project, the architects brought in hundreds if not thousands of examples of each feature. We had participants choose from the different designs of benches and varieties of trees, and then people would glue and place them on the maps of the site. After each of these sessions, we attempted to aggregate the ideas and come up with another shared vision.

Over time, people started to feel like this was their project, and this is what we’ve always been repeating. People would email us and say things like, “You know, I was walking by this place nearby, and there was this blackberry bush that I always pick up the blackberries from. Wouldn’t that be nice to have something like that on our site?” This is amazing because it was giving us evidence that people are actually starting to think about public places as their places.

You touched on how often organizations come into communities, use them for grants, and then leave. How have you navigated the funding process, and how have you received funding for this project?

The Farish Street project’s design is funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 2°C Mississippi applied for this grant on behalf of the City of Jackson (COJ), but shortly after it was granted, we became a sub-recipient with COJ functioning as a fiscal agent only. This put a lot of pressure on us, as a small organization, to carry the whole project ourselves, but it also unexpectedly helped us in the community engagement process. We were free to share with people how the money was being spent, which was met with surprise and honest appreciation. We explained that a part of the budget is going to pay for our salary, but that we do not take any overhead to maximize the amount going directly to the project. With the funding process, as well as with other parts of each project, we always make sure to be extremely honest with people that we are working with. We tell them how much money we have and what it pays for. We also make sure they know what we do not have money for. This was particularly important in the Farish Street project, which had funding for implementation only. The clear communication and full transparency were crucial in the process. We shared successes along with failures to make sure the community knows where the project is, each step of the way. We share updates between monthly community meetings, in the form of newsletters, where we describe what we’ve been doing to secure funding since we last met.

When we presented the final design, we were very clear that we had no implementation funding. Fortunately, we did not have to look for very long, since just a few months after the final design was unveiled, 2°C Mississippi received a $1.5 million grant for five years from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program from the Inflation Reduction Act for the project’s implementation and maintenance.

We informed everybody and brought them back to the table to start talking about the details of the implementation processes. Five years of maintenance is so important. Many projects within cities like Jackson, even when they get development funding, end up very short lived, because the city just doesn't have a capacity to maintain it properly. So to navigate this, we built public participation into the maintenance process. We dedicated $100,000 to the Communities of Shalom, where many of our meeting participants belong, to help us place the green infrastructure and then care for it.

After understanding the complexities of grants that fund only the design phase of a project, we made sure to apply only for funding that also covers implementation and maintenance. Since then, in addition to the Forest Service grant, we received $500,000 in funding from both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Hilton Foundation for design, implementation, and maintenance of flood controlling green infrastructure in Jackson.

Both the USDA’s Forest Service and EPA grant money are great examples of these agencies allocating money in a way that actually reaches frontline communities that need the resources. I observed how they’ve been changing their application process, which is normally really technical, to accommodate community-based organizations that often lack capacity to successfully apply for projects that otherwise reflect the mission of the grants. In the past, federal grant applications required so much effort and technical capacity. The application process was a huge practical barrier to receiving funding. People open up the application and can’t do anything because they don’t understand what any of the questions mean. Right now there’s a lot of technical assistance and one-on-one help, where you are connected with a staff member, who can lead you through it.

So kudos to the federal government for these impressive efforts.

Do you think being a non-governmental entity helped you foster trust in the community?

There is a history of community mistrust in state and city governments in the South. And even though right now the local government is African American, the people are still really wary of what government’s motives and actions are. Some non-governmental organizations, such as ours, are trying to fill in that gap, developing projects directly with communities and empowering them by authentically involving people at every stage of a project.

In our particular case, being not only a non-governmental organization, but also being new, small, and led by an outsider, strangely worked for us. Being new meant no negative track record, being small allowed full transparency and easy communication, and being led by an outsider (a resident born in Poland who moved to Jackson as an adult) placed us in a category of an unknown commodity.

However, being small and new also led to many challenges in working on large projects. Until last month, we didn’t have a physical location. We were all working remotely, and had to struggle finding places for community meetings. At one of the places we hosted a meeting, for example, the building’s door had to be propped, and after a while the door accidentally got locked. During the meeting, people were trying to get in but weren’t able to, which made them, understandably, extremely upset. It was a small group, but people were saying, “this is one more example of how we are being treated by the city and universities (the location was a university building).” We explained that we are a small organization, and we messed up. In order to show how honestly sorry we were and how much we needed a second chance, I wrote personal apology notes and I promised that next time I would be standing in the door making sure that everybody could come in. Next, the meeting was organized in a different location, but, as promised, I was standing in the front door to greet everybody.

I think mishaps like that actually worked to our advantage. People started realizing that we have more in common than one could expect, struggle with limited resources, are overworked, and sometimes need help. In the end, they decided to give us a chance.

What were the demographics of people who attended community meetings?

Mississippi is a very religious state and a very large percentage of the population not only regularly attends church, but completely identifies with its church. A majority of social connections and sense of belonging in Jackson are through church. It is not uncommon, while meeting new people, to be asked, “What church do you go to?” So we reached out to pastors from local churches, and many pastors as well as their parishioners came.

Age wise, I think, it’s heavily skewed toward 60 plus, since this is the age when you simply have more time for community engagement. Of course, we also had a group of younger people, from middle-age to even some very young people in their 20s. Unfortunately, the young people were not consistent participants. We had younger families coming in with their children. The youngest just played on the side and older were encouraged to participate.

A large majority of the participants, like the population of Jackson, were African American, with a few exceptions of older Caucasians, who were dedicated to social justice causes. The group was usually gender balanced (with about a half and half split between men and women).

We never asked about their education level, but these were not academics coming in and trying to tell us their theories about urban design. These were people who were saying, “I remember how Farish Street was 20, 40 years ago.” We were trying to engage absolutely everybody. I would go to local businesses and just hand out fliers and talk to people. At the core of the group, however, are the people who, I think, saw how this area used to look, and they really wanted it to look like that again.

Who owns the Farish Street project property, and who will be caring for the property after the project is developed?

We would like all of the spaces that we are developing and will develop to ultimately become owned by the City of Jackson. Right now, the city is overwhelmed with numerous urgent needs, which is why we are forming partnerships with local organizations to manage our projects until the city is in a position to take over its maintenance. The Farish Street project is on a property owned by a semi-governmental organization, the Jackson Redevelopment Authority (JRA). This organization takes ownership of abandoned properties that once belonged to the city, and works on the financing and logistics of their redevelopment.

The ownership of the site will stay with JRA, while 2°C Mississippi develops and then maintains it for at least five years. This is the time we have secured funding for and hope that it will be either enough time for the city to gain capacity to take over the maintenance, or we find more funding to continue ourselves.

How did you build trust with local intermediaries?

I reached out to every organization and all individuals we could find. We were saying, “we have funding, and we need advice on where to invest it.” It was a very long, extremely frustrating, and inefficient process.

We began by calling and emailing all organizations that we already knew to connect us with their network and so on. We asked to present (in-person or over Zoom) to any organizations or groups that showed any interest, including churches (which are a major social structure in the South). We also organized numerous in-person events, encouraging participation with gift cards and catered food. Eventually, we got connected with neighborhood associations, which gave us direct access to the audience we wanted to engage. This process took about 6 months, which may sound inefficient, but it was absolutely necessary. From meetings with 20 to 50 people, we would sometimes have only one or two who would like to engage with us. Having these meetings consistently, without losing enthusiasm, was the key. There was no systematic methodology. This area has a very small set of nonprofits and organizations that have community trust.

This is not surprising, as one woman who allowed me to come and give a presentation to her church group, remembers thinking, “Oh, Lordy, okay, one more white person that comes in is going to talk a good talk and disappear and probably get money because they talk to us.” She now says, “I don’t know how it happened, but you stuck.” And I’ve heard on numerous occasions that people feel that they’ve been taken advantage of for years. And we try to make sure we’re different: We believe that cooperation doesn’t mean meeting with people only once. You need to figure out how to involve community members meaningfully. This is a co-creation process: Communities are as much owners of this project as we are, or even more.