In 2021, Hurricane Ida knocked out eight transmission lines and 31,000 utility poles in Louisiana. This left 1 million people without power, with some outages lasting several weeks. In the heat wave that followed, 10 people died without air conditioning.
Launched only six weeks earlier, Together New Orleans solidified a clear vision after Ida: They would organize “resilience hubs” powered by solar energy within a 15-minute walk of every resident in Southeast Louisiana. The hubs, called “community lighthouses,” would provide charging stations during power outages, invite residents to cooling stations during heat waves, and offer food during emergencies.
“You can’t live without air conditioning in New Orleans,” says Sister Alicia Costa, congregational leader of the Sisters of the Holy Family, which stood ready to activate their lighthouse last year. “The humidity makes it worse. So, you really need to be able to cool off and that’s what the lighthouse will provide. A place to cool off and get some food and just be until things can get a little better.”
Together New Orleans’ parent network, Together Louisiana, which expanded from Together Baton Rouge (founded in 2010), has opened 19 community lighthouses across the state, many at houses of worship or other community institutions.
Resilience hubs as faith in action
The concept of resilience hubs took shape around 2014. K Baja, a former climate and resilience planner for Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability, realized that people in Baltimore didn’t use or trust traditional government-owned emergency shelters. So she proposed flipping the script and putting the power back into communities.
Emergency services and planning should happen within places where people already spend time, she suggested. Furthermore, emergency responses shouldn’t merely react to events but also should support communities in addressing the root causes of disproportionate exposure to climate impacts (for example, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions), as well as in adapting to climate change.
Together Louisiana might be the most developed community-led network of resilience hubs in the country, and one of its strengths might be its Catholic roots. “Way before it was resilience hubs, it was Catholic social teaching,” says Broderick Bagert, a lead organizer for Together New Orleans.
The organizing group, initially founded on the backbone of the Industrial Areas Foundation, started in 1940 as a national network of faith- and community-based organizing supporting social justice and labor rights. One of its first board members was former Chicago Bishop Bernard James Sheil. Then, in the late 2010s, seed funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development helped lay the groundwork for Together New Orleans, just as the relief funding was drying up after the Hurricane Katrina response. In 2021, it launched with 45 member organizations, including Catholic and other faith groups.
Sister of Divine Providence Christine Stephens, an important mentor to Bagert in the Industrial Areas Foundation, introduced him to Monsignor Philip Murnion, a leading scholar of parish life. Murnion, in turn, influenced Bagert’s thinking on how a resilience hub can become a parish mission. He realized that resilience hubs align very well with Catholic thought on parish life.
What is a parish after all? It’s a geographic entity wherein Catholic institutions are responsible for the well-being of every soul—not only sacramentally but also practically. “I’ve always loved that idea,” Bagert says. “It is the same idea [with resilience hubs]. It’s a practical living out of that idea, trying to make that literally the case. This is our boundary, and this is our response plan. We think this has a very practical disaster response, energy-related, but also it is related to the mission of these organizations and their ability to live it out.”
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network, where Baja went on to work, developed the most comprehensive guide to date on how to start a resilience hub, says Brian Henning, director of Gonzaga University’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment in Spokane, Washington. Henning leads an effort to build resilience hubs in Spokane, addressing wildfire smoke and extreme heat. He also follows the model of Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW) for resilience hubs, which describes a role for institutions to offer community engagement on preparedness.
In these models, resilience doesn’t stop at installing renewable energy. Those targeting deeper cultural transformation usually endeavor to plan for and provide aid in emergencies. Each host institution becomes responsible for its geographic area and commits to identifying vulnerable people and preparing to respond during a disaster.
Starting a network of solar resilience hubs
To be successful, Together Louisiana looks for the right institutions to host hubs. Bagert wants organizations that have already provided food and other response during disasters—even without any kind of backup energy system.
One example of this is the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Black order founded in 1842 by Henriette DeLille in New Orleans’ French Quarter. When a former superior general purchased the sisters’ 122-acre plot in East New Orleans in 1907, it was swampland. Today, the grounds include a nursing home and a girls’ school called St. Mary’s Academy, in addition to the motherhouse.
Costa says the sisters were already routinely feeding area residents. “We don’t need a storm for them to come for help,” she says. “Behind the nursing facility, there’s a big train barn. That’s where the property ends. We get people who get off the train and come for food. We also have people in our neighborhood who come for food. They eat what we eat from our kitchen door. That’s just a daily routine for us.”
The sisters planned their first solar energy system for the motherhouse, which is a really solid building, Costa says. It flooded with four feet of water during Katrina, but the walls and floors were preserved. The house, which also has a community kitchen and dining area that accommodates 200 to 300 people, prepared to operate a lighthouse last summer, but no storms came.
This spring, however, they experienced a trial run. “New Orleans is notorious for having electricity go out,” Costa says. “Just last week, the sun was shining, and the electricity went out.” The solar kicked in: The lights came on, and the refrigeration continued running.
In northern Louisiana, the network is also learning how to flexibly respond to outages where there are no lighthouses. After a winter storm, East Carroll Parish residents experienced an outage for two weeks. “They didn’t have a community lighthouse, but Shreveport did,” Bagert says. Coordinating with Delta Interfaith, they deployed a mobile resilience hub with a simple solar-powered storage battery to support warming centers and households needing to charge medical devices.
Adapting to extreme heat and wildfire smoke
On Earth Day 2021—the same year Together New Orleans launched—Gonzaga University introduced a similar initiative structured around its strengths as an academic institution. It announced its intention to resource the eastern Washington region with tools to navigate climate impacts.
“We see ourselves caring for the Inland Northwest—west of the Rockies, east of the Cascades, and north of the Blues (Blue Mountains)—but realistically, Spokane County and hoping to spread to more rural areas in the inland,” Henning says. “We have a land-based, place-based pedagogy and philosophy for how we approach climate resilience work.”
During the summer of 2021, a record-setting heat dome lingered over the region for one week. Spokane’s highest temperature was 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Portland hit 116 F. A small town in British Columbia reached the highest recorded temperature in Canada at 121.3 F, which is higher than ever recorded in many U.S. states, even Texas.
The result was devastating for the underprepared region used to much cooler temperatures. In Spokane, rental properties and many older houses built in the 1920s through the ’40s are poorly insulated with no air conditioning and faulty electrical wiring; most worrisome are the upper floors of apartment buildings. According to a 2020 federal survey, only 30 percent of Washington homes used central air conditioning, and about 25 percent used a window unit or ductless heat pump to stay cool.
Standard practice for a few hot days a year is to leave the windows or doors open at night, but during the heat wave, temperatures didn’t drop enough to cool homes. “They thought they would be OK, but they weren’t,” Henning says. More than 400 people died from direct and indirect heat-related causes, making it Washington’s deadliest weather event, according to a report by Gonzaga and its colleagues.
The center also began tackling how it could help residents adjust when wildfire smoke settles into the region, as it often does during the summer or fall. Over the last decade, the Spokane region saw an average of 9.2 days with poor air quality compared to the previous 15 years’ average of 2.6 days. “Sometimes [air pollution] is coming from California or Canada. It just comes and lingers for a while,” Henning says. “I remember a summer when I couldn’t see my neighbor’s house across the street.” Area wildfires in August caused property damage, evacuations, and poor air quality in Spokane.
Finding out community needs
More important than whether your resilience hub has solar is “the people and the teams,” Bagert says. The challenging part of this work is building teams and reengaging the neighborhood, but he believes this is the rich part—the place where the most transformation takes place.
The Louisiana coalition is developing an annual training that will take place at the start of hurricane season for site teams to identify roles each person will play that year as they discuss the logistics of their emergency response. Ideally, a community lighthouse will canvas the neighborhood at least once a year to learn community needs. “We’re trying to create the structure and systems and practices and training still with a light staff at the center,” Bagert says. “If we just leave it to [people to] go do it on [their] own, it fades over time.”
Henning also describes how understanding community needs and current behaviors became a top priority in Washington state. First, the Gonzaga center needed to know what people in Spokane wanted to do about the heat and smoke. When Spokane opened cooling centers during the heat dome, they weren’t well used. Henning agrees with where Baja landed: “People will go to places they already go and know and trust,” he says.
After mapping heat clusters across the city, Henning and his colleagues realized more clearly that they need to work with trusted neighborhood organizations such as the Carl Maxey Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, which serve East Central; this is a neighborhood with historically larger Black and immigrant communities that still feel the effects of 20th-century redlining and racial segregation. Gonzaga found that Spokane residents who are Black or Indigenous are more likely to live in urban heat islands, as they are dubbed, than white residents are. Like many cities, Spokane neighborhoods with fewer parks, less urban tree canopy, and darker surfaces in the built environment experience higher temperatures than other neighborhoods.
When the institute lost federal funding, it had to pivot away from solar-powered hubs and began to think of resilience hubs in a graduated way. It created 11 Level 1 resilience hubs, located in faith communities, community centers, and libraries.
Resilience hubs became sites where Gonzaga could survey neighbors about their vulnerability and behavior in relation to wildfires—for example, asking about health conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), any practices for cleaning indoor air, or interest in visiting community places to access clean air. They also created culturally responsive trainings and resources for hubs to share with communities needing advice on how to stay cool or achieve cleaner air at home.
Compiling and communicating research-based advice for the Northwest is especially needed, because the findings often counter current practice. For example, if it’s hotter than 95 F inside, a fan will increase, not decrease, the temperature, Henning says, and when hot and smoky days overlap, some window air conditioning units circulate outside air and lower indoor air quality.
The Level 1 resilience hubs help people stay home when air or heat pose a threat to comfort and health, though they are also places to cool down and breathe clean air.
However, the region still needs Level 2 resilience hubs, Henning says, and if new state funding is allocated, those sites may soon receive solar and battery storage for use in power outages. Then they can serve as charging stations for medical devices and offer other emergency response services.
Contributing to community priorities
When resilience organizing begins with community engagement, the strengths of various members can also be leveraged in ways that go beyond resilience hub networks. This spring, for example, the Sisters of the Holy Family broke ground on the first community solar project in the Deep South on the sisters’ unused property. But the project wouldn’t have been possible without Together New Orleans.
Back in 2022, Costa offered the organization more land. “We have 22 acres behind St. Mary’s that are not used. All we’re doing is cutting grass,” she says. The land is big enough for more than a community lighthouse—the property can accommodate a community solar array, which would allow neighbor households to subscribe and pay a reduced electric bill.
But the sisters faced local policy disincentives—which many states maintain—that made a large solar development financially infeasible. So Together New Orleans advocated at local meetings and triggered a change: The local municipal utility agreed to buy additional power generated by privately owned systems at a rate high enough to make the investment worth it. “It wasn’t just that the rules changed, it was that faith communities responded and advocated to change those rules,” Bagert says. “Sometimes you hit obstacles, but then sometimes you can change policies.”
Similarly, the Gonzaga Institute used the university’s resources after it heard the community’s need for cooler, livable rental units. The environmental law school helped propose legal requirements for landlords to maintain at least one bedroom in rental units at 80 F or lower. At the state level, a movement to make rental units cooler made gains with a mandate that went into effect in June; the rule bans landlords from forbidding the use of portable cooling devices.
Organizing in third spaces
In both Washington and Louisiana, resilience hubs have gained momentum with the attention and management of a nonpolitical, community-based institution.
In New Orleans, Bagert says the network is nimbler and faster than the city, which technically made plans for resilience hubs years earlier and never completed the projects. In another project with the state, using a federal grant, Together Louisiana planned sites for future resilience hubs but still hasn’t seen those cross the finish line three years later.
In contrast, Together Louisiana on its own has moved quickly, realizing the impact would be greater if many congregations, unions, and neighborhood associations worked together. “That made it more attractive for larger funding sources,” Bagert says. As a network, they’ve facilitated local and federal funding and even acted as the owner of solar systems to deal with taxes and maintenance.
As an academic institution, Gonzaga also helps fill a role that didn’t exist before in the region’s climate resilience planning. The institute became a “neutral space where different types of organizations could come together and work on something,” Henning says. “Our city and county don’t always get along. The city is more progressive, and the county is more conservative. Yet they work together on these plans.” Because governments flip-flop between parties frequently, Gonzaga serving as manager “will make it more durable to changes. The plans themselves are by and for the community, and the university manages that,” Henning says.
Transforming culture and ourselves
As a Catholic Jesuit school, Gonzaga is primed to help facilitate worldview transformation for the public good, Henning believes.
On one hand, that transformation can be cultural. Henning thinks “hub” language is one small shift that can impact uptake. Hub avoids the baggage of the word shelter, he says. “Shelter—the language is charged with that complexity. Hub indicates that there are spaces people already know, and they’re for everyone, not just people who are unhoused, although they are for people who are unhoused as well,” he says.
In the Pacific Northwest, communities also lack a collective knowledge about what to do in case of an emergency—even though in Oregon’s coastal towns, tsunami evacuation zones and routes are posted everywhere. “This summer we were there, and there actually was a warning,” Henning says. (No major activity actually happened.) He thinks Gonzaga can nudge people to become more aware of what to do in case of heat waves or smoke days, prompting people to also mentally consider an emergency plan, to the point that these attitudes become embedded in everyday practice.
But the transformation should be deeper than that, too. “The problem is partly about policy and technology and infrastructure, but it’s also about transformation of ourselves and how we conceive of ourselves,” he says. Henning points out the language Pope Francis used in Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home): “It’s not even ‘stewardship,’ but ‘care.’ . . . It’s about relationships between people and our home.”
Henning concludes: “Success is about more than just surviving or making late-stage consumer society suitable but transforming ourselves to see ourselves as part of life, as a part of a delicate, balanced creation.”
This article also appears in the October 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 10, pages 20-23). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
