Residents of Southside, a historically Black community that lies along Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, now live in an area recently recategorized as a “special hazard flood zone” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“When we get weeks of rain, people’s basements are flooding. If the creek overflows, it floods,” said Chavon Bunch, executive director of Southside Community Center, a neighborhood institution. “Long term, climate change is only getting worse. 

“We are certainly looking in horror at our friends in Asheville and the surrounding areas as they are experiencing such devastation from flooding that could only get worse as the hurricanes keep coming.”

Now Southside is one of three communities partnering with Cornell researchers to create “resilience hubs” – existing facilities that support communities during disasters and crises caused by climate change, pandemics and other emergencies – and also create a replicable playbook for other New York state neighborhoods to follow.

Starting Oct. 17, the communities, with the help of the Cornell team, will brainstorm to define the scope of their respective hubs.

Credit: Noël Heaney/Cornell University

“These resilience hubs are driven by what the community wants, and driven by what hazards they experience, what vulnerabilities they have in their communities, what priorities they have,” said Alistair Hayden, assistant professor of practice in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health in the College of Veterinary Medicine. He and Rebecca Morgenstern Brenner, senior lecturer in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, are co-leading the project. Along with Southside, they’ll be collaborating which the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe near the U.S./Canada border and the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca to create their own hubs.

A resilience hub, a new cornerstone of the climate justice movement that has been pioneered in a number of California towns, shifts power back to communities, Brenner said. She  was the recipient of the 2024 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship in recognition of the work she is doing with Ithaca's Southside Community Center. 

“It has to be a two-way street. There must be building trust and understanding and listening to the needs in these vulnerable communities,” she said. “What we really need is a replicable playbook, a workbook that other communities can pick up and customize.”

Added Hayden: “We want to test it out in New York state, gain a little more experience, and share that experience about how this might go in New York.”

Students contribute

Brenner will continue to include students in this work, building on her longstanding relationships with the three communities.

Depending on what the communities decide during the brainstorming meetings, students in her spring 2025 classes Environmental Justice and Policy, and Comparative Environmental Policy, will recommend policy-based solutions that focus on empowerment and environmental justice, she said.

In 2023, her students collaborated with Southside to assess the impact of the FEMA news and come up with policy to mitigate it. Residents who live in the new flood zone will have to purchase a federally backed mortgage on their homes in order to apply for flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program. Brenner’s research estimates that could add $7,000-$10,000 in new annual costs for homeowners.

The classes jointly held a public forum for regional decision-makers, government officials and community stakeholders to share their findings and policy recommendations. That effort resulted in an $800,000 investment in flood mitigation for the City of Ithaca, 90% of which will be covered through a FEMA grant, to create new flood control along Six Mile, Cascadilla and Fall creeks over the next three years.

Community needs

For its resilience hub, the Southside community’s priorities include providing a space during natural disasters for people to stay dry, to charge their phones, and for kids to play and blow off steam in the gym, Chavon Bunch said.

“We already do so much around feeding folks. If there were a huge flood, we would want to be able to house people, we would want to put in showers and a laundry,” she said. “We’re a close-knit neighborhood, so we’re going door to door to allow people to express their needs. Ideas are great, but we need the money to back the ideas.”

Each community will receive $15,000, funds Brenner and Hayden received from a two-year Climate Solutions Fund grant administered by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

At the scoping meetings, the Cornell team will describe what other communities have done. Later, they’ll facilitate meetings with community leaders. Generally hubs offer five types of support:

• services and programs that promote community preparedness;
• communications, especially during service disruptions;
• buildings and landscapes that can operate during a crisis;
• reliable backup power; and
• operations, with people and processes in place to help during a crisis.

A core concept is that hubs are existing facilities. “The whole point is it’s a place where the communities already like to go, and so it’s really about bolstering the resilience of existing spaces,” Hayden said. In California, for example, hubs have emerged at art galleries and tribal casinos.

That’s because government resources often take a long time to become available after crises. Communities can be more nimble, Hayden said. A good example is the Lahaina wildfire last year in Hawaii.

“Government support was delayed, and there were all sorts of stories about existing clubs and social organizations that knew how to throw barbecues, for example,” Hayden said. “So they could leverage that existing network to help mobilize food and other resources to people who needed them. Building this community-level resilience before a crisis can be really important for that.”

Whereas the model followed in historic emergency management focuses on top-down decision-making, resilience hubs focus on community needs. “Locally led is the direction that a lot of people are trying to go with emergency management, and this is a great model for that,” he said.

And that model dovetails with the systems approach of Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, Hayden said.

“It’s not about solving flooding risk by building flood barriers,” he said. “It’s about solving flooding risk by building community resilience, getting food to people who need it, building social ties, and supporting many aspects of a community in order to address more than just one need.”