Program

See our Framework for Community-Driven Climate Adaptation

1. Leadership Development

We provide water leadership trainings and briefings for cohorts of 15 to 20 participants. Each cohort represents a different sector, geography, or stakeholder group.

With each cohort, the first step for the WLI team is to work closely with representatives of different stakeholder groups (Co-Creators) to define and shape cohort goals, values, curriculum content, activities, and learning environment.

Then, the WLI Team works with the Co-Creators to facilitate Water Leaders trainings and briefings for the Cohort. Cohort members take part in 10-15 hours of curriculum, building knowledge and skills through field trips, story sharing, and hands-on learning modules.

Cohorts conclude with participants developing and implementing Community Projects through which they bring key elements of what they’ve gained through Water Leaders back to their networks and neighborhoods.

“We have to let contradictions & problems sit with us a while before jumping to conclusions about what
we should be advocating for.”

— WLI Participant

2. Inclusive Planning

Our goal is to build the capacity of community and sector leaders, while building mutual respect and collaboration across sectors and between resilience planners, scientists, policy makers, and community members.

In taking part, resilience planners and scientists strengthen their ties to community leaders across the city, which leads to opportunities for testing quantitative data against lived experiences, in order to make community-informed recommendations to planning bodies.

WLI graduates belong to a regional network of Water Leaders who are active across a range of sectors and realms of advocacy. They are prepared to work alongside fellow citizens, technical experts, and policy makers in tackling big questions, such as:

• What forms of resilience are most important to New Orleanians? 

• What level of funding for pumps and levees is acceptable to residents? For green infrastructure?  

• What are community priorities in regards to waterfront access and recreation? 

Water Leaders Institute advises partners on planning and design methodologies that support the integration and empowerment of community voices in public planning processes and policy making. With highly informed community leaders at the planning table, we can shift the way in which resilience planning outputs are understood by the public. 

3. Decision Making

The goal of Water Leaders is to improve governance and decision-making processes in order to improve safety, resilience, and environmental quality through leadership development and inclusive planning practices. This work is both top down and bottom up. 

Top down: Success will take the form of more equitable and effective policies that govern our waterways and waterfronts, streetscapes, park landscapes, transportation systems, land use, housing, development, disaster response, disaster recovery, and day-to-day water management practices. Public policies, programs, and executive actions will reflect the knowledge, concerns, needs, and ideas of diverse community leaders.

Bottom up: Success will also take the form of community-driven solutions, with citizens driving household, neighborhood, and city-wide initiatives that are rooted in the knowledge, capacities, and aspirations of New Orleanians and the communities to which they belong. 

Whether citizens choose to tear up concrete, advocate for new land use policies, or engage in wetlands plantings, these actions will be rooted in 1) a sense of agency for each citizen regardless of age, race, sexual orientation, background, occupation; and 2) an understanding that each individual effort is part of a collective narrative that we are writing as we learn and relearn how to make our home here in the delta.