Resilience Hubs
What are Resilience Hubs?
Resilience hubs are trusted, community-serving facilities that support communities in everyday life and before, during, and after an emergency. Although climate change affects everyone, low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionally impacted by climate-related events. Resilience hubs help neighbors access resources and services and build trust and community cohesion in their day-to-day lives.
What is Seattle Doing?
The future Citywide Resilience Hub Plan will guide how the City assists and supports a network of resilience hubs. The Office of Sustainability and Environment is working with community partners and City agencies to develop a Citywide Resilience Hub Plan. The plan will include recommendations on how the City can assist and support a network of resilience hubs. Community engagement will take place in spring/summer 2024.
Community Engagement Cohort and Design Team
A team of community-based consultants with expertise in art, science, academia, community organizing, policy and advocacy, and climate justice are creating and leading engagement activities.
Community engagement goals are to share information with frontline communities about resilience hubs and the Citywide Resilience Hub Plan, provide meaningful opportunities to inform the Plan, and build support for resilience hubs and empower communities to advocate for them.
Debolina Banerjee(she/hers) is a Senior Climate Policy Manager at Puget Sound Sage. Her work includes research-based analysis of climate policies, campaign support on climate justice issues, and building power within Sage’s local and statewide climate coalitions. Debolina has research experience in transit-oriented development, the environmental impacts of unorganized industries and project management for real estate development. In addition, she has extensive experience working with grassroots activists and marginalized communities in India organizing for social justice around food, sustainable agriculture, clean environment, community development and women’s empowerment.
Neli Jasuja (she/they) is passionate about creating space for intergenerational and intersectional BIPOC community to access liberation in relationship with the Earth and manifest sustainable systems of care for people and planet. They work at Young Women Empowered (Y-WE) as the Environmental Justice Programs Manager and launched the Y-WE Grow youth program focused on farming, food justice, and land-based healing at Marra Farm in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle in 2019. Outside of Y-WE, Neli has organized with Got Green, the Climate Justice for Black Lives Collective, and fellow API community around BIPOC solidarity.
Nancy Huizar (they/them) is the founder of NH Consulting and is a South Seattle native with leadership experience in environmental justice, research, policy, community organizing, and education and outreach. They believe that everything we are doing to further environmental justice needs to address and connect to how people — particularly people of color — are impacted.
Mita Mahato (she/her) is a Seattle-based comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. In joining fragments of used and discarded materials—newspaper, maps, mail ads, packaging scraps—her work dramatizes entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism. She has worked with a number of organizations to co-develop programs and projects that leverage art toward environmental justice and critical land relations. Her comic book collaboration with Seattle and King County Public Health, "Climate Changes Health," has been published in several languages. Additionally, her poetry comix have appeared in places including Ecotone, Shenandoah, Iterant, and AMNLY, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades. Her next book, Arctic Play, is forthcoming in October 2024 from The 3rd Thing. Her mother was Prem, born in Bihar. Her father was Basanta, born in Bengal. A career educator and Black Earth Institute Fellow, she teaches comics and poetry at all levels.
Amir Sheikh (he/him) is a transdisciplinary urban environmental researcher, co-curator, and collaboration builder. He works at the intersection of urban ecology, cultural landscapes, and planning to collectively examine critical questions about our spatial relationships to landscapes for informing a just and equitable future. He is involved in a range of community-responsive environmental planning, cultural landscape, and spatial storytelling projects. At the University of Washington, he has co-created a variety of materials about Seattle’s environmental and urban histories through the Waterlines Project. He has also contributed to projects ranging from community-based issues around gentrification to research investigating the relationships between the built environment and public health, and to regional historical ecological mapping for guiding issues related to restoration, resiliency, and co-management efforts. He is passionate about amplifying how communities experience and think about place especially through the lens of history by co-creating and co-producing knowledge utilizing multiple ways of knowing and creative collaborations with the hope that this can lead to increased intersectional awareness, dialogue, and ultimately greater equitable and just governance between communities, land, water, & other species. Amir has been wandering the mossy sidewalks of this city for 30 years.
Rishi Sugla (he/him) is a research scientist at the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group. His work combines marine ecology, paleoclimatology, environmental justice, and storytelling as a documentary filmmaker. He has worked closely with frontline communities struggling against extractive industries and climate impacts to build collective power. Rishi is interested in co-created knowledge and research that supports climate adaptation with community, community science and technology, and systems based thinking applied to social movements and climate justice. He also works on radical futurisms centered on climate justice, and storytelling as a tool to build collective power. In his free time, Rishi enjoys getting his hands in dirt, social dancing with mixed success, plotting a new adventure, being in community, and writing.