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The group lost files, contact information, and other documents. Hardest of all, it lost a community gathering space just when it was needed the most. Rogue Climate had to move its mutual-aid efforts because a property owner did not want them setting up in the parking lot.
“It’s really ironic to be a climate-justice organization and have our building burned down from a climate-change fueled fire,” Sol says.
Climate change is creating more volatile, extreme, and unpredictable disasters. Nonprofits are vulnerable to these changes in myriad ways. In the worst cases, lives and buildings are at risk. Many organizations, like Rogue Climate, rent. While they can make changes to their operations and policies, there is little they can do to adapt their buildings to meet the rising threats. But groups that own or are constructing buildings can take steps to make those structures more resilient to climate-change driven risk.
Too often organizations are reacting to a recent disaster, be it fire, flood, or storm, and try to quickly address a deficit, says Stephanie Shapiro, co-founder of Environment and Culture Partners, a nonprofit that consults with museums, zoos, and other cultural institutions. It would be better, she says, if organizations were proactive and sought to identify potential risks before they cause real harm whenever possible.
Climate Resilient Resources for Cultural Heritage, a project started in 2022, is working to create interactive maps to help nonprofits assess the current and modeled future climate risks they face. The project is also building tools to help groups better understand how they can respond to those potential risks and how climate-driven changes may impact their communities, says Shapiro, whose group is part of the collaborative working on the project.
“We really like to look at resiliency as being able to not just survive but thrive through something happening,” she says. Organizations can do that by understanding and adapting to local risks and trying to reduce their own carbon footprint, she adds.
The climate risks are abundantly clear in south Florida. When Hurricane Irma hit the state in 2017, at least 88 buildings were destroyed in Collier County. More than 1,500 homes were seriously damaged. The hurricane caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just that small area.
So when the Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance, located in Collier County, looked for property to build low-income housing, hurricanes and the flooding that often follows were top of mind. Immokolee’s lowest-income residents, many of them undocumented immigrants, often live in trailers with holes in the floors large enough for snakes, rodents, and insects to enter. Residents often pay as much as 80 percent of their monthly income for this substandard housing, says Alan Penick, the group’s treasurer.
The alliance found a parcel of land big enough for eight 16-unit apartment buildings and a community center. One key to the organization’s plan: When workers began grading the site, they made sure the pads for the buildings were raised safely above the flood plain. The new flood map looks like a doughnut, with the housing development as an island of safety in the middle, Penick says.
The group designed the site to absorb lots of water to give the development the best chance to avoid flooding. Workers dug out a large retention pond that only fills with water when it rains. Buildings will have space between them. The complex has about an acre and half of green space, thanks to land it had to set aside for the Florida scrub-jay, a threatened species of bird native to the state. But that undeveloped land also ensures that rainwater can sink back into the ground rather than run off and cause flooding. There’s also a community garden, a playground, and soccer field, all of which improve drainage.
The buildings are constructed to withstand 155 mile-an-hour winds — the same standard as a hurricane center. They consist of two stories of concrete blocks filled with liquid concrete. The floor of the second story is precast concrete rather than wood, and the walls between units are also concrete block. The buildings are fire, mold, and termite resistant.
The project’s ability to withstand increasingly violent storms was a key goal, Penick says. No one benefits from housing at risk of serious damage or outright destruction in the next hurricane. “Our goal from day one is we want to build it, we want to own it forever, and we want it to be low-income forever,” he says. “Part of that you can see in the structure.”
Other nonprofits are thinking about how shifts in the climate might cause them to use their buildings differently than they do today.
The Sabathani Community Center in Minneapolis, which has spent significant time and money to reduce its carbon footprint, is starting to think about using its building as a cooling center. With traditionally mild summers, many homes and apartments in Minnesota don’t have air conditioning. But heat waves are increasingly common there. By July 26 of this year, the city already had 18 days above 90 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The group also wants to plant more trees to reduce the heat-island effect in the neighborhood.
“Even if we were able to solve [climate change] tomorrow, we still have to deal with the carbon that’s been released into the atmosphere for generations to come,” says Janet Brown, who works as a contractor with the group on fundraising and numerous energy-efficiency projects. “We need to think about the communities that are going to be most impacted and what those impacts are going to be.”
That combination of curbing carbon emissions and adapting to environmental changes is important, says Sarah Christiansen, the Midwest climate and energy program director for the McKnight Foundation. It addresses both the systemic changes necessary to ultimately reduce climate change, while responding to the real needs of communities and people.
In the 1980s, the United States went an average of 82 days between disasters that caused a billion dollars of damage or more, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. From 2017 to 2022, the time between such disasters dropped to just 18 days. Large, expensive disasters are more frequent, hitting more populated areas and lasting longer.
Climate change has significantly altered the way Team Rubicon works, says Art delaCruz, CEO of the disaster-recovery group.
The organization, which mobilizes veterans to respond to crises, has changed the materials it uses when it helps victims rebuild in the wake of a flood. Rather than using fiberglass insulation, which is ruined by water, it now uses insulation made from old blue jeans that can be dried out and reused. The group rebuilds homes with vinyl wainscoting, which can be removed, dried, and reinstalled, rather than sheetrock, which must be thrown out after it gets wet. The change in materials is an acknowledgment that extreme storms and flooding will be back sooner rather than later.
In the western United States, Team Rubicon is trying to get ahead of disasters. Its military volunteers are thinning brush and trees around fire-prone communities in the hopes that it will deter fires and make them easier to fight if they do erupt. The organization is also using electric and hybrid pickup trucks donated by Ford that have large battery capacity so they can charge things like electric chainsaws, power a home, and even run a mobile command center from one of the trucks.
“Now you have a truck that can actually recharge batteries that you’re going to use,” delaCruz says. “It fundamentally begins to change the game for what you can do.”
Rogue Climate didn’t own its building, so many of the changes it has made since the fire have been procedural. The organization has taken measures to prepare better for the next disaster: The risk of future fire is just something you have to live with, its executive director Sol says. Rogue has digitized its documents and done emergency-preparedness training for staff so they are better prepared for an evacuation, for example. The group now has a crisis-management plan that will help it respond better to different types of disasters.
“Over the last two years, we have had to reprioritize and make space to do the emergency preparedness and trainings for ourselves and also for the community,” Sol says.
The fire led the group to do some advocacy work as well. Rogue recently worked with a coalition of organizations to advocate for a $10 million state fund for resiliency hubs, places where people can come during an emergency that have resilient power sources and provide resources to people in need.
The organization found new office space in a former store in a strip mall. It’s large enough to hold community meetings, but heat waves continue to be a problem. Last year, the group had to cancel several community meetings because the air conditioning was broken and the landlord couldn’t get it fixed.
Sol is frustrated that she has to rely on a landlord for basics like air conditioning during the Pacific Northwest’s increasingly common heat waves. Her group is small, and even if it had the resources to buy, buildings are scarce in her town, particularly after so many burned down during the fire. But, she says, the loss has driven home why owning is important.
“I really do hope that more community organizations and smaller nonprofits can own their own buildings so that they really can be resilient in times of disaster,” she says. “Owning a building is an important community and climate-resilience strategy so that groups can have some self-determination around how they serve the community in times of crisis.”
