A Climate Action Network for New York City Housing Authority 

Ten years after Hurricane Sandy devastated public housing developments in NYC’s coastal communities, the Authority overseeing repairs and improvements in these developments, wondered how their climate adaptation and resiliency efforts were registering with tenants.

In 2021, my team and I led an engagement process for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which houses over 400,000 New Yorkers in 302 developments across the five boroughs. Working with Kinetic Communities, we recruited and compensated tenants from 14 different public housing developments to participate in a Climate and Sustainability focus group. 

For our outreach campaign to tenants, I worked with a designer on my team to create a dynamic, colorful illustration that evoked the core tenets of the project—sustainability, community, and climate and social resiliency. We built an engaging project website with information for prospective participants, and developed a set of digital and print recruitment materials, which incorporated the artwork.

With a diverse group of tenants in place, we planned and facilitated a 5-part virtual workshop series that introduced participants to NYCHA’s recent sustainability and climate resilience efforts, and provided a space to discuss how their needs could be better incorporated into the plans. I worked with my team to build interactive and informative workshops, and created engaging presentations to guide each session.

Participants left feeling overwhelmingly positive about being included in the process, about the knowledge they had gained, and about their overall perception of NYCHA.

To ensure transparency and awareness beyond the immediate focus group, I also co-led the creation of two public-facing reports for NYCHA that detailed capital improvements made over the previous decade and outlined NYCHA’s ongoing climate adaptation plans.