Building Community Resilience: Strategies of Women and Nonbinary-led Grassroots Organisations in New York City

Overview

The impacts of climate change are not distributed equally around the globe, but in both the global North and South, they disproportionately affect poor and marginalised communities, exacerbating pre-existing intersectional inequalities. Women and marginalised groups have always been active in resilience-building efforts for the survival of their communities, and often at the forefront of place-based social and environmental justice struggles. Yet in the United States, grassroots women’s central role in community development and organising has often been invisible and taken for granted as an extension of their unpaid care work at home. Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have diminished the political capacity of nonprofit organisations and depoliticised participatory processes. This paper provides an overview of how nine women and nonbinary-led community-based organisations in New York City have resisted these dominant trends in the community development field. It explores the range of strategies and tools they use to challenge and reimagine community development policy and practice in this context. The examples are drawn from an online archive and teaching tool for community development education that highlights the role of grassroots women in community organising and resilience building (https://www.womenbuildcommunity.org/). I was one of the three city planning faculty from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York, who created this website and co-authored the cases with the leaders, based on in-depth interviews with the leaders, as well as some background research on the organisation and neighbourhood.