Celebrating Water Justice: NOLA Water Week
Katya
Forsyth
March 22, 2022
The Water Collaborative

Jessica Dandridge, Executive Director of the New Orleans’ Water Collaborative (TWC), a leading water justice non-profit, talks about New Orleans (NOLA) Water Week with palpable excitement and positivity. NOLA Water Week, which will be held in November, is the most recent iteration of TWC’s five year tradition of engaging community members around water justice through music, art, ceremony and education. This year, Dandridge is focusing on bringing personal and community healing to the forefront of the conversation around water justice, since water can be a traumatic topic for many New Orleans residents. From the destructive impacts of flooding and hurricanes, to the day-to-day struggles with water quality and affordability (which impact 8 out of 10 NOLA residents), cultivating a positive relationship with water is difficult — but also essential — for envisioning and creating a just and inspiring future. NOLA Water Week is about water justice, but even more so, it is an event to remind New Orleans and the greater Climate Justice movement of the visioning, healing, and excitement that drives our collective struggle for justice.

TWC has been hard at work developing water justice policy and green infrastructure interventions in New Orleans. They were instrumental in developing an amendment to the New Orleans Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance that eliminated potential exemptions from stormwater management requirements, and spearheaded the analysis of the proposed Federal Flood Risks Management Standard established by Executive Order 13690. They have also completed flood mapping for major thoroughfares in New Orleans, and piloted most of the original porous pavement projects across the city. The organization has also taken steps to engage allies both locally and nationally in the movement for justice. Their Edible Planter Box competition in early 2021 brought together food justice and water management professionals to judge designs proposed by architects from around the world. In 2020, TWC co-founded the People’s Water Project, a coalition of organizers, researchers, lawyers, advocates, and community members working together to combat water inequities and fight for bold, reparative changes that challenge corporate power and address issues of water affordability and accessibility. Together, the People’s Water Project has helped bring The Water Act to Congress with over 500 organizational endorsements and a goal of de-privatizing water and establishing it as a public good. If your organization is interested in joining the fight, you can sign on here.

Jessica Dandrige is Executive Director of the New Orleans Water Collaborative (TWC), a water justice organization that hosts NOLA Water Week. Photo from the Water Collaborative.


In addition to working with policy makers, TWC’s work bridges the gap between water-related government resources and the residents of New Orleans. New Orleans has long been a leader in water adaptation strategy and green infrastructure, especially since the majority of city-level expertise has its roots in community knowledge. In this way, the NOLA water justice ecosystem is exemplifying the values of participatory design: finding effective strategies to elevate and build grassroots knowledge with policymakers in order to affect meaningful and practical interventions. As we collectively emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and begin implementing principles of a just transition, New Orleans advocates and their Gulf South partners are leading the way when it comes to our relationship with water. 

Climate justice is an inherently intersectional crisis, and specific focus areas like water justice serve as an entry point to discuss the compounding structural implications of race, class, gender and corporate control on community health and abundance. Water is necessary for life, but it’s also easily taken for granted or overlooked in favor of flashier aspects of climate justice, like renewable energy. Since 1977, federal funding for water infrastructure has fallen by 82%, even as the combined price of water and sewage utilities have increased by 80% between 2010 and 2018. Drinking water is often poisoned by degrading lead and cast iron pipes, industrial runoff, combined sewer overflows, and pollution from harmful agricultural practices like pesticide and herbicide application. All of these issues emerge from privatization and corporate control over water and a lack of public investment in water infrastructure. These root causes pervade most of the climate justice movement’s struggles: corporate control over resources like land and water create the conditions for resource depletion, worker exploitation, and community degradation. Privatization creates a hierarchy of influence by prioritizing profit, or the upward redistribution of wealth while disempowering community members and exploited workers from affecting necessary changes in industry for their own health and well-being. In terms of water, corporate control is especially and immediately threatening, as fresh water is not only scarce, but also the fundamental building block of all human life. By contrast, The People’s Water Project focuses on water as a public good and pushes for water, accessibility, and affordability, and quality.

The lack of accountability in current water infrastructure is part of the reason why building collective action around water justice is an integral aspect of the climate justice struggle. Individuals are most likely to participate in collective struggles when they feel the injustice personally, that they have a shared group identity and purpose in addressing the injustice, and that collective action can be effective. TWC works at the intersection of all of these aspects — from education, to community building, to policy making. TWC’s work emphasizes that relationships with water are integral, joyful, and powerful parts of residents’ everyday life, and NOLA Water Week is a celebration and continuation of that work.

NOLA Water Week is an active practice in reframing water justice away from the dry academic analysis of water issues and towards a democratic co-imagining of a positive, liberating, and fun relationship between NOLA residents and the water around them. This relationship can be the force behind transformative, participatory reorganization and a blueprint for a future in which our public policies and infrastructure nurture a healing (rather than traumatic) experience with water. 

TWC nurtures this healing through fun and inspiring in-person events, like the installation of their first manufactured Edible Planter Box, press conferences with elected officials, and the closing “Drag Show on the Water.” For those who cannot attend in-person, they are also holding virtual webinars, such as “The Importance of Mutual Aid for a Sustainable Future,” “Green Infrastructure for a Sustainable Future,” and the “ABC’s of Coastal Restoration Workshop.” They have generously offered to share these webinars with the larger climate justice community via the Green New Deal Cities Resource Hub, a new project of the Global Center for Climate Justice.


If you or your organization is interested in supporting NOLA Water Week, The Water Collaborative is seeking sponsors through the end of September — you can reach them by emailing hannah@nolawater.org. You can also follow them on Instagram at @nolawater or subscribe to their newsletter to keep up with their work!

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