Durham, NC residents living in areas most vulnerable to extreme heat and urban flooding often have the least access to emergency planning resources. “From Crisis to Readiness” addresses that gap directly — bringing community-led workshops and physical preparedness toolkits to neighborhoods that have been historically underserved by infrastructure investment and disaster response systems. The goal is to reach 150 residents in Durham’s highest-exposure areas over the course of twelve months, building both knowledge and the tangible capacity to act on it.

The project is led by Keshi Satterwhite at Planning Ahead. Rather than generic awareness campaigns, Keshi and her team co-design each workshop with residents in high-risk flood and heat zones, grounding the curriculum in public health science and hyper-local climate data. A four-part workshop series running from March through September is paired with the distribution of 150 physical resilience toolkits and the co-creation of community resource maps — practical, neighborhood-specific tools that remain useful long after the workshops conclude.

Connection is a deliberate part of the design. The workshops are structured to seed two community support networks, ensuring that when the next heat event or flood arrives, residents have relationships and shared plans already in place. A six-month follow-up with 25 participants will track behavior change, toolkit usage, and stress reduction during actual weather events — providing the longitudinal data needed to demonstrate what sustained preparedness looks like at the street level.

The project culminates in an open-source, replicable community preparedness guide, finalized by year-end and slated for presentation to Durham’s Environmental Affairs Board for integration into official outreach. The team intends to use the data gathered to seek regional funding to expand the model to other North Carolina communities.

CO2 Foundation sees this project as an example of community-level resilience work that does more than prepare people for immediate threats. By building public trust and neighborhood cohesion on the front lines of climate change — and producing a model that others can replicate — this work contributes to the broader social foundation that large-scale climate solutions will ultimately depend on.