“We Are the Storm Now”:
20 Years After Katrina, Envisioning the Next 20 Years
By: Desiree Evans, Project South Communications Coordinator, August 2025 Newsletter
In our last two newsletters, we reflected on why Hurricane Katrina matters as a turning point for social movements, and on the lessons its aftermath continues to teach us. So now we ask:
What must we build before the next storm?
In many ways, the storms are already here, whether they come as climate disasters, political repression, economic collapse, or state violence. The U.S. South has long been a teacher of survival and transformation, shaping strategies to confront disaster and to imagine new futures.
From Black Reconstruction to the COVID-19 crisis, history shows us that our survival must be collective, and our liberation depends on what we can build together.
Inspired by the work of Southern organizers in the twenty years since Katrina, here are five visions for what social justice movements could build and sustain for the next twenty years:
1. A People’s Infrastructure of Care
When Katrina hit, the grassroots responded: neighbors in boats rescued one another, churches opened their doors to those without homes, and organizers from across the country mobilized supplies and volunteers to rebuild. Twenty years later, we know we cannot rely on failed state systems. To weather the storms ahead, we must strengthen community-controlled infrastructures of care: mutual aid networks, community medical clinics, food distribution hubs, housing cooperatives, seed banks, community gardens, and energy resilience projects.
2. Sanctuary Spaces & Liberated Zones
Katrina revealed the desperate need for anti-racist, community-centered spaces when disaster strikes. We must begin to establish more permanent sanctuary spaces and liberated zones across the South.
- Sanctuary Spaces are places where communities can gather, shelter, and organize. They are spaces where immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, and other marginalized communities can breathe freely, find safety, and live without fear of policing, surveillance, or erasure. These spaces are not only for emergencies, they are also places for community members to find culture, healing, and belonging.
- Liberated Zones act in similar ways. They are autonomous spaces where communities practice self-determination outside of, or in direct opposition to, the control of oppressive systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and state violence. Here, people can exercise collective governance, shared decision-making, and accountability beyond the reach of state institutions.
History offers us many examples of these spaces: Maroon communities formed by escaped enslaved Africans across the Americas; the Freedom Schools and organizing hubs of the Civil Rights Movement; the Zapatista autonomous zones in Chiapas, Mexico; and the “liberated zones” formed at mass encampments and mass convergences here in the United States over the last quarter century.
Our Southern movement work can continue this lineage by building community-led centers of survival and power where people grow food, coordinate mutual aid, practice healing justice, and prepare for disasters while modeling the new systems we need to survive and thrive.
3. Movement Governance
Disasters reveal what we already know: state power abandons us, but people’s power can save us. Movements can work together to create governance structures and parallel infrastructure rooted in people’s democracy to rebuild our world.
At Project South, we look to tools grounded in decades of practice. One of these is the People’s Movement Assembly (PMA), an organized gathering where communities come together to analyze problems, create shared vision, and commit to action. Rooted in participatory democracy, PMAs reject top-down leadership in favor of group-centered leadership that relies on dialogue, consensus, and builds collective power from the bottom up. PMAs are organizing strategies where movements can find alignment, share resources, and act in concert toward liberation.
Across history and around the world, assemblies like these have advanced self-determination, people power, and grassroots governance. PMAs remain one of the tools we can use now to build our 20-year battle plan.
To learn more, download our PMA Handbook.
4. Training & Preparedness Networks
We need to get ready and stay ready. A new generation of organizers must be equipped not only with political analysis but with vital survival skills. We need networks of trained first responders, culturally-based healers, and community protectors rooted in every region. From emergency medicine to digital security, from food sovereignty to disaster response, preparedness is movement work.
This could mean training community members in trauma care and conflict de-escalation, building emergency food shelters, and organizing neighborhood safety teams prepared for both natural disasters and political violence. It can mean reviving tools like ham radios to stay connected when cell towers fail and power goes out. This could also mean hosting yearly “go-bag” prep parties so your neighbors are equipped with ready-to-grab emergency kits when evacuation is necessary. Survival skills are necessary movement skills.
5. Cultural & Narrative Power
Katrina exposed the violence of mainstream media narratives. These dominant narratives dehumanized survivors and put our communities in further danger. To resist both violence and erasure, we must continue to build alternative media and cultural power. This means storytelling that expands the imagination of what is possible, challenges state violence, and affirms that our survival matters. Culture has always been a weapon in our struggle for liberation.
On the ground this can look like archiving oral histories, creating art, and building community-controlled media platforms. It can look like supporting youth and community-led radio, podcasts, zines, and social media projects where people tell their own stories. It can look like front porch story circles that become living archives, or livestreams that tell the truth when national media refuses.
Our stories demonstrate our power, and we must protect and amplify them. Strong communications strategy should not be an afterthought; it is core to building strong movement infrastructure.
Looking Forward
Katrina showed us the worst of what happens when governments abandon their people, and the best of what happens when people remember their power.
We are the storm now.
Let us be the shelter, too.