Katrina20

PROJECT SOUTH AND KATRINA 20 ORGANIZING

“We are in a time of fundamental shifts. The future is contested.”
– Emery Wright, Project South

KATRINA AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT TURNING POINT

Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast crisis that unfolded in 2005 marked a major social movement turning point in the United States. The disaster unveiled the intersecting forces of white supremacy, predatory capitalism, and government abandonment that continue to endanger our communities today. But Katrina also remains a lasting testament to the power of collective action.

In the vacuum of state support, it was grassroots communities who mobilized to care for one another, who organized relief, who envisioned recovery on their own terms. Grassroots organizers, mutual aid networks, and cultural workers across the United States rose up in response to Katrina, filling the gaps left by government abandonment. Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class communities became both the first responders and the long-term visionaries, building solidarity networks, free clinics, and organizing in the ruins of the floodwaters.

This turning point seeded a generation of movement infrastructure. Katrina’s shadow stretched far beyond the United States, connecting the Gulf South to global struggles over climate migration, land dispossession, and survival in an era of accelerating crisis.

For many of us in the movement during that time, Katrina was a call to action, a devastating reminder of how deeply structural racism, poverty, and environmental neglect could converge in a single catastrophe. The storm and its aftermath revealed how much work still needed to be done to build the movement infrastructure necessary to protect our communities.

BUILDING PEOPLE’S POWER

Today, as finance capitalists, tech oligarchs, christian nationalists, and white supremacists consolidate forces, social justice movements must find new pathways to align and build a united front against fascism. 

20 years of lessons from frontline resistance demonstrate that social movements will be a primary vehicle to rebuild our world. The development of social movement infrastructure and governance, particularly through People’s Movement Assemblies, is a critical organizing strategy to practice people’s governance and produce coordinated action plans. 

Over the last 20 years, Southern communities have faced the direct impacts of climate disaster and contended with rising state repression in a region where public infrastructure protections have been decimated for generations. The Southern Movement Assembly (SMA) is one of several formations that originated in the aftermath of Katrina as a way to collaborate beyond single-issues, to practice movement governance, and to grow a regional force of organizations to build power.

As a young woman from Appalachia declared at the first SMA in Lowndes County, Alabama in 2012: “We cannot do this alone. And we don’t want to.”  

By studying social movement history, we know that several major convenings of movement leadership such as the Bandung Conference (1955), the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), the Pan-African Congresses, the Black Radical Congress (1998), the Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice (SNEEJ) gathering (1996), and the World People’s Conference on Climate Change (2010) produced critical agreements like the Black Radical Congress Principles of Unity, the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, and the Cochabamba Agreement. 

Southern leadership was guided by this history to use the PMA process to produce our own cross-movement agreements that articulate shared principles and a shared course of action to resist and build for the next 20 years. 

THE CALL TO ACTION

In lead up to the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Project South led a call to Southern movement leadership to convene a unique People’s Movement Assembly in the summer of 2025 to draw from the lessons of Hurricane Katrina over the last 20 years, and to recognize Katrina as a social movement turning point full of loss, reckoning, and resistance.

The Katrina 20 People’s Movement Assembly was born as a collaborative project co-facilitated by Southern-based organizations Project South, Alternate ROOTS, Highlander Center, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, Blueprint NC, and the Jubilee Community Center in Montgomery, AL, in alignment with Taproot Earth and the Katrina 20 Local Planning Committee, which represents hundreds of organizers around the Gulf South.

The assembly process brought together frontline organizers, cultural workers, and community leaders to reflect on two decades of resistance and to chart the next 20 years of social movement power, infrastructure, and governance.

Over the summer of 2025, Project South connected with more than 600 frontline organizers, cultural workers, strategists, and community leaders to gather reflections and visions. We held 2 Virtual Assemblies, where over 200 people participated. Over 150 people all around the country shared with us their Lessons from Katrina. Fifty organizational leaders participated in the Synthesis Team in-person meeting, and over 200 people participated in the in-person PMA on August 27th in New Orleans.

During this process we worked to address three questions: 

• What lessons from Katrina have shaped the past 20 years of organizing and movement building?
  What are the current threats and opportunities our communities face?
  What infrastructure do we need to survive and win over the next 20 years?

In New Orleans these questions were synthesized to produce a set of 10 cross-movement agreements that articulate our shared principles and a shared course of action to resist fascism and build power for the next 20 years. 

Southern organizations believe that there is power in rooting our strategies for this current period in movement history, in particular the lessons we all learned during the social movement turning point of Katrina and its aftermath. We recognize that Katrina exposed some of the worst of the economic, racist, and predatory systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and the state, but Katrina was not the enemy.

Katrina was a teacher who showed us how the enemy moves, and it is up to us to learn the lessons and apply them today—to prepare not just to survive the many storms we face today, but to win.

As Brother Malik Rahim reminded us during our second virtual assembly, this anniversary is a wake up call and a call to action. To remember and rebuild our world with purpose.

KATRINA 20 SOLIDARITY STATEMENT

During the summer of 2025, we also invited local, regional, and national groups to sign a Statement of Solidarity to support the work of the Katrina 20 Local Organizing Committee, which represents the frontlines most impacted by Hurricane Katrina across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The local committee met for over a year to plan the Katrina 20 Week of Action that organized over 100 community events across 3 states over 7 days and started a Community-Controlled Fund to support next steps. More than 250 organizations from across the country signed the statement. 

FOR MORE ON OUR K20 VISION, CHECK OUT OUR SUMMER 2025 NEWSLETTER ARTICLES:

• Hurricane Katrina Was the Blueprint: 20 Years of Memory, Movement, and Momentum
• Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned in the Aftermath
• “We Are the Storm Now”: 20 Years After Katrina, Envisioning the Next 20 Years 

THE KATRINA 20 PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY 

During the K20 Assembly, we came together to define and implement movement infrastructure. Together, we named its functions, affirmed our shared visions, and recognized both the historical and present urgency of building what we need to survive and to win.

We affirmed the K20 Movement Agreements drawing from the spirit of other historic commitments to collective struggle. Out of this lineage, we synthesized and affirmed ten core practices.

We committed not only to carry them forward, but to use them as the foundation for organizing future assemblies and building toward an Assembly of Assemblies, led from the South, and rooted in solidarity with national and global movements.

Read the 10 agreements below:

RESOURCES FROM THE K20 PMA PROCESS:

• K20 ASSEMBLY SLIDES (in pdf): Presentation of the Situational Analysis and 10 Agreements
• K20 DIGITAL BINDER (google drive link): Includes historical movement agreements, lessons from Katrina shared by over 100 people, and organizing tools for this moment.
• K20 LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE WEBSITE: The committee connected community members in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to create a shared vision of commemoration and power-building around the 20th anniversary.
• K20 PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY FINAL REPORT (in pdf): The report synthesizes the lessons, practices, and strategies that were cultivated through the K20 PMA process, with lessons for how to use the K20 agreements in your own work.