Organizing for Survival in an Era of Climate Chaos

Our current infrastructure was built for a world that no longer exists. How do we build the power to survive when the systems we depend on fail us? In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with guests Keyante Aytch, Alice Liu, and Brandon Bunt about the tools and relationships that can help make communities resilient — from mesh networks and off-grid solar to neighborhood disaster hubs.

Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes.

Today, we’re talking about what it means to build communities that can weather catastrophe — not simply by stockpiling supplies or preparing as individuals, but by creating relationships, skills, and infrastructure that allow people to take care of one another and exercise control over the systems their lives depend on.

My guests are Keyante Aytch, Alice Liu, and Brandon Bunt, three participants in Climate Mobilization Project’s National Climate Survival Incubator. Keyante is a Chicago-based solar installer who is building off-grid energy systems at community gardens and urban farms. Alice works with West Street Recovery in Houston, where neighborhood-based disaster hubs combine material preparedness with community organizing. And Brandon runs Kiau Technologies, an ecological technology studio developing decentralized tools for farmers, including solar-powered soil sensors and communications systems designed around autonomy and data sovereignty.

This conversation was recorded before the severe storms that struck Northwest Indiana on August 11. In Gary, a predominantly Black city, more than 38,000 utility customers lost power, and some residents went nearly two weeks without electricity. The prolonged blackout disrupted access to food, medicine, communications, and other necessities, while creating especially dangerous conditions for people who rely on electricity for medical care.We won’t be discussing that disaster directly in this episode, but I encourage listeners to listen to this conversation while thinking about what the people of Gary endured — and about what forms of preparedness and infrastructure will allow our communities to care for one another when the systems we depend on fail us.

That work is at the heart of what Keyante, Alice, and Brandon are building. In this episode, we talk about neighborhood disaster hubs, community-controlled solar power, food and energy sovereignty, decentralized communications, and what becomes possible when we stop thinking of resilience as an individual responsibility and start treating it as a collective project. Their work also raises a larger political question: What kinds of power can communities build when they have greater control over the systems that sustain everyday life?

All three of my guests will also be featured in an upcoming event that I’m participating in with Climate Mobilization Project Project. On September 17, they’re hosting Before the Storm, a free online national town hall focused on the 2026 Super El Niño, grassroots climate resilience, and movement strategy in an era of escalating climate disruption and authoritarianism. Keyante, Alice, and Brandon will be sharing lessons from the resilience projects they’re building, and I’ll be joining Daniel Aldana Cohen, co-author of A Planet to Win, for a conversation about political power, local ownership, and where movements need to evolve in the years ahead.

The event is September 17 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Eastern, or 6 to 7:30 Central. You can find the registration link in the show notes.

For now, I hope you’ll sit with what my guests have to say about the infrastructures we inherit, the infrastructures we build, and the kinds of relationships that might help us survive what’s coming while creating something better.

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[musical interlude]

Kelly Hayes: Keyante, Alice, Brandon, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Alice Liu: Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Keyante Aytch: Thank you.

Brandon Bunt: Thank you for having us.

Keyante Aytch: Yeah, this is great.

Kelly Hayes: How are you all doing today?

Keyante Aytch: Solid, solid. Feeling pretty well. It’s a beautiful day in August in the summertime. Rocking and rolling.

Brandon Bunt: I’m based in Denver and we’ve had an exceptionally hot and dry summer, and I just finished moving to a new space, so it’s been a little bit tough, but I’m very excited about the new space. It’s a live-work studio that I live in, but also now the headquarters of our company. So it’s been hard, but exciting nonetheless.

Alice Liu: And I’m calling in from Houston. It is a rainy day over here. It’s also been super hot, so the rain is a nice break from the summer heat.

Kelly Hayes: Well I am so happy to be in conversation with you all today. Could each of you tell the audience a bit about yourselves and the work you do?

Keyante Aytch: Sure thing. So again, I’m Keyante Aytch from Chicago as well, Kelly. So I am a solar installer by trade. I’ve been in this particular industry for about six years now, a little over half a decade. And the work that I do now through my contracting services is installing what are called off-grid or standalone energy systems in community gardens and urban farms. And through my current project, I am developing an emergency response program and plan to be able to utilize these energy systems to support the nearby residents at these sites during power outages.

Alice Liu: Hey, you all. My name is Alice. I am based in Houston, and I have been working with a disaster recovery organization called West Street Recovery since 2020. So it’s been six years. West Street Recovery is a grassroots project that started in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, one of the country’s deadliest and most costly natural disasters to date. It responded out of the total lack of governmental support to individuals and neighborhoods in crisis. And now, a full nine years later, we run a hyper-local disaster response and preparedness program, and we also use that as the basis for building power to improve policy for climate resilience here in Houston.

Brandon Bunt: Hi, I’m Brandon. I run Kiau Technologies, what we’ve been calling an ecological technology studio. We build solar-powered soil sensors that communicate over mesh networks for small and diversified farms, mostly in water-scarce parts of the West. I grew up caring about food justice and about how healthy food actually reaches people, and I studied engineering because I wanted to build tools that could act on that.

Our work spans a lot of areas. Of course, it’s taken me a while to find the thread tying our seemingly separate but actually related projects together. And what I’ve landed on is autonomy. Most technology is built to make life more convenient, and we’re building tools to help people become more autonomous, protect the resources of the land that they’re on, and reclaim control over their own decisions and attention with their own data. So soil moisture sensing is where we started, but not where we’re stopping.

Kelly Hayes: I want to start with disaster response and community power. Alice, West Street Recovery describes disaster recovery as a way to build community power. What does that look like in practice?

Alice Liu: Yeah, so for West Street, since the start of our project, we have had a dual approach to what we believe effective disaster response has to entail. And that’s number one, intervening in the material conditions that precede and follow a disaster, especially here in Houston. We’re on the Gulf Coast, we’re in the Gulf South, and we’re facing some of those shared political conditions with other states here in the South. And that means that disasters are followed by deep government neglect, and they’re also preceded by conditions of existing economic precarity.

So for us, when we are in pursuit of this goal of building community power and increasing community autonomy on the front lines of the climate crisis, first and foremost, that looks like making sure people have a safe home to live in, people have food on the table because economic hardship and survival is not an accident. It’s politically intentional. We see with cutting federal food stamps, hunger, not having housing, all of these things are weaponized because when people are struggling, that makes it harder to carve out time to join a political project and resist the erosion of our rights that’s happening here in the U.S.

So for us, we started as mainly a home repair project, which means that when homes are flooded, oftentimes the most vulnerable and low-income neighborhoods are en masse, denied from federal recovery programs like FEMA, which are designed to support the middle class. And we saw after Hurricane Harvey that the average wealth of white households here in the city actually increased after this disaster because of the way that federal aid and insurance operated and was distributed.

So West Street Recovery, we are based in Northeast Houston, and we repair homes free of charge for low-income houses that are denied and sort of fall through the cracks of these other programs. And that’s step one of bringing people into our community. We have a sister organization called the Northeast Action Collective, which is almost entirely made up of disaster survivors, whether that’s Hurricane Harvey or the three or four other disasters that have happened since then. And because people are able to stay in their homes because they’re not being displaced following an ice storm or a power outage or a flood, this is sort of increasing the community’s social resilience.

And it also is a really strong foundation of trust to where we get to know each other on the ground in the streets, literally shoveling dirt out of drains, generally just getting really dirty. And then from there, we try to facilitate conversations about, okay, your home was flooded, you were unable to afford repair. Also, you’ve been paying taxes in this city for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and your streets look absolutely horrible. So if the money isn’t going towards infrastructure, where is that money going?

Generally politicizing the disaster. And yeah, that’s really the base of the community group that we organize with. And in practice, it means that we have about 100 to 150 people now across the city who every year, there’s multiple campaign moments that we mobilize around. And over the past five years, we’ve been able to shift over 100 million dollars in the local city budget to go towards more equitable climate resilience, sort of flood infrastructure that isn’t just protecting the richest neighborhoods, but is actually being built in the most vulnerable parts of the city that need it the most.

Kelly Hayes: That sounds like powerful work. You’ve talked about disaster response as both meeting people’s immediate needs and creating the relationships that make organizing possible. Can you tell us how West Street Recovery’s hub homes work? What have you learned about what people need in order to take care of one another during a crisis?

Alice Liu: Yeah, absolutely. So West Street Recovery’s hub homes basically serve as hyper-local disaster preparedness and response centers that are located in people’s homes and backyards. So currently, we have seven established hub homes across Northeast Houston and are also currently operating a hub school, where we’re training four additional hub home leaders to also create hubs in their own neighborhoods. Each hub is equipped with backup solar panels and batteries so that they are operational and can serve as a gathering space and sort of crisis center when and if the power goes out.

Hubs are also equipped with essential rescue supplies, medical equipment, and food and some kind of backup water system. So that’s the physical infrastructure side of the hub, but just as important is building up the social infrastructure. So each hub house leader is generally already identified as a community leader who has deep roots and connections within their neighborhood. But oftentimes, we found during disasters, people who really need help might not have the level of trust to actually ask for help and communicate their needs.

There’s such a huge variety of needs that, unless you’re working in disaster response, it might be hard to think of. A lot of our members are blind. Most of our members are older residents. They might require CPAP machines, other medical equipment that means that even a relatively brief power outage can be life-threatening. So each hub is generally adapted to the needs of that specific neighborhood or street. And it’s also the center of trainings, like trainings for how to muck a house, first aid and CPR, essential medical response trainings.Trainings for how to set up a rain garden to prevent flooding in your own yard.

And what we’ve learned from building these neighborhood-based response infrastructure is that how individuals’ households and neighborhoods respond to disasters is generally reflective and indicative of how we care for each other and treat each other outside of disasters. Meaning that these moments of crisis, whether that’s a climate crisis or a political crisis, are moments that are reflective of our general standards for what it means to be in community. And that means having long-standing relationships that continue outside of moments of crisis, knowing each other on a deeper level than might be the baseline in our society right now.

And also, just that it’s really important to have these concrete skills, whether that’s medical skills, whether that’s honestly, firing up a grill and cooking food for your neighborhood. I think just basically finding your place and doing that work is a process of both getting to know yourself and also getting to know others.

Kelly Hayes: That is so damn impressive. Before we continue, I want to give listeners a little more context about how the three of you came into conversation with one another. You’re all part of Climate Mobilization Project Project’s National Climate Survival Incubator. Could one of you tell us a little about the cohort and what that experience has looked like?

Keyante Aytch: I’ll do it. Yes, we do know each other. It’s a very enjoyable collective of folks that I enjoy seeing. I’m enjoying being in spaces with Alice and Brandon again. We’re on virtual space once a month, and then we were all together earlier this year for a retreat. So Climate Mobilization Project Project has assembled a climate survival cohort. I believe there are … are there 17 of us or somewhere around there? And the whole goal is different orgs or individuals from across the country who are all in some form or capacity, focused on climate survival, community resilience, and things of that nature that are helping maintain stability in our communities in times of need, whether natural disasters or political. And so a part of this … our main activities are monthly Zoom meets, going through different workshops, different lessons, each of us sharing our own individual projects and workshopping through different ideas to, as the phrase goes, steel sharpening steel, because there’s a lot of overlap between all of our different projects and ideas and things that we’re working on.

So overall, it is focused on that resiliency and that climate response piece. And overall, just a beautiful group of human beings, all nerds at a summer camp is what I would call it, because that’s what it was like when we were all physically together in Kentucky a couple of months ago, and really a group of inspirational people doing some amazing work across the country.

Kelly Hayes: Keyante, I want to turn to the work you’re doing here in Chicago. You’ve installed off-grid energy systems at community gardens and urban farms around the city. Why have those spaces been such a focus of your work?

Keyante Aytch: Yeah. So community gardens, urban farms are in this era of life, because I couldn’t necessarily speak on maybe things that are happening in the ’90s or even beforehand. But in this era of the mid to late 2000s, we’re seeing a resurgence or a surge of locally grown food hubs and conversations around land sovereignty where the question is being asked, what does land that is owned and operated by community, what is it able to do? Are we to build more Amazon warehouses and things of the sorts and data centers, or are we to use that land for food growing?

And with that conversation of food growing, there is this natural relationship to energy sovereignty. They talk about land sovereignty, food sovereignty. And so energy sovereignty ties in so well with the conversation. And so when I work with community gardens and urban farms, it makes so much sense because here are these hubs, these physical spaces where community’s already congregating, already around the idea of food, already around the idea of resiliency and ownership that is decentralized from greater, larger institutions.

This conversation of energy just complements the piece of, like I said, food sovereignty where through solar and battery technology and even down the line, other technologies, wind technologies, biofuels and things of the sorts, we are able to have these areas that are hubs of resiliency, both food and energy. So it makes a very good partnership. Also in a literal sense, these are places and spaces that don’t have existing electricity already. So when clients are at that point, where they’re looking to have electrical infrastructure on their site to add to the productivity and operations that they have of growing and community facilitation and whatnot.

There is that conversation of do we have a typical ComEd hookup, which is our local utility here in Chicago, or what does it look like to build our own electrical infrastructure? Again, utilizing the solar and battery technology to be completely self-reliant and resilient.

Kelly Hayes: In 2023, during a four-day power outage in Englewood, a neighborhood in Chicago, one of the off-grid systems you helped build became a resource for neighbors who needed electricity. Can you tell us what happened during that outage and what it taught you about the role community-controlled energy can play during a disaster?

Keyante Aytch: Yes, absolutely. So yes, that did happen. So that was in 2023. There’s a major power outage in that particular neighborhood that it’s in, which is in the Englewood neighborhood. So the community garden that’s on that block, it’s kind of right in the middle. I’m pretty sure there once was a home there, but then it got tore down and became a vacant lot, and a family organization was able to reclaim it, turn it into a community garden, and we’ve got solar there that powers a community refrigerator.

So during that power outage, which lasted for four days, that community garden had the only presence of electricity for four days. And 2023, three years ago, we are in the era of Zoom, the era of wifi, the era of digital virtual connectedness where we need our electronics to maintain productivity. So that being the only place of immediate source of electricity, neighbors were literally able to just plug up extension cords and charge their phones. And that refrigerator, people were using that refrigerator to keep some of their items cold in this emergency capacity.

So from there, that was not the intention. Emergency response was not the intention. It was, “Hey, this community garden wants a refrigerator to be able to stock food and produce for community for free.” So that was the original intention. And then after that, it was just like a, “Oh, wow moment” like, “Oh, this also has another purpose.” In its day-to-day where it’s powering a refrigerator. In its emergency sense, it can support communities in an emergency response capacity for electrical needs. So that really sparked the interest of wanting to make this more of an intentional effort since then. And so, we have five sites around right now of that equivalency in terms of capacity.

And all of those are on community gardens and urban farms. And so, wanting to get those all in a robust enough state and operational to be able to support their nearby communities during times of need to just keep electrical devices and things charged. It hasn’t happened in any particular neighborhood where we have a system at since then. But yeah, just this year in Chicago, we had another power outage that was four days. It just hit different parts of the city. And then there was another one just two weeks ago that caused a couple parts of the city to be out of power for about two days or so.

So I’m noticing every single year we have an outage. It’s just a matter of how long. The longest I’ve heard thus far has been four days. So having that ability to have these systems be available to operate as emergency response units is just coming from a place of caring about community and wanting to make sure that we can keep some sort of normalcy and kind of protecting our communities essentially by having electrical access. So yeah, I’d say that’s what we realized since then.

Kelly Hayes: That example really gets at what it can mean to build infrastructure that remains useful when the systems around us fail. Brandon, your work approaches some of these questions from a different direction. Kiau is developing solar-powered sensing and communication systems that can operate independently of cloud infrastructure. Can you walk us through how that technology works in the field, and why it matters for farmers and communities to be able to control their own data?

Brandon Bunt: For sure. So I’ll start at the crop level. At Kiau Tech, we develop what we call nodes. These are essentially multiple different types of sensors connected together to a battery and a solar panel, as well as a radio antenna. We use a specific kind of sub-gigahertz unlicensed radio called LoRa. That’s L-O-R-A, and it’s a shortened acronym for long range. And we use a specific type of this LoRa called Chirp Modulation that allows us to send the data long distances and using very little power. And so the sensor nodes that we install in the ground measure soil moisture, typically using something called a granular matrix sensor.

That’s actually measuring the force required to pull water out of the ground. And we also measure soil temperature. We take that raw voltage reading as well as the soil temperature reading, combine them, and translate them into a pressure reading that a soil scientist or an agronomist would be able to understand. We send that number over the radio mesh to a base station that we call Mothership. And that typically can live in a farmer’s home or their barn or some sort of central location on the farm.

And that device can do a further translation to take that pressure reading into something that farmers can understand, whether that’s plain language or ideal ranges that we set for their crop type when we install. So the overall system involves multiple nodes that try to talk directly to the base station. But really the exciting part is that in a mesh, if any of the nodes are too far away from the base station, they can actually hop and relay each other’s messages further down the line.

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And additionally, what that means is if there’s a node between a node and the base station and it’s somehow damaged, a tractor runs it over or a raccoon is interested in the wires and chews through them, the mesh can, in a sense, self-heal and find another path back to the base station. And so, this allows for this communication between the nodes and the base station without having wifi coverage over the entire acreage of the farm or alternatively having cellular service to each node location, which would get quite expensive. This sort of allows for data from many different parts of the farm that are not necessarily within typical range.

So that’s how we actually collect the data. And then, currently in our trials, we’ve actually been storing the data on our own servers because the farmers that we work with are excited to help us develop this technology as we’re still in the prototyping phase. But the ultimate goal is to actually set up servers at each farm where all of the computation and data analysis that needs to happen can happen locally. And this would truly allow farmers to fully own their data. As it stands currently, we still try to honor that agreement.

We tell the farmers that the data that we collect on their farms stored on our servers is theirs and they get the final say to do what they want with that data. But really, the ultimate goal would be, to be able to tell a farmer, “You don’t need to trust us to do the right thing with your data. You can trust us because we’re not asking you to trust us, and here’s a server that you can host yourself on site and actually run all of those calculations.” And in order to facilitate this, the main concerns with having that type of equipment on site is, first, the power consumption.

And second, the conveniences that we associate with the cloud in general. Namely, if something happens to that device, if there’s a water leak of an air conditioning unit that happens to be nearby and it damages the device. So our ultimate goal is to actually pair farmers together in completely different grid systems, maybe even across the country, and have them get to know each other virtually so that they can back up each other’s data and sort of create a decentralized, not quite a cloud, but a peer-to-peer backup of the data that is being collected.

And in terms of how that data is actually used, again, because we’re in the early stages, we’ve found more success and opportunities with farmers and ag-adjacent nonprofits that are interested in research. So storing the data over an entire season and analyzing it either together or having an expert come in and analyze the data has been the common approach. But we have had a few incidents of actually being able to use the data on a day-to-day basis where we say, well, even though a farmer would typically irrigate in Boulder today, given the heat, the sensor is showing between six to 18 inches that there is adequate moisture.

Not ideal, but adequate so we can actually hold off one more day without inducing any stress on the crops. And given the record-low snow packs in Colorado and the West in general this past winter, a farmer being able to hold off on irrigation strategically, knowing not when to irrigate can actually extend how long they can rely on their own water rights and not having to buy water rights from neighboring farmers who might not be using them or things like that. And so it could even, in the future, represent a potential for significant economic and financial savings as well.

Kelly Hayes: Got it. Thank you. I’m a non-farmer, non-scientist over here, so I was processing all of that and thinking, “Oh, that’s how people are actually using this.” You’re giving farmers better information about what’s happening on their own land in real time, so they can make the most of precarious water supplies rather than relying on what can increasingly become a guessing game as conditions grow less predictable.

Brandon Bunt: That’s exactly right, and I love the phrase that you use of a guessing game. I think many farmers have been doing that or they look to their neighbors who have found some sort of success and they try to go with those recommendations. But soil itself is such a complex and alive system that even a couple of miles down the road, soil types can change significantly. And so our hope is that we can drive down the cost of installing this type of technology so that these sensors are accessible to even the small producers.

And it’s not just the super-large industrial monoculture farms that are able to invest in this type of technology, but also the smaller growers that are typically actually the ones providing the bulk of healthy, fresh food through mechanisms like farmers’ markets and CSAs.

Kelly Hayes: That question of who has access to this technology also raises the question of who controls it. You’ve made data sovereignty a principle of Kiau’s work. Why does it matter who owns and controls the data that farmers generate?

Brandon Bunt: Before I even talk about why we care about that philosophically, I’d like to share a brief story of a farmer, of a peach grower that we met in Northern New Mexico. I think the data sovereignty and the control of the technology is first and foremost an issue of practicality. So this peach farmer took a risk a couple of years ago and installed wifi-connected irrigation valves throughout his entire high tunnel peach operation. And at some point, something in the system didn’t work as intended. And when he reached out to support, it turned out that that company was no longer producing that product.

It might’ve even been acquired by another company. He didn’t even have the time to get to the bottom of what happened to the company that he bought these wifi connected valves from. It no longer made sense for him to continue paying for wifi service to his farm. And so, ever since that day and continuing today, he uses a tiny thumb screw on the side of the valve that was only ever designed as an emergency backup solution. And that’s now his primary mode of turning on irrigation and sending water to each row.

And so something that with a simple mechanical valve used to take him seconds per row, now takes several seconds and compounded across the entire farm. The time it takes for him to irrigate has increased, but not enough to entirely replace the valves, not to mention that capital cost. So he definitely has felt that he’s been burned by technology. As a result, he wasn’t really interested in working with us because he was kind of apprehensive about putting more technology on his farm.

And so, just the idea that a company that you rely on for something as critical as irrigation, where in … especially the area that I’m in and south of me in the San Luis Valley in Northern New Mexico, missing a day of water can significantly impact crop stress, even potentially kill some of your crop. It’s essential infrastructure. So your internet service provider going down or a grid going down is not really an acceptable excuse for losing a significant portion of your income for that year.

And so our goal is to try to make as much of what we make securely open source as possible so that the most tech-savvy farmers can actually adopt and adjust our systems and our software and our firmware for what they need. And other farmers who are maybe a little bit more tech-averse can still trust that even if we cease to exist as a company, because that firmware is open source, they can receive help from anybody else who has those basic skills in order to fix whatever needs to be fixed in the future.

And additionally, I’ve found that a lot of existing ag-tech companies kind of sell locked black boxes, and they’re really targeting agronomists and university researchers at land-grant universities because that’s where a lot of the funding in agriculture is to be able to afford these more expensive systems. But after talking to a couple of professors at land-grant universities, even those professors who are managing to get consistent funding for projects sort of express this disdain that if they don’t pay the monthly subscription, they can’t access their data.

And in some cases, they’re not even collecting new data. They want to teach their latest batch of students or they want to go back to a previous year to analyze or compare differences between years. And they feel kind of locked in because the physical hardware that they bought becomes useless without that continuous payment. And so, even though it might be a bad financial decision for us at Kiau Tech in the short term, because of the nature of farming and how critical irrigation is and how much of an essential thing it is, we’re confident that providing an open source tool that acknowledges these needs is the better play in the long run.

Kelly Hayes: I want to open this up to all three of you. You’re part of a cohort that includes farmers, engineers, organizers, artists, and people building everything from food systems to energy and communications infrastructure. What are you learning from one another about what climate survival requires? And has being part of this cohort changed how you think about what your own project could become?

Keyante Aytch: Yes, it definitely has, being around such intelligent folks has definitely inspired some of my projects. For starters, Alice, and the work she’s doing and are doing down there in Texas. I’ve been meaning to connect with them, with you all, to just learn about some of the SOPs and procedures around things that are happening in emergency response work because they’re pretty much already doing it, right? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when there are folks that have already had such experience. And then Brandon, who’s here, he was teaching us a workshop on the mesh network and building out a mesh network.

And the thought of off-grid communication sovereignty, if that’s a thing. I was like, “Oh, that makes so much sense going along with community gardens that are growing their own food, harvesting their own energy, and can also have their own network of communication lines.” So I definitely have gotten a lot of sparks and ideas from all of the different folks in the cohort. And I think it’s one of the most beautiful things about this cohort, this program, because we’re all in the relatively similar realm.

And so just picking and pulling ideas and gaining influence from everybody just makes me personally and what I got going on better and I’m sure I can speak for everybody. It says that we’re all able to just continue boosting our own activities as well.

Kelly Hayes: Alice, what has that looked like for you?

Alice Liu: Well, first of all, it has been an absolutely incredible experience being a part of this cohort. And even Brandon and Keyante, it’s so great to hear you all’s answers on this podcast. I think a couple of things come up for me in terms of what I’ve learned and the importance of the diversity of this cohort. Number one, the disaster response that I do and that West Street Recovery does operates in a very urban environment. And I think being around people who are across the U.S., like farmers who are operating outside of that urban environment was so eye-opening for me.

And learning about the precarity of our current food system and the challenges that independent farmers are facing who are trying to operate outside of that large industrial agriculture model. And also, I think despite the physical environment and maybe the way that community looks in urban versus a rural environment, and maybe the way that organizing looks too, just recognizing how our political conditions are nonetheless shared and connected across state lines, across geographies has been really cool for me.

And number two, I mostly think of myself as an organizer and an advocate and an artist. And I think working with engineers and farmers who are more focused, I think, about building these systems, working towards autonomy and sovereignty and ownership of physical infrastructure is really cool because I think West Street is doing that. Our goal is one, protecting the stock of affordable housing and one of the main sources of Black intergenerational wealth in the U.S., but also building relatively sovereign energy systems. But also, I feel like we are still operating at such a small scale.

So seeing these farmers who are managing tons of acres of land, feeding a ton of people, is just … yeah, that’s I think, really cool for me in terms of imagining maybe the structures and modes of governance that are necessary to scale up. And then a final thing, which is very short, but just that I think on the left, often there is this very anti-tech mindset that is based in fear and also a valid response to the way that tech is so much used as just a tool of surveillance and wealth accumulation here in the US. So I think seeing ways that tech can support autonomy and can support liberation was also very eye-opening for me.

Kelly Hayes: I’m very interested in that as well. Brandon, what has the experience been like for you?

Brandon Bunt: Yes. When we all met in Kentucky at Black Roots Farm, I had prepared a workshop on mesh networking. And leading up to the workshop, I was concerned about how to present enough technical information that was not only interesting, but essential to having people not just have the skills, but inspired to build out decentralized communication networks and how that could help their project and their local communities. And I had kind of made the assumption that perhaps some of the people wouldn’t care so much about the underlying mechanism of how it’s able to transmit messages such a long distance on such a small amount of power.

Or maybe they wouldn’t be interested in exactly how the sensor works to measure soil moisture. And I couldn’t have been more wrong on that. Everybody was super ready to nerd out and listen and also provide extremely, extremely helpful feedback in terms of how we present these ideas and also, what types of things we should be building. And it has completely changed not only the way that we have gone about designing some of our products, but also, even how we identify and accepting or acknowledging that we really want to build tools that people can use to create parallel systems.

It doesn’t need to be one or the other or all centralized infrastructure is bad, but instead just giving more options to people. And also, I think I’ve really been inspired by how everyone else in this cohort wears so many different hats within their own organizations so effortlessly. And this might sound like a small thing, but just being able to talk about different legal structures or how to understand a tax code or how to structure a project in a certain way from the rest of the cohort has been incredibly helpful. So definitely has changed my identity and our identity as a technology company and what exactly that means.

Kelly Hayes: I want to bring us to the September 17 event. Climate Mobilization Project Project is hosting Before the Storm, an online national town hall bringing together climate science, frontline organizing, and grassroots resilience work. What do you hope people who attend will understand about what communities can begin building now, as climate disruption intensifies alongside growing political instability and authoritarianism?

Keyante Aytch: Well, I’ll share. I think one of the biggest words, I think we were making fun of how much we said this word, I think decentralized. I think wanting audience members and onlookers to lean into and invest in, if not already, energy and time and fiscal resources into decentralized infrastructure and what that looks like on all the different tiers from our food, where it’s sourced or how our energy is sourced, how our communication operates, how our data is sourced. Decentralization I think is a huge tool in protecting and navigating our communities in the face of all of the varying natural disasters and injustices and so forth, and so forth.

To be able to have a power base of resource, of infrastructure that is not tied to some sort of entity that might not have one’s best interest at heart, I think, is fundamental and foundational to a lot of this work.

Alice Liu: I think for me, and I’m kind of saying this for myself too, because I’ve been pretty sad recently. Yeah, they officially have started construction on the border wall through Big Bend National Park on the Texas border. And yeah, it’s really devastating quite frankly. And I think my response to the most important takeaway would just be that whatever you do, it has to be now. And I know that oftentimes in movement spaces, it can be unproductive, the sense of urgency. I think the urgency doesn’t … it doesn’t have to mean like, “Oh, let’s just run around and see whatever the most acute crisis is and do that and then do a different thing the next month.”

I think that can include building these long-term systems like Brandon and Keyante are doing. It also includes being in the streets and protesting. And it also includes continuing to learn your skills and finding people who you really trust and can throw down with. But yeah, I just think that even if you’re not sure if it’s the right thing, even if it feels so small in relation to the crises that we’re facing, it’s everything … I think we learn just as much from our failures as we do from our successes.

As an organizer, I’ve put so much time and sweat and tears into things that just totally … yeah, they were ultimately defeats. But out of that, came some of my strongest friendships and also, laying the foundation for future moments and opportunities for political resistance. So yeah, I think basically just doing it and constantly learning from that process.

Brandon Bunt: For me, I’ve felt that post-COVID and more recently with AI, climate hasn’t actually necessarily always been the forefront of the conversation. On average, I felt like the number of times I’ve spoken about it, even with friends or family, has declined over time. And I’ve wondered why that was the case. And I’ve also noticed that there’s a lot of media focus and general buzz around the successes or failures of different political candidates. And while I think that it remains extremely important to pressure candidates or incumbent politicians to do the right thing, simultaneously, I’ve always found that that kind of puts us in the position of a consumer.

And I’ve personally found it extremely empowering to say, “Well, oh, my wifi is a little bit slow.” My initial reaction is, “Oh, my ISP, my internet service provider sucks, or I should find a better one, or I should switch from Verizon to AT&T,” what have you. But to go from that consumer-choice mindset to instead being like, “Let me go outside to my balcony and check on the status of my antenna. Has a bird sat on it or disconnected the wire from the solar panel? Let me see if I fix that, I’ll be able to reach my friend who’s a couple miles down the road.”

That sort of shift in autonomy I think is really empowering. And while the tangible difference that it makes, the change that me talking to my friend over a centralized platform like WhatsApp or iMessage versus talking over Meshtastic or Reticulum, that single text might not make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly has helped me feel like I can actually do something. So one thing I’ve really appreciated about working on this type of hardware is that it breaks down the concept of consumer versus provider. And instead of being funneled into one of those categories, we can instead be members of a larger system that we all steward together. So as a consumer, we are making consumer choices of which ISP or which provider to go with, or as a provider, maybe we get a ham radio license, but that’s considerable investment, time, maybe even money in order to serve a larger community, which is great.

But I think the really empowering part is as a member, when the physical technology itself embodies a decentralized approach, we all contribute a small amount that allows the larger system to function, whether that’s collecting a little bit of rainwater, providing an antenna for a mesh network, or growing a small amount of food locally. All of that is sort of under the same approach of not being a consumer or provider, but instead a member. And I think that can be very empowering. I think it can be hopeful, and I hope that’s something that people see tangibly on the 17th next month and feel listening.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I want to thank you all so much. It’s been inspiring to hear about the work you’re doing and the ways you’re thinking about preparedness, autonomy, and collective care. I’m really looking forward to the 17th and to continuing this conversation about what we can build now to help our communities take care of one another in the times ahead. Thank you all so much for joining me today.

Brandon Bunt: Thank you so much, Kelly.

Alice Liu: Thank you, Kelly. And thanks, Brandon and Keyante too.

Keyante Aytch: And thank you. Thank you, Alice. Thank you, Brandon. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly.

[musical transition]

Kelly Hayes: Before we close, I want to say a little more about why I’ve been thinking so much about preparedness lately.

My friend Dean Spade and I have been working on some disaster prep resources that could help people organize preparedness events in their own communities. Preparedness, as I understand it, is a form of community defense.

Much of the built world we are living in was not designed for the conditions we are beginning to face. Our homes, electrical grids, transportation systems and other infrastructure were built for a world that no longer exists. And for the most part, elected officials have offered little in the way of policies, plans, or visions that will help people survive as those systems fail.

Republicans have, in some cases, moved beyond their longstanding politics of climate denial toward a smash-and-grab embrace of climate chaos. And while Democratic officials are more likely to acknowledge some of the realities we face, they are doing precious little to stem the damage, or to help people survive the fallout.

In addition to demanding public investment in safer infrastructure and less destructive, more resilient ways of living, we also need to build the skills and relationships that will help us survive these times together.

I believe that work will overlap with other forms of community defense, because organized people who are invested in one another’s survival have the capacity to pivot as new challenges emerge. Preparedness can also give us a practical, constructive starting point for conversations about climate chaos, and how we can fight for the planet, that might otherwise be hard to initiate. In these challenging, uncertain times, we need to know our neighbors, and we need to know how to support each other when waters rise or when the lights go out. If we’re ready to do that, we will be more prepared to support each other against other threats as well.

That’s why I’m so excited about the work you heard about today. It’s also why I hope you’ll join us on September 17 for Before the Storm, Climate Mobilization Project Project’s free national town hall on Super El Niño and climate resilience as a movement strategy. Keyante, Alice, and Brandon will all be there, along with Daniel Aldana Cohen and me, and participants will leave with resilience toolkits and concrete models for organizing preparedness in their own communities. You can find the registration link in the show notes.

Dean and I will also have some preparedness resources ready soon, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

I want to thank everyone who’s doing what they can in these times to support communities being hit hard by climate disasters, from the flood-stricken communities of Nepal, to people recovering from the prolonged power outage in Gary. I’m thinking of everyone who is grieving, displaced, exhausted, or struggling to get through the aftermath of these disasters. I hope we can build the capacities we need to mobilize even more effectively as these disasters continue to strike.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

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Show Notes

• You can sign up for Climate Mobilization’s virtual town hall on the 2026 Super El Niño here.
• You can learn more about Daze of Autonomy here.
• You can learn more about West Street Recovery here
• You can learn more about Kiau Technologies here.