The first time I met Ginny Goldman on a zoom call, I wasn’t surprised to hear the origin story of Organizing Resilience involved a major storm. We are both Houstonians, and it’s part of the local culture to mark the passage of time by hurricanes formed in the Gulf Coast. The storm that would eventually lead to the founding of OR, however, was a winter storm that started in the Pacific Northwest and — through its boomerang path of destruction across Canada, the United States, and Northern Mexico— would knock out the Texas power grid, leaving over 4 million people without power in subzero temperatures for about a week. Official Texas state numbers show 246 people died from the storm, but the tally varied widely.
As Ginny tells it, “I’m with my family, taking turns warming up in our minivan — everyone we knew was struggling — and what are Texas politicians doing? Gregg Abbott is spending his time baselessly attacking renewable energy. And Ted Cruz took his family to Cancun. As people rightly focused on humanitarian relief, Republicans took advantage of the crisis to advance a political narrative not based on facts or science or reality— wind turbines had nothing to do with our power outage”
“Political power is contested in crisis moments,” Ginny explains. By building a crisis response network that allows local community leaders and national progressives to coordinate and cooperate during natural disasters, OR’s model prepares U.S. progressives to enter this contest.
The “On-Call Network” is part of its growing model. It's a team of long-term, specialized experts in fundraising, organizing, campaign strategy, navigating federal disaster systems and media. A key role in the On Call Network is the “Activation Manager,” who is pre-trained by OR to coordinate the members of the rapid response team and communicate directly with leaders in the impacted regions.
This past May, I got to see OR’s work up close. Over two days, community leaders and organizers from across the U.S. and Puerto Rico came together to run through climate crisis simulations. At the end of the training, activists could opt-in to be a future volunteer Activation Manager when disasters hit.
Maurice Weeks, OR’s senior advisor, opened the training by asking everyone to share their experience with crisis response.
Answers ranged from electoral work— “I worked on a city-wide ballot initiative to fund housing” — to direct service — “I worked on a juvenile crisis response hotline for years.” Many participants shared examples from natural disasters: the Buffalo Winter Blizzard. Hurricane Florence in North Carolina. Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The entire room nodded when one person said, “This meeting is important because it helps us be proactive instead of reactive.”
Kunoor Ojha, seasoned campaigner and consultant to OR, walked us through the big picture. “An Activation Manager is like an air-traffic controller,” Kunoor says. “I was OR’s activation manager for the Maui wildfires. At the time, I was studying abroad in Greece when news broke from Hawaii and I got the call from Ginny to tap in as Activation Manager. I had pre-existing relationships on the island, so I grabbed a flight back to the United States to be in a better time zone in order to coordinate between Hawaiian and U.S. mainland time zones.”
Others in the room, like Chrishelle Palay, Executive Director of Houston HOME Coalition and a member of OR’s strategy team, emphasize that this training is important because when disaster strikes, public money through the state and federal government is available for relief. While most people generally know that “FEMA” responds to natural disasters, the reality is that activating FEMA is not that simple. The process requires coordination at multiple levels of government and varies from state to state.
Chrishelle drives the point home, “If we are not organizing to get money for our communities, that money will not come to us.” Overall, Organizing Resilience has done 10 activations and moved $10 million dollars in private and public money between 2021 and 2024.
More movement organizers, particularly from Houston and across Texas, were scheduled to join us on our second day of training to run through crisis simulations based on this region. However, that evening and into the night, multiple yellow Tornado Watch alerts appeared on our phones warning Houston area counties to take cover. One warning described severe 80mph winds.
I start to get these loud alerts. Upstairs in the dining room, I look at a fellow Houstonian, unsure, and ask what they do during a tornado. She looks back and says, “I’m not sure either, I usually ignore them, and it hasn’t been a problem before.” I heard someone at the dinner table float the phrase “flash hurricane.”
As it turned out, the storm that hit Houston that night wasn’t just a tornado. It wasn’t a flash hurricane either (I’m not sure those are real). It was a derecho. Derechos are extreme weather events that can include tornadoes, but what makes it a derecho is “rail winds.” A derecho is a “straight-line” version of a tornado.
The next morning before we’re scheduled to meet in the conference room, Serena and the OR team send out a message to our group. “Sending our thoughts out to those of you who were impacted by the storm last night. For those of you who are still able to join us, we will be meeting as scheduled in the Medical Center.”
Overnight, Ginny and the OR team had decided to change the day’s plans. Many of the attendees were directly impacted by the derecho. It would not make sense to run through a simulation when the moment required action. Approximately one million homes had lost power and eight people died. The near-100 mph winds knocked over trees and blew out thousands of windows.
After a morning briefing, we split up into teams:
The Communications and Media team group immediately started drafting press releases and coordinating local speakers with national reporters.
The Fundraising team sent out its first appeal to a crisis response fund housed at Amalgamated Foundation.
The Campaign Strategy team began working on threading the needle between local organizing campaigns to build a local, green energy grid and a national narrative strategy, with the goal of making sure to angle towards receiving public disaster relief funds and connecting the dots between the mass power outages and the unreliable fossil fueled electric grid in Texas.
The Organizing team pulled the most impacted zip codes, drafted surveys, and split people up into canvassing groups.
For the next two months, Organizing Resilience worked in partnership with groups on the ground including the Workers Defense Project, Texas Organizing Project, CEER and AFL-CIO Gulf Coast to execute its response plan. In late June, OR held a town hall with community partners and formerly passed the lead towards community members.
Then, giving Houston climate activists little time to rest, Hurricane Beryl hit the city in early July. Experts point to record-high ocean temperatures as the reason Beryl formed as a Category 5 this early in hurricane season (a first). Over a million CenterPoint energy customers lost power in the middle of a heat wave, and people took to social media to share stories of CenterPoint workers coming out and leaving without doing repairs. As Ginny would say: power is contested in crisis moments. Folks will look to the leaders and organizations who are there to help and to deliver results. Organizing Resilience made the call to respond to Hurricane Beryl. It would be the second time they would look at FEMA funds for the same neighborhoods, within a 2-month time span.
I thought back to that first day of training, when Maurice asked everyone to introduce themselves and share their experience with crisis response. One-by-one, everyone opened up in ways that I don’t usually experience. In a room full of new acquaintances, many shared moments of being caught-off-guard, of making the wrong call, of hindsight being their teacher. Then later that night, we were all caught off guard with the derecho. Not because we didn’t care— the restaurant was also caught off guard— but because this is what it means to be living through a climate paradigm shift. The work of groups like Organizing Resilience is more than just disaster response, it’s recalibrating our disaster response muscles to meet this paradigm shift.