Community-led Resilience

“[Youth] are like electric cables … they really understand the nuance of the issue, and they understand that a holistic approach is needed. They understand that seeing trash in their neighborhood is connected to safety. They already think about [their neighborhood] along the lines of, just because I’m experiencing it this way doesn’t mean that there’s a one-size-fits-all model. And then when we take that to funders, the city, whoever the institution is that we’re having to navigate, they want a one-size-fits-all model … It always reminds me that it’s a limitation of their capacity to understand and not an issue with our capacity to understand.” — J. Bowles, CURYJ, January 2026

Introduction

In the mid- to late-2010s, California experienced a series of disasters: escalating frequency and intensity of fires (Valley Fire (2015), Tubbs Fire (2017), and Camp Fire (2018)), followed by the introduction of Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) which left millions of people and businesses without electricity during dry, hot, and windy days. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the record-breaking 2020 wildfire season brought weeks of hazardous air quality and record heatwaves. Amid the many calls to action and efforts to protect the most vulnerable communities during and after these disasters, an intervention emerged to address hazard preparedness in communities: the Resilience Hub. The term caught on in 2017 from Oakland advocates in the NorCal Resilience Network, and just four years later the state formally funded resilience hubs via Strategic Growth Council (SGC)’s Community Resilience Centers (CRC) program in SB 155 (2021).

Resilience hubs were first conceptualized as community-determined spaces that shift power to frontline residents and operate across three modes: everyday service, disruption response, and recovery (Baja, 2022). In California, an early example that fits this definition is Richmond’s RYSE Youth Center, a violence-prevention and youth-organizing space that extends into climate resilience; it is run by a community-trusted institution that serves residents year-round and pivots during disruptions (Lou et al., 2020). The breadth of the resilience hub definition reflects the multiple policy streams that have recently converged on them: climate emergency adaptation, mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through local solar installations, food access programs, and, central to this capstone, community-centered criminal justice reform.

In neighborhoods where high incarceration rates and environmental burdens concentrate in the same geographies, community organizations have long built responses to both. In San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point, residents organizing against toxic contamination from the former naval shipyard also face some of the city’s highest rates of police contact (Dillon & Sze, 2016); in the Inland Empire, Black women have led grassroots planning for parks and public infrastructure while organizing against carceral expansion in communities surrounded by state prisons and ICE detention (Malson, 2025); in East Los Angeles, Legacy LA has worked since 2007 to address gang violence and environmental health in the Ramona Gardens public housing development, one of the city’s most heat-exposed neighborhoods (Legacy LA, 2025). Climate resilience and community-based diversion from the criminal justice system are not separate policy goals; they share geographies, demographics, and increasingly the same physical infrastructure.

This intersect maps the characteristics and geographies of state-funded resilience hub interventions to investigate where climate resilience and community-based diversion co-occur, and finds that state funding has begun to meagerly support the overlap; of the 54 state-funded resilience hubs identified between 2015 and 2025, six explicitly include criminal justice diversion in their project goals, all led by community-based organizations. This intersect argues that community-driven diversion is a climate adaptation strategy: bundled investments in greening, remediation, and programming through community-controlled spaces address both heat exposure and the conditions that drive criminal justice contact, and state climate resilience programs should fund them accordingly.

Methodology

This intersect establishes the extreme heat risk profile for urban communities by applying the shared environmental risk framework to peer-reviewed literature on urban heat exposure and its health and criminal justice impacts.

Two formal interviews were conducted in January 2026 with program managers at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ) in Oakland: Catalina Garzon, Executive Director, and Jacy Bowles, Program Director. Both interviews were conducted over Zoom; interviewees consented to participate, to be recorded, and to be named. CURYJ was identified through the author’s work on the Climate Justice Coalition, where Garzon was a fellow volunteer; an initial conversation about CURYJ’s community mapping work led to formal interviews on the organization’s approach to building interventions at the intersection of decarceration and extreme heat resilience. These interviews reshaped the focus of this intersect toward resilience hubs, and CURYJ’s program is integrated into the findings alongside four other organizations (Casa Familiar, Little Manila Rising, Legacy LA, and the Black Cultural Zone) analyzed from publicly available project descriptions, organizational websites, and grant program reports.

To map where climate resilience and community-based diversion co-occur in state funding, 373 grant awards funded between 2015 and 2025 across five climate resilience programs were collected and coded between January and March 2026. Each award was characterized by lead type, phase, and project topics, and filtered against the two-part resilience hub definition. Lead type was classified from the named grantee in the award data as Public (city, county, municipal, or state agency), CBO (community-based organization or nonprofit), or Tribal (federally or state-recognized tribal government or organization); see Appendix C for program descriptions, data sources, characterization criteria, and the full table of awardees.

Findings are assessed against Critical Resistance’s abolitionist framework to evaluate whether the resilience hub model supports community-based diversion and shifts power to systems-impacted residents.

Extreme Heat Risk in Frontline Communities

Exposure

Rising temperatures disproportionately impact historically redlined and disinvested neighborhoods, where urban heat island effects are most pronounced (Wilson, 2020; Hoffman et al., 2020). Lower-income communities and communities of color face higher surface urban heat extremes at the national scale, compounded at the household level by aging housing stock and higher indoor temperatures (Benz & Burney, 2021; Gabbe et al., 2023). Limited transportation access prevents residents from reaching cooling centers during heatwaves, and transit-poor communities that depend on walking, biking, or waiting at outdoor bus stops face higher traveler exposure to heat (Bedi et al., 2022; Li et al., 2023).

Extreme heat and air pollution interact as compounding exposures; hotter temperatures worsen ground-level ozone and trap pollutants in urban valleys, and simultaneous exposure increases mortality by 21% and exacerbates respiratory and cardiovascular conditions (Rahman et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2025; Li et al., 2025).

Vulnerability

Individual vulnerability factors — non-white race, those age 5 or below or 65 and above, disability, social isolation, level of education, and chronic illness — overlap heavily with the exposure attributes of disinvested neighborhoods (Reid et al., 2009; Harlan, 2012; Chakraborty & Soroka, 2025). Energy access is one of the most direct determinants of residential heat exposure; low-income households in poorly insulated housing face higher indoor temperatures and greater electricity demand for cooling (Ashbaugh & Kittner, 2024; Liu et al., 2025). Energy poverty compounds this further: when spending on cooling replaces essential expenditures for food and medical care, heat vulnerability extends beyond temperature exposure into cascading health and economic harm (Sun et al., 2025). At the household scale, thermal insecurity is produced by power hierarchies that constrain adaptation even when residents are aware of the threat; landlords who refuse to repair cooling systems, energy assistance waitlists, and building codes that do not account for indoor heat turn temperature into structural violence (Hamstead, 2023).

Impact: Community Health

A 10-day heatwave in September 2022 increased California mortality 5% above expected levels, with the greatest disparities among Hispanic residents (10% increase), Los Angeles and Orange County residents (9%), and working-age adults 25–64 (11%) (CDPH, 2023). During seven major heat events between 2013 and 2022, residents of SB535 environmental justice census tracts experienced 14–30% higher heat-related mortality than residents outside these tracts (California Department of Insurance, 2024). Extreme heat events increase hospitalizations for respiratory disease, stroke, renal failure, and mental health crises (Schwarz et al., 2021; Sherbakov et al., 2018). Children of color are disproportionately concentrated in schools with the highest extreme heat exposure, with hot school days accounting for approximately 5% of educational disparities for children of color (Chakraborty & Soroka, 2025; Park, 2020). Contact with police produces parallel harms; direct and indirect exposure to police violence is linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes among Black youth, and police stops lower adolescents’ educational performance and psychological wellbeing (Jindal et al., 2022; Del Toro et al., 2019).

Impact: Violence and the Criminal Justice System

In Los Angeles, crime increased 2.2% and violent crime 5.7% on days above 85°F, with stronger effects in low-income neighborhoods with older housing (Heilmann & Kahn, 2019). Extreme heat was associated with 7.9–11.9% increases in bookings for violent offenses and increased domestic violence calls (Sturm et al., 2024; Dey et al., 2025). The concentration in neighborhoods with older housing indicates that the built environment influences heat-related violence; addressing housing quality and neighborhood disinvestment is likely a more direct intervention than policing, which is not correlated with decreased crime (Center for Juvenile & Criminal Justice, 2024).

Heat has a mix of effects on the operations of the justice system: police conduct fewer stops above 84°F and fewer investigations above 85°F, suggesting reluctance to leave air-conditioned vehicles (Obradovich et al., 2018; Heilmann & Kahn, 2019), which reduces the discretionary policing that disproportionately affects these neighborhoods. For those who do enter the system, however, heat produces more punitive outcomes; a 10°F increase in temperatures makes judges 6.55% less likely to rule in favor of defendants (Heyes & Saberian, 2019).

Capacity

Community capacity to manage extreme heat risk in these neighborhoods is produced through collective efficacy: the mutual trust and shared willingness to act on behalf of a neighborhood that leads communities to protect one another during and after a disaster (Chandra et al., 2011). This capacity is built through social infrastructure in intersecting networks; physical community spaces generate bonding capital (ties within a group), bridging capital (ties across different groups), and linking capital (ties that connect communities to institutional power and resources); the design of the built environment either facilitates or obstructs each type (Killam & Kawachi, 2022; Strawderman & Herrmann, 2023). The root causes of thermal insecurity are similarly intersecting, produced by systems of housing, energy, and health disinvestment, not by temperature alone (Hamstead, 2023). Urban sustainability planning, however, remains organized around energy, water, or land use in isolation rather than responding to intersecting vulnerabilities (Castán Broto & Westman, 2019). When interventions are bundled to address greening, building remediation, and community programming together, they produce overlapping effects; experimentally, place-based greening and remediation in disinvested neighborhoods reduced violent crime by 29–85%, with community-engaged maintenance producing stronger and more sustained effects than professional maintenance alone (Hohl et al., 2019). These are the same physical interventions that reduce urban heat island effects, and when delivered through community-controlled spaces as alternatives to incarceration, new kinds of communities are created among the people most affected by the carceral system (Shigematsu et al., 2010).

The demand for trusted physical spaces increases as California funds more community-based alternatives to prison or jail. As part of California’s reforms to reduce mass incarceration, voters passed the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act (Proposition 47) in 2014, and the legislature established the California Violence Intervention Program (CalVIP) in 2018. These programs fund service delivery rather than built infrastructure, but their grantees depend on physical community spaces to reach people; CalVIP supports violence interruption at sites like Richmond’s RYSE Youth Center, and Prop 47 grants have seeded facilities such as Santa Monica’s SaMo Bridge, where individuals are matched to health and housing services instead of jail (BSCC, 2025; City of Santa Monica, 2025). Youth diversion programming depends on these same spaces, they reduce recidivism more effectively than conventional judicial processing, and community-based youth diversion costs approximately one-tenth the cost of detention (Wilson & Hoge, 2013; Gigante et al., 2022). Resilience hubs that combine climate adaptation infrastructure with community diversion programming and youth leadership are positioned to serve both functions simultaneously.

State Investment in Community Capacity

California has invested in many community climate resilience projects since 2015, but few explicitly address the overlap between heat vulnerability and criminal justice contact. Of the 373 climate grant awards reviewed across five climate programs, 54 (14.5%) funded projects met the definition of a resilience hub; six (11.1%) of these explicitly included restorative justice or community-based diversion in their project goals. All six were led by community-based organizations.

Characteristics of Resilience Hubs at the Intersection of Heat and Community-based Diversion

Of the 54 resilience hub projects, 45 (83.3%) included infrastructure to support community members during extreme heat events (the remaining 10 are early in their planning process, and do not explicitly list extreme heat emergency support). Six (11.1%) of the resilience hubs explicitly included community-based diversion themes in their project goals. Notably, all six of these were led by CBOs; no resilience hubs with a public agency as their lead awardee (21 of 54, or 38.8%) mentioned their facility as a place to support systems-impacted populations or alternatives to incarceration, though this does not mean they will not have an eventual impact.

Organizations such as Casa Familiar, Little Manila Rising, Legacy LA, and the Black Cultural Zone are developing resilience hubs that share commonalities in their values on community sovereignty and environmental justice. One organization currently developing a resilience hub is Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ) in Oakland; they received a planning grant from EHCRP in 2025 but not yet for the resilience hub, so interviews with their staff provide the details of their program. Each of these organizations operates in a neighborhood with overlapping climate vulnerabilities and systemic disinvestment; each has arrived at the resilience hub as an extension of longstanding work to reimagine communal spaces where residents feel protected and cared for. Six themes emerge across their planning and development processes.

Established Organizers in Climate Resilience

All of the organizations developed a resilience hub project as part of a longer-term effort to support community capacity. Casa Familiar operated in San Ysidro for over 50 years before launching the La Semilla Community Resiliency Center as part of its broader “Construyendo Juntos” campaign (Casa Familiar, 2024). Little Manila Rising was founded in 1999 to save Stockton’s historic Filipino American neighborhood from demolition, and pivoted toward environmental justice after co-founder Dr. Dawn Mabalon’s passing from an asthma-related emergency (Little Manila Rising, 2025). Legacy LA grew from a 2007 effort to address multigenerational gang violence in the Ramona Gardens public housing development (Legacy LA, 2025). The Black Cultural Zone was first envisioned when a new Bus Rapid Transit line threatened to displace Black-owned businesses in East Oakland (Black Cultural Zone, 2025). For each, the resilience hub is one project within a broader portfolio rather than a standalone climate intervention.

Trusted Places: Upgrading Existing Community Spaces

Each resilience hub is sited on a property already trusted and embedded in the community. The Black Cultural Zone’s Liberation Park Extreme Heat Hub is planned within an existing site for cultural programming and community stewardship; the grant funds the infrastructure upgrades for a cooling center with renewable energy backup and nature-based solutions (SGC, 2024). CURYJ has identified its Bonanza Building, currently used for food distribution and community art builds, as the site for its resilience hub (C. Garzon interview, January 2026). Casa Familiar’s La Semilla center sits within the organization’s existing campus in San Ysidro. Legacy LA operates from Ramona Gardens, where it has been a trusted presence since 2007. In each case, community members do not need to be introduced to a new institution or travel to a new neighborhood in order to access support.

Mapping Community Assets, Not Just Vulnerabilities

These projects share a deliberate methodological choice to articulate and map community assets, not just vulnerabilities or deficiencies, in the process of identifying programs and locations for the resilience hub. CURYJ’s HEATED project identifies places where community members already seek positive social connections, mutual aid networks, and a sense of belonging (C. Garzon interview, January 2026). Casa Familiar’s La Semilla frames the resilience hub as a generative starting point (“the seed”) rather than a deficit-filling response, integrating a community garden, workforce development, and emergency preparedness alongside climate infrastructure.

Community Participation and the Leadership of Systems-Impacted Youth

Each organization places emphasis on uplifting the voices of young people directly impacted by the criminal justice system, housing instability, and environmental hazards. Legacy LA youth leaders conducted door-to-door surveys of every residence in the 500-unit Ramona Gardens development, interviewing neighbors in English and Spanish to document environmental health concerns and identify priorities for green infrastructure (Legacy LA, 2025). CURYJ’s HEATED initiative employs formerly incarcerated young adults ages 18 to 26 through its Dream Beyond Bars Fellowship as co-designers of a community heat survey; program facilitators described the fellows as engaging in daily observation, analysis, and hypothesis-testing to tell the story of how their personal experience connects to broader structural patterns (J. Bowles interview, January 2026).

Alternatives to Criminalization and Punitive Systems

Each organization explicitly frames its resilience hub work as connected to efforts to address the criminalization of the communities they serve. Legacy LA operates as a Gang Reduction and Youth Development provider; participation decreased the risk of gang involvement by 83.4% (City of Los Angeles GRYD, 2025). Casa Familiar provides juvenile diversion services for youth aged 6 to 18 alongside immigrant rights advocacy and affordable housing through its community land trust, all understood as facets of a single campaign against displacement and criminalization (Casa Familiar, 2025). The Black Cultural Zone’s Community Stewards program offers an explicit alternative to conventional policing, while CURYJ’s HEATED initiative seeks to redirect public investments in climate emergency planning toward community-based alternatives to incarceration (C. Garzon interview, January 2026).

Economic Opportunity Programs

Across these organizations, workforce and economic development bridges climate resilience and alternatives to criminalization. Little Manila Rising’s urban forestry program has created over 100 job opportunities while addressing extreme heat (Little Manila Rising, 2025); CURYJ is exploring union pre-apprenticeship partnerships so that youth can gain exposure to trades like HVAC installation through its building renovation (C. Garzon interview, January 2026); the Black Cultural Zone pursues economic power through its RISE East initiative with the goal of creating an ecosystem where residents are “not just employees, but owners and decision-makers” (Black Cultural Zone, 2025). In each case, the pathway out of criminalization runs through economic opportunity rooted in the same neighborhoods and institutions that provide climate protection.

Program Design vs. Community Practice

The six themes are not entirely absent from the grant programs’ own design that funded the resilience hubs. CRC Round 1, EHCRP Round 1, and CalEPA’s EJ Action Grants Round 2 all require community-engaged planning processes, CRC and EHCRP both reward workforce development components, and EHCRP requires asset-based community planning. None specify that they prefer existing community centers or facilities for retrofits, but CRC and EHCRP both state that they allow for them. What none of them require, or even mention, is any connection to criminal justice diversion, systems-impacted populations, or alternatives to incarceration; the link between climate resilience and decarceration remains an innovation introduced by the CBOs themselves in their community work. All six hubs incorporating community-based diversion were CBO-led; none of the 21 public agency-led hubs mentioned the criminal justice system, safety, or related topics. The overlap between climate resilience and criminal justice diversion is therefore driven by community organizations rather than state program design.

Conclusions

The restorative resilience model of these six hubs shares six characteristics: they are led by established community organizations, upgrade trusted community spaces, emphasize community assets instead of deficits, empower systems-impacted youth as co-designers and leaders, offer diversion and violence prevention programming, and create economic opportunity rooted in the neighborhood. The embedded values of the six resilience hubs suggest that community capacity increases with investments in social sovereignty, restorative healing, cultural preservation, and breaking the generational cycle of criminal justice involvement by shifting power and work to the community, especially its youth. This strategy aligns with abolition frameworks; centering systems-impacted individuals in the planning and design of resilience hubs is an example of using the process and funding mechanisms of planning as a diversion tactic. Planners should not shy away from explicitly supporting community-driven diversion as a climate resiliency tactic and uplifting these CBOs in building community capacity through youth-driven investment.

Climate adaptation is intergenerational; the young people currently leading programming at these hubs will live through the decades of escalating heat exposure. The six hubs profiled here demonstrate that demand exists for resilience investments that explicitly address both heat and criminal justice system involvement, that community-based diversion delivered through community spaces is more effective than detention, and that it costs less. Youth in these neighborhoods already understand that greening, safety, and economic opportunity are inseparable; as Bowles states in the opening quote of this intersect, the limitation is institutional capacity to receive intersectional proposals, not community capacity to produce them. The resilience hubs funded without explicit diversion goals are the immediate opportunity to close that gap.

The role of the state as funder and organizational capacity supporter rather than planner is appropriate in these projects. State policy was responsible for neighborhood disinvestment and disproportionate incarceration rates that caused multi-generational economic disaster to these communities; state funding should invest in repairing this harm. This analysis quantifies how disproportionately small the funding currently is. Between 2015 and 2024, California invested approximately $6.67 billion in community resilience programs; over the same period, CDCR spent $133.5 billion on prison facilities and administration.

Limitations & Next Steps

Many resilience centers without an explicit goal of reducing criminal justice involvement do include implicit support for programs that would achieve this, particularly supportive services for the unhoused. The Century + Restorative Care Village at LA General Medical Center, for example, provides housing plus behavioral health facilities and residential withdrawal management, both proven interventions for reducing incarceration and recidivism (AHSC, 2024). Justice-involved people are not mentioned in the project, nor are they explicitly involved in its development, but its healthcare and housing will affect systems-involved populations in Los Angeles. Without explicit goals or outcome measures around rehabilitation or diversion, however, this impact will be difficult to assess. Further research is needed to identify what program indicators could imply community-based diversion impacts, and analyze how and why these investments exclude explicit language in their grant program descriptions.

California’s recently funded hubs are still too early to evaluate for effectiveness, and doing so will require metrics for trust, governance, and community-defined outcomes, not just output-based measures (Freiberg, 2025), which the findings in this intersect support.