I’ve worked with The Canal Will Kill NOLA since 2021 where I volunteer my time, strategic thinking, organizing, and research skills to assist this community based organization’s goals to protect the neighborhood from the Army Corp’s billion dollar project. This work integrates humanities research with community-based knowledge production to illuminate how infrastructure, risk, and place are understood and contested in the Gulf South.

In partnership with the Kira Akerman, director of the feature documentary Hollow Tree, Columbia Climate School, and The Climate Museum, I co‑created the Hollow Tree writing workshop, an interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates documentary film, climate humanities research, and creative writing skills. The workshop supports students and community participants in developing narrative tools for understanding climate change and its social impacts.

From 2012 to 2018, I served as Program Director and then board member for New Orleans Airlift and Music Box Village, helping shape its interdisciplinary performance programming and community partnerships. This work deepened my engagement with place-based arts initiatives and collaborative cultural production in New Orleans.

From 2015-2018, I co-taught in the women’s population in what was then called Orleans Parish Prison. The women collaborated in writing, editing, and designing the anthology, Unheard Voices: prose & poems by women writers in the Orleans Parish Justice Center.

For more than 35 years, residents of the Lower and Upper Ninth Ward have organized against the Army Corps of Engineers’ Industrial Canal expansion project, a federally driven plan that threatens their safety, cultural continuity, and environmental future. This long arc of resistance which has been sustained through neighborhood meetings, political advocacy, legal challenges, and storytelling, has generated a rich but dispersed body of community knowledge that remains at risk of being lost as elders age, materials deteriorate, and records remain scattered across personal collections. The New Orleans Water Democracy Community Archive (NOWDCA) responds to this urgent gap by creating a publicly accessible digital archive that preserves oral histories, documents, media, and organizing materials, ensuring that the strategies, memories, and lived expertise of Ninth Ward residents remain central to ongoing struggles for water democracy and environmental justice.