What the Water Already Knew
By Jacqui Patterson and Delicia Reynolds Hand
I didn’t grow up knowing the word “environmental justice.” I grew up knowing that half the kids in my school on the south side of Chicago had asthma. I grew up knowing that my father – a mechanic, who never smoked a cigarette in his life – died of pulmonary fibrosis. I grew up in a city ringed by coal-fired power plants, in a country where 78 percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of one – where, as the Coal Blooded report I would later help produce at the NAACP documented, a Black family earning $50,000 a year is more likely to live near a toxic facility than a white family earning $15,000. The plants were profitable. The neighborhoods were not an accident. I just didn’t yet have the language for what I was seeing.
Those words came later. They came in Jamaica.
I went to Jamaica as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1990s – my father was Jamaican, so it was also a kind of homecoming – and I went expecting to teach and to serve in the ways Peace Corps volunteers expect to. What I didn’t expect was to understand, for the first time at a cellular level, how systems work. I watched a community whose water supply had been contaminated by Shell Oil. A corporation that clocked record profits continued to operate with impunity, while people organized, tried to get help, tried to be heard. The community’s suffering wasn’t incidental to the business model. It was integral to it. There it was – the connection between what looked like a local water problem and the entire architecture of extraction I had been living inside all my life without ever seeing its shape.
That has never left me. Thirty years later, I’m still asking the same question that Jamaica first put in front of me: what does it actually take for Black communities to control their own futures – not be consulted, not be included as a line item, but to actually control them?
I’ve thought about Jamaica every day since October 28, 2025, when Hurricane Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 and tore through the island with the kind of sustained fury that the Caribbean has never recorded. Forty-five lives lost. One point six million people affected – nearly half the population. Damage equivalent to forty percent of the country’s entire GDP. The community of Black River, in St. Elizabeth Parish, largely swept away. The strongest storm to hit Jamaica in over 170 years. By every measure, the worst.
And yet, within days of landfall, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility – a financial mechanism Jamaica had spent a decade investing in and building toward – triggered its largest payout in history. Nearly $92 million in the first week. A catastrophe bond Jamaica had arranged through the World Bank paid out $150 million. The lights came back on faster than anyone expected. Schools reopened. Roads cleared. The Prime Minister stood in front of CARICOM leaders weeks later and said: Melissa tested our people, our institutions, our infrastructure. And they held.
That is resilience. Real, hard-won, sovereign resilience – built by a country that knew storms were coming, prepared for them on its own terms, and activated those preparations when the moment arrived.
But I want to hold both things at once. Because now Jamaica is also moving into a reconstruction phase financed by $6.7 billion from the World Bank, the IDB, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank. And here is the question that the framework we’ve been building at The Chisholm Legacy Project exists to ask: on what terms? Who sets the priorities? Who controls the decisions about what gets rebuilt, in which communities, by which logic? The financial instruments Jamaica built with its own foresight performed beautifully. What happens now, when the larger reconstruction architecture – the same architecture that has historically attached conditions, imposed priorities, and directed resources away from the communities most in need – takes the wheel?
This is not an abstract question. It is the same question the Second International Decade for People of African Descent is asking at the global level: after years of recognition, who controls the development? The shell companies change. The mechanisms evolve. The dynamic holds.
That understanding has been with me for thirty years, from the water in that Jamaican community to the current moment. What does it actually take for Black communities, in this country and around the world, to control our own climate futures? Not be consulted. Not be included as a line item. To actually control them.
This is the question our new body of work is built to answer. And the timing of this announcement is not incidental. We are launching the Climate Finance, Just Transition & Black Liberation Certification Program on Juneteenth – because Juneteenth is precisely about the gap between what gets declared and what communities actually receive. On June 19, 1865, enslaved people in Texas learned that freedom had been proclaimed two and a half years earlier. The announcement had been made. The delivery had not. That gap – between declaration and lived reality, between what is promised at the top and what reaches the ground – is the central problem this framework is built to close. We are in the Second International Decade for People of African Descent, launched by the United Nations under the theme of Recognition, Justice, and Development. After ten years of acknowledgment, the call now is for answers. For reparatory justice. For environmental justice. For investment that actually reaches the people most harmed. That is the moment we are in.
That is resilience. Real, hard-won, sovereign resilience – built by a country that knew storms were coming, prepared for them on its own terms, and activated those preparations when the moment arrived.
I want to tell you about three things we’ve been building – two that are complete and one that’s on its way – because together they form something I’ve needed for a long time: a framework that is honest about the whole problem.
The Ten Transformational Climate Finance Mandates paper starts from a premise that took me years of work to be able to say plainly: the systems through which climate resources flow were designed to reproduce the conditions that created the crisis. That’s not a rhetorical move. It’s an accurate description of how international climate finance architecture was built, who controls it, and whose priorities it has consistently served. The Ten Mandates lay out a comprehensive vision – from reparative justice to community-controlled financial infrastructure to democratic governance to following Global South leadership – for what transformed climate finance actually looks like.
What moved me most in developing this framework was what it revealed about what already exists. The models are not waiting to be invented. Ghana’s community-controlled green banks. Brazil’s Quilombola agroecological projects, protecting forest and land rights simultaneously. The Southern Reparations Loan Fund’s community-led grantmaking. The Bridgetown Initiative, which Prime Minister Mottley brought to the international stage with the kind of moral and economic clarity that international climate finance bodies hadn’t seen before and frankly weren’t prepared for. Black communities and Black nations, building regenerative economies on Ubuntu principles, on Ujamaa, on cooperative traditions that have survived everything that’s been thrown at them.
The solutions already exist. That has to be the starting point.
The second paper – Cultivating the Conditions – is where we asked the harder question. Because if the models exist and they work, why don’t they scale? Why do they keep getting destroyed?
And I mean destroyed literally. I think about Tulsa in 1921 – 35 blocks of Black economic autonomy eliminated in a single night of organized violence. I think about the federal urban renewal programs that destroyed over 1,600 Black communities under the guise of slum clearance. I think about COINTELPRO specifically targeting Black cooperative businesses and credit unions as subversive. I think about Shell in Jamaica. I think about the structural adjustment programs that dismantled community-controlled African economies in the name of development. I think about what France did to Burkina Faso when it moved to nationalize its gold.
This is not a pattern of failure. This is a pattern of deliberate intervention. And until we name it clearly, we keep being surprised when it happens again.
The Cultivating the Conditions paper identifies five political prerequisites – the changes that have to be in place first, before broader transformation can take root without facing the institutional destruction that has eliminated Black autonomous economic projects for over a century. Historical accountability and reparative justice. Legitimizing multiple ways of knowing. Democratic governance that actually functions democratically. Transforming the international architecture. And resourcing movement-building – because you cannot build power on empty.
Right now, watching the current administration move through climate programs like a wrecking ball – banning words, freezing grants, gutting CDFIs, dismantling USAID – the underlying logic is the same logic that contaminated the water in that Jamaican community in the early 1990s. The same logic that placed a coal plant within breathing distance of my father’s neighborhood and called it economic development. It is the same logic that has Jamaica today rebuilding with $6.7 billion from the very multilateral institutions this framework was written to transform. The question of who controls reconstruction is not a technical question. It is a political question. And the answer matters for every community in the Caribbean that will face the next Melissa.
The framework we’ve been building was made for exactly this moment. Not in spite of it.
The third paper is coming – an implementation toolkit, practical and community-centered, for how communities act on this framework right now with what exists. It’s being built from genuine consultation, not from behind a desk, and it will have what communities actually need: governance models, resource mobilization strategies, legal navigation, templates, case studies from people who have been doing this in places like coastal Louisiana and cooperative economies in Mississippi and climate finance forums in Barbados.
But I’ve learned something over three decades of this work, and it’s that frameworks only move when the right people hold them. Analysis that stays in long documents doesn’t organize anyone.
That’s what the certification program is for.
The Climate Finance, Just Transition & Black Liberation Certification Program – launching on Juneteenth through TCLP’s Black Liberation and Just Transition Institute – is 18 hours built around this framework, taught by the people who have been living it. Not visiting lecturers. Faculty. Community leaders, cooperative economy builders, frontline advocates, people who have been in international debt negotiations and in community meetings where the heat pump grant got denied and in organizing spaces where residents are figuring out what power actually looks like in their particular context.
I have spent 30 years watching extraordinary people fight extraordinary battles, often in isolation, often having to rediscover what others have already learned because the knowledge isn’t connected. This program is our investment in connection – in making sure that someone in Houston and someone in Detroit and someone in coastal Alabama and someone in Black River, Jamaica are working from a shared analysis and can learn from each other’s strategies.
Shirley Chisholm – the woman whose legacy anchors everything we do – understood that leadership rooted in community can actually change systems. Not by performing access to a table designed for someone else. By building something different, from the ground up, with the people most affected driving every decision.
She never said the words “climate justice.” But every principle she lived by is exactly what this moment demands.
Jamaica showed us both things at once last October: what it looks like when a community has prepared for disaster on its own terms, and what it looks like when the architecture of reconstruction still belongs to someone else. That gap – between resilience that communities build and control that communities still don’t have – is the whole work. The Second International Decade has named it. The question is who fills it. It’s what three papers and one certification program and thirty years of this movement are all reaching toward.
The chaos at the top is real. But the whole story is what communities are already doing, and what happens when they have the resources, the analysis, and each other.
Juneteenth reminds us that the announcement was never the finish line. The work of closing the gap – between what is declared and what communities actually hold – is ours to do. That’s what we’re building. And we’re just getting started.
–
The Climate Finance, Just Transition & Black Liberation Certification Program launches Juneteenth, June 19th, through TCLP’s Black Liberation and Just Transition Institute. Visit https://thechisholmlegacyproject.org/black-liberation-and-just-transition-institute to learn more and apply.