On an April day that featured near-record-high temperatures in the Roanoke Valley, it was only fitting that Roanoke directed its focus toward heat resilience.
A cohort of technical advisers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency visited Roanoke on Monday to help prepare a handful of community-based organizations to apply for the EPA’s Community Change Grant, part of an ongoing grassroots effort in the northwest sector of the city to better prepare those neighborhoods most affected by heat. Organizers hope to obtain a grant from the EPA, anywhere from $10 million to $20 million, by year’s end to fund initiatives in Roanoke toward that goal.
H.O.P.E. for Heat Resilience, a yearlong project formed with the Northwest Neighborhood Environmental Organization and a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, has been working toward that end, combining the efforts of the NNEO and other community and religious organizations, academic research, and a cohort of eight high school students from the Roanoke Valley to find innovative ways to strengthen heat resilience efforts in one of the warmest and most vulnerable parts of the city. H.O.P.E. is an acronym: Healing our people with empathy.
“We’re planning for the future, but we can’t do that in an equitable way without involving directly people from the community itself,” said Theo Lim, an assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech and principal investigator for H.O.P.E. for Heat Resilience.
Lim and NNEO organizers Antwyne Calloway and Antonio Stovall, along with a handful of other community leaders, created H.O.P.E. for Heat Resilience in the wake of a 2020 city study on urban heat islands. That study concluded that areas of the city with the most vulnerable populations — that is, those most likely to experience poverty, violence, food insecurity … the list goes on — also experienced the most extreme heat.
Their idea, called The Roanoke Method, was to take a different approach to urban planning, one that intentionally involved all facets of the communities they sought to change in finding solutions. One of the results was a cohort of eight high school students participating in a class to reimagine Northwest Roanoke in a more heat-resilient way. The students, who come from William Fleming, Northside and Salem high schools, spent the past six months, including summer, learning about, brainstorming and employing resiliency strategies in the community in which they live. They’re receiving college credit for their work through Virginia Western Community College. Currently, the cohort is working on a simulation game through which they will redesign McCadden Park in the Melrose-Rugby neighborhood to become both a cooling space and a spot for public gatherings of all kinds.
“They’re getting the skills of urban planning to directly plan for their own community to be more resilient in the face of rising temperatures,” Lim said.
One student is Northside sophomore Kennedy Helm, who said her involvement in H.O.P.E. has transformed her outlook on her neighborhood and her ability to influence its future.
“I would have never thought that I would have been out there trying to push involvement in our community,” Helm said. “It’s a good opportunity, and I like that I’m building friendships with everybody that’s involved. … They don’t make it seem like it’s just work. It’s fun.”
Helm’s mother, Tiffany Helm, heard about H.O.P.E. at the project’s genesis and encouraged Kennedy and Tiffany’s niece, Milana Correa-Jackson, to get involved.
Milana, a freshman at William Fleming, said H.O.P.E. has helped put her energy to good use.
“I didn’t know what I was into, but I knew that it was good,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot about patience and a lot about listening. … I am more of a listener, and the game has allowed me to gain patience. I have to sit there and shut up and listen.”
She said the game they’ve been working on recently went poorly at first.
“We learned that there was a lot of conflict because first of all, we’re kids and we know what we want in the park,” she said. “All the boys are into playing sports, so they wanted a basketball court. I wanted a splash pad. Somebody else wanted an amphitheater. … We could not even end the game because we would not stop arguing.”
But then the students were asked to play characters with their own sets of circumstances and desires reflecting a broader population, and the plan came together more easily. The students have been training with Lim and a group of Virginia Tech graduate students on the game, and Saturday they will present it to the community at an engagement and planning event in which they will facilitate their own version of the game for a group.
“I like to talk to people and get to know their side of stuff … so it’s really fun,” Milana said.
The students’ solutions-oriented work is the crux for Lim and the graduate students aiding in his research. In the mid-1900s, Roanoke entered a phase of “urban renewal” centered around moving poor Black residents in the Northwest neighborhoods closest to downtown. As well documented by Mindy Thompson Fullilove in her book “Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It,” Roanoke’s history with the population of Northwest in particular has been unsteady at best, ugly at its worst.
“Roanoke is held up as a … case study in what not to do,” said Laura Hartman, an associate professor of environmental studies at Roanoke College. “And so, at least in certain circles, our city is synonymous with bad urban planning.”
Invoking eminent domain, the city purchased land, often below market value, and effectively destroyed Roanoke’s Black cultural centers. Many of those relocated people wound up elsewhere in Northwest with deep-seated mistrust of the city government.
“This project centers the work of healing from trauma,” Hartman continued. “Recognizing that this community that we’re working with is the same community, more or less, that was uprooted and then placed in a different location and has had to deal with all the aftermath of that.”
Hartman became involved in the project through RAISE (another acronym: Roanoke Area Interfaith Stewards of the Earth) and assists Lim in integrating the different community-based organizations in Northwest toward the common goal of climate resilience. She said the ugly history of the relocation of the Gainsboro, Commonwealth, and Kimball neighborhoods have had long-lasting effects.
“It’s bad enough that people were forced out of their homes, but over 900 graves were dug up,” she said. The exhumed were interred in mass graves outside the city limits.
“It’s hard to visit those graves now,” Hartman continued. “You don’t even know where a particular person is. … What is that? That sounds like something out of, I don’t know, Nazi Germany or something? Do we really do this to people in this country? It’s outrageous.”
Now, H.O.P.E. is focused on solutions that will help heal the damaged relationships between a city and many of its people using The Roanoke Method.
“I think that is a way of reclaiming for the city … the culture of planning in Roanoke,” said Lim.
“Can we turn that around by redefining the culture of planning in Roanoke to involve thinking about how past traumas are experienced today and then how that can be healing for the future? … It also really changes the dynamic of the space that we’re in by having young people there. Adults act differently when they know that there are students watching.”
Monday, the EPA-led team of government officials and consultants toured Roanoke and saw the planned projects ready to be implemented. Their focus isn’t specifically on implementing the solutions but rather to help Roanoke secure the grant money, up to $20 million, to do so themselves.
“Community groups are organizing and doing so much great work, but when it comes to bureaucratic processes or grant funding — the technical expertise part — that’s historically what these community groups have been disinvested from,” said Celine Rendon, a climate resilience manager with Austin, Texas-based Adaptation International, who is helping to lead the EPA task force.
Rendon said her group is there to “be a listening ear” for the grassroots organizers who haven’t before led projects at this scale or applied for federal assistance in doing so.
“The stories are really common, and so there’s a lot of things I see locally happening in Austin that I see happening here in Roanoke,” she added.
For Lim and his students, they see any connections they develop now as an asset for the future.
“By really opening up the space where people can feel like they can bring their whole selves and express what the problem is from their perspective,” the professor said, “it really helps people to understand.”