 I'm Liz Williams-Russell. I manage the climate justice portfolio at the Foundation for Louisiana. We are a statewide philanthropic intermediary that works on a lot of different social justice issues and provides both technical and grant-making support to ensure that Louisiana residents and our communities are centered in decision-making processes. Throughout 2017, Foundation for Louisiana and the Office of Community Development partnered to co-fund and co-manage more than 70 community planning meetings as part of a larger planning process to really address the impacts of land loss and flood risk to our communities and businesses and begin designing strategies that includes programs, projects, and policy recommendations to actually holistically deal with the impacts of sea level rise and flood risk to our communities 10, 25, and 50 years from now. The LA Safe process was really able to center community decision-making. How do we ensure that residents most impacted by environmental change actually are key designers and decision-makers in what the solutions are? So we were able to really focus on the impacts of flood risk and land loss to communities and businesses over time and think through what future projects and programs might look like. We acknowledge that we should be growing in a strategic way in areas that are poised to remain high and dry over time and acknowledging the culture of Louisiana really build out ways to consolidate our resources and acknowledge that we're losing land more quickly than we can rebuild it. So what does it look like to have a spectrum of communities that are growing in population and those that are declining in population and everything in between and really being able to act on sectors that don't consider themselves environmental? So when we started working with our constituents on this particular process we heard what we have heard over and over again. By the time we see a plan all of the decisions have already been made outside of our community for our community. In this process we didn't actually go to community with any projects or programs already designed. We didn't have a plan behind our backs. We actually were working with residents that were most impacted to say if this is what we expect flood risk to look like now 10 years from now, 25 years, 50 years from now, what does that mean for your community and what should that look like? So we were actually designing with residents and across public, private, philanthropic, nonprofit and community spaces to actually design what those programs and policies might look like. As far as we know there hasn't been a similar process with that level of depth and breadth and community and engagement that's really been centered from the outset. So we have, the LA Safe Planning Team has been doing a lot of work to engage with other communities both around Louisiana and across the country and in fact at a global level because we are on the forefront of the experience of flood risk with climate change. Because of the land loss that we've experienced over the last 100 years sea level rise and communities literally losing land around them is not a future scenario in Louisiana. It is very much present day and so a lot of areas that are looking out onto the horizon where they may experience similar impacts are looking to Louisiana for leadership and for examples on how to build out these processes. We're a litmus test for a lot of the realities of sea level rise and a lot of the realities of increased flood risk and what that does to transforming communities, what it does in transforming our businesses and our local economies. Again this is not a future scenario in Louisiana. So the LA Safe Process was one of the projects awarded to Louisiana in terms of federal funding from the National Disaster Resilience Competition. Over the last 10 years every one of our 64 parishes has been under a federal flood declaration meaning that flood risk and the impacts of various types of flooding are not foreign to any resident of Louisiana. So the federal competition to actually allow places that had experienced disasters within the window of 2011 to 2013 through the National Disaster Resilience Competition was an incredible opportunity for us to build out local capacity and coordinate between agencies and between sectors, both sectors in terms of public, private, philanthropic, NGO and community spaces, but also housing and development, transportation, economic development and job access, public health access, all of those spaces were really centered in LA Safe and most federal funding doesn't actually allow for that type of creative overlap between spaces. So we tend to silo off different components of the work but really this type of flexible resources allowed us to carve out pathways into new sectors that hadn't considered themselves environmental and maybe weren't really thinking about the impacts of land loss and flood risk and the population shifts that are occurring in relation to disaster as an entry point into new conversations, new types of programs or existing expansion of policies or practices so that was a really incredible opportunity for us.