The historic floods last August caused more than $240 million in damage in the Milwaukee area.
Since then, community organizers have started hosting flood resilience events. The goal is to provide a safe space for Milwaukeeans to share their personal stories of loss and advocate for solutions.
Richard Diaz is the water infrastructure field manager with BlueGreen Alliance, a nonprofit focused on environmental issues. Diaz is helping organize the Milwaukee Justice Strategy Blitz events related to flood resilience. He spoke with WUWM’s Eddie Morales about what he hopes to accomplish.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eddie Morales: When the flood hit in August last year, what was going through your mind when considering where to start with community organizing?
Richard Diaz: In August last year, I was like, "wow, it finally happened," right? Like, you hear these various reports of more annual precipitation. In fact, the day it happened, I'm like, "this is out of this world." Milwaukee, in my lifetime, hasn't experienced anything this severe. It was very, very gut wrenching.
How eager were people to gather and talk around this issue, and what went into organizing the Milwaukee Justice Strategy Blitz event?
We had the strategy blitz in May and it was an idea that I had following both the August flooding events and then also the one this past April. Ideally, it was to create a space for people impacted by flooding, kind of like a network for folks to learn each other's stories and build community.
At the Milwaukee Justice Strategy Blitz, you got to bring together some impacted folks who had the most extreme stories and had suffered the most amount of loss. I saw you interviewed Edgar Mendez — him and his wife lost two vehicles that were fairly new. So it's bringing together folks like that, north side folks, south side folks, Black folks, Latinx folks, to come together and learn about what has happened.
Another significant piece of the Milwaukee Justice Strategy Blitz was folks learning from communities in Houston that had experienced very, very similar devastation from flooding from Hurricane Harvey — learning how they organized and were able to coalition-build and go after policy wins to help protect people and create a mobilizing force that can hold elected officials at all tiers of government accountable.
What were the immediate results of this community organizing and what do you hope to see in the near future?
Well, we're still in the beginning stages. We're going to have part two of the strategy blitz on Sept. 23 and we want to make sure that we are true to the original form and function of this idea. I think we capped it at 60 people in which 60% of those folks are directly impacted. We don't have a shortage of policy organizations and we don't have a shortage of nonprofit staffers doing service work. What we have is a shortage of people that live and breathe the impacts of some of these issues and are willing to build their capacity to lead from where they are.
We are going to continue to organize and build the vehicle. We're in the stages of developing a policy platform based off of what we heard from folks. We know that MMSD has really done a good job of trying to learn from community members and organizations about how we should become a more flood-resilient community, but MMSD can't be the only public sector partner involved in this, right? We need to see more action from the city, from the county and from the state.
