Introducing the Compass — Lighthouse Environment Partners

Welcome to The Compass
A Quarterly Update from Lighthouse Environment Partners

This is our first issue, and we’re thrilled to share it with you! If you’re receiving this, chances are we know you personally, and we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your support. If we haven’t met yet, we look forward to collaborating to create flourishing communities and ecosystems together.

Why The Compass?
The name symbolizes the need to regularly take stock of where we are, where we are headed and continue on our trajectory or, if needed, adjust course. Our quarterly updates are designed to reflect on where we’ve been, share what we are experiencing in our work and our milestones with partners, and look ahead to inspire and connect our growing community.

Major Milestones and Updates

2024 marked Lighthouse’s first year in operation—and what a journey it has been! We set out to explore how we live in our environments today and how we can build thriving communities as the climate changes. Most importantly, we’ve been asking:

How can we live better?
How does our physical, mental, emotional, and financial well-being intertwine with our environment and community?
How do our connections with others increase our resilience?
How do we flourish?

Progress hasn’t always been linear, but each challenge has pushed us forward. Through experimentation, reflection, and bold planning, we are seeing the momentum build within our own organization as well as with our networks and partners.

Some of our biggest milestones this year include:

Implementing our Community Resilience Program pilot

We’re developing our organizing approach based on authentic relationships, leadership development from within, and long-term engagement. We launched the Community Resilience Program to provide organizing support to the North River/Laurel Road Ladies Outreach Committee, an all-volunteer community-based organization providing mutual aid to the neighborhoods of North River, Laurel Road and Silver Dollar Road in Carteret County. Lighthouse hired Justin Wallace, originally of North River, in July of 2024 to begin our journey of working “with and through” and not “to and for” the Committee.

*Justin Wallace, our Community Resilience Organizer, at the North River Fall Festival!*

Visioning, education and grant-writing with our partners

Organizing is an exercise that builds trust, capacity and knowledge in order for collective action to happen. But in order to take thoughtful action, we must be grounded in the needs, values and desires of our communities and of ourselves, understanding how our histories and relationships have shaped us all.

Lighthouse worked with the Committee and additional NGO partners to understand the community’s history, current realities and future goals in order to create a vision that could guide the partnership development and align our respective goals. Throughout this process, we identified funding sources well suited to make these visions a reality and created, or facilitated the creation of, educational content to present to the Committee and community. This culminated in writing a $20M EPA Community Change Grant in partnership with five additional NGOs - the Committee, the NCSU Coastal Dynamic Design Lab, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, the Rural Opportunity Institute, and the North Carolina Eastern Sentinel Landscape - that, if funded, will build leadership and capacity development, rebuild the beloved community center that burned down over 20 years ago, conduct a wastewater feasibility study to address widespread failure of septic systems resulting from rising groundwater levels, and implement a suite of additional nature-based solutions to mitigate flooding and other impacts of extreme weather. We are waiting to hear if we will be selected, but we have identified a number of other avenues through which we can accomplish our goals.

*Todd Miller of the North Carolina Coastal Federation discussing land acquisition and climate resilience strategies with Committee members for our Community Change Grant application*

Building capacity for communities to engage in additional local, state and regional opportunities

At both state and federal levels, there have been unprecedented investments in resilience planning and project identification. However, engagement with planning processes and pursuit of resources for implementation requires communities to be aware of available opportunities, to have the capacity to engage, and the internal resources or partner support to manage logistically complex projects. These factors often lead to the perpetuation of underservice to historically underserved communities, even for programs with the best of intentions. Addressing this problem has always been one of Lighthouse’s original intentions, and we are seeing our theory of change succeed through increased capacity, project planning, education and outreach.

We believe that building the capacity of the community-based organization (in this case, the Committee) to understand and coordinate these efforts smoothly for the benefit of the community will lead to funds well-spent and disparate efforts working together for better outcomes than these efforts working in isolation. While we are still learning how best to manage these efforts, we see a tremendous amount of value in the existence of community-based organizations that can ‘catch’ all of these efforts and make them work for the benefit of the community.

Some of these efforts include:

Engaging with the Resilient Coastal Communities Program Phase 1 Vulnerability Assessment reach by using our network and events to increase participation in surveys as well as providing feedback on how to improve the process
Connecting community members with researchers at Duke and UNC studying the impacts of climate change and flooding on communities
Working with Carteret Community College to accept the generous donation of a trailer that can serve near-term community meeting space and food pantry and storage needs
Pursuing landscape planning opportunities such as the NCSU Coastal Dynamic Design Lab.
Youth participation in fire department training opportunities

We look forward to future partnerships that provide education, training and project co-creation.

We sat down with Juanita and MaryAnn of the North River/Laurel Road Ladies Outreach Committee to talk about what a thriving community looks like, the impacts of flooding and the under-the-radar issue of heirs’ property in their community.

Challenges and Opportunities

The challenges are many, but can be summed up in the fact that addressing the effects of climate change is expensive, stressful, and complex.

Costs aren’t limited to dollars—though rising insurance premiums, infrastructure repairs, and disaster recovery are enormous burdens that can wipe people out financially. There’s also the emotional toll: the stress, confusion, and uncertainty of navigating a changing environment.

We believe resilience is about more than reducing harm and bouncing back after a disruptive event—it’s about thriving despite challenges. This is why our work also includes how climate resilience planning can also consider the following:

Co-exist with the new physical and financial realities of our changing climate, especially extreme storms, rising sea levels, and exceptional flooding events.
Increase emotional resilience, economic opportunities, and food security.
Build community, social cohesion, and collaboration.
Support land ownership, especially for heirs’ property holders.

It is much to consider, but climate change reveals that everything truly is connected. As such, we believe our success will be the result of our connections – with ourselves, with each other and with our environment.

Instances of king tide flooding in North River

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, we’re thinking about solving for environmental, social, and economic variables, such as:

Community-based insurance to increase financial resilience and nature-based infrastructure.
Community-led disaster plans that build community cohesion and safety before, during, and after extreme weather events.
Floodprint planning in partnership with NC State’s Coastal Dynamics Design Lab that considers how changing weather patterns can actually improve how communities live by planning holistically.
Upgrading community infrastructure, including opportunities to rebuild the community center, fund needed upgrades to the North River Fire Department, and the setup of a donated trailer from Carteret Community College.
Sustainable land-use opportunities such as agroecology, community gardens, and other economic models like co-ops and land trusts.

Cleaning out emergency food supplies that had gone bad in the container. The Committee often provides needed food aid but has not had the infrastructure to properly maintain and store food donations since the community center burned down. Infrastructure improvements include accepting and maintaining the donation of a trailer from Carteret Community College and rebuilding the Community Center to meet these and other community needs, among others.

How You Can Help

We have ambitious plans and see opportunities all around us, but we can’t do it alone. Strong partnerships, collaborations, and financial support are essential to our shared success. Below are some immediate funding needs where your help can make a difference:

Continued support for our Community Resilience Program to implement the Floodprint and initiate identified projects.
Upgrades for the North River Fire Department and trailer setup.
Funding for storytelling to amplify community voices.
Support for the North River/Laurel Road Ladies Outreach staff, events, and immediate food and utility aid for some residents.
Follow us on Instagram! We’ve just launched our instagram @lighthouse.environment

If you’re interested in partnering with us or supporting other aspects of our work, please reach out. We believe there is an incredible opportunity to create deeply satisfying places and relationships—and that our natural world is calling us to do so.

We are so grateful to have you on this journey with us. Thank you for supporting our mission to create flourishing communities and ecosystems.

Warmly,

Kelly and Justin

It’s the relationships we are building that we are most proud of!