This was first printed in Religion & Management.

After Hurricane Ida in 2021, when business electrical energy sources vanished, many New Orleans neighborhoods went darkish. The storm left a lot of the metropolis with out energy for 10 days in early September, when the common excessive temperature is near 90 levels.

However hurricanes — as damaging as they’re — aren’t the one downside. Final yr, for instance, the town misplaced energy because of grid overload and Mylar balloons. Louisiana has the longest energy outages within the nation, with a median of practically eight hours, based on information from the U.S. Vitality Data Administration.

And in metro New Orleans, the place 20% of residents stay beneath the poverty line, probably the most susceptible usually have nowhere to go for aid. Certainly, practically a dozen deaths had been attributed to the outage brought on by Ida. This contains deaths from warmth exhaustion and carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly put in gas-powered mills.

The Rev. Shawn Anglim, founding pastor of First Grace United Methodist Church within the Mid-Metropolis neighborhood, stated Ida was a wake-up name. Within the months following the storm, he and different group leaders took half in a Zoom assembly to debate choices for community-led options.

The net gathering was hosted by Collectively New Orleans, a religion, labor and group group that’s a part of the bigger group Collectively Louisiana, a statewide community of greater than 250 congregations and civic organizations.

“The utility firm was not going to cleared the path, and the town was not going to cleared the path,” Anglim stated.

Their proposed answer: Create “resilience hubs” throughout the town in church buildings and different group facilities.

In 2022, Collectively Louisiana approached the Better New Orleans Basis, which supplied $1 million to launch the Neighborhood Lighthouse pilot technique to put in commercial-scale solar energy techniques with backup battery storage to shine a lightweight for residents all through the town throughout occasions of want.

Since Hurricane Ida, Collectively New Orleans has established 14 Neighborhood Lighthouses throughout the town to generate clear electrical energy and retailer it for emergency use. Photo voltaic vitality additionally reduces electrical energy prices throughout regular climate — no small factor in a metropolis recognized for its oppressive warmth and humidity.

The undertaking goals to construct a community of 86 lighthouses so that each New Orleanian might stroll to at least one in lower than quarter-hour. The lighthouse areas are unfold throughout the town, established in each Protestant and Catholic church buildings, in addition to on the CrescentCare Neighborhood Well being Heart. Collectively Louisiana plans to construct as many as 500 throughout the state.

“The most important microgrid on the earth is in New Orleans,” Anglim stated. “It’s referred to as Neighborhood Lighthouse.”

Providing a way of security in a disaster

Within the wake of Hurricane Katrina 20 years in the past, Anglim led the consolidation of a traditionally Black church, Grace UMC, and a traditionally white church, First UMC, which got here collectively to worship beneath one roof as a bigger Methodist congregation referred to as First Grace UMC.

Anglim requested longtime parishioners whether or not the 2 church buildings might do extra for the town “as one physique of Christ, greater than we might ever do as two our bodies one lengthy mile aside.” The congregations blended their musical and liturgical traditions right into a sanctuary that displays the multicultural actuality of the Large Simple.

Throughout Hurricane Ida, the Nationwide Climate Service recorded peak wind gusts of 113 miles per hour in New Orleans, which tore the roof off the sanctuary at First Grace. As we speak, the brand new roof is outfitted with photo voltaic panels and storage batteries; electrical energy connects to a fellowship corridor with an occupancy of about 150 individuals. The communal house provides charging stations for neighbors and a cooling heart to flee the daytime warmth, Anglim stated.

The church supplies transitional housing for ladies, youngsters, trans and gender-nonconforming people year-round by way of a program referred to as Hagar’s Home. The group additionally runs Mission Ishmael, a professional bono immigration authorized program for kids and people dwelling in Hagar’s Home. Throughout an outage, the Sunday Faculty lecture rooms upstairs from the fellowship corridor are reserved as sleeping quarters for this group.

When Hurricane Francine made landfall in Louisiana in 2024 it introduced the primary take a look at of the microgrid that went on-line in 2023. The Class 2 hurricane brought on important flooding however no fatalities.

At First Grace, the vitality saved in batteries saved the lights and air con on within the fellowship corridor and the church’s primary workplace, which powers web entry to coordinate further catastrophe aid. The Salvation Military and different native help organizations arrived with meals, oxygen tanks and electrical mills to maintain medical gadgets operating in a single day.

“Wherever there’s a steeple, individuals count on you to be the church. It doesn’t matter that they’ve by no means gone to church,” Anglim stated. “When the lights exit, they knock on the church door.”

Then-mayor LaToya Cantrell directed residents to the working lighthouses throughout the town. In New Orleans East, an remoted neighborhood of greater than 75,000 people who’s topic to frequent outages, Garreth Johnson, a member of Cornerstone United Methodist Church, fielded questions concerning the newly put in photo voltaic panels and batteries.

“We had an inflow of calls asking what the Neighborhood Lighthouse is, from people who weren’t Methodist, who had been unchurched, who had been simply keen to assist,” Johnson stated.

Johnson sees this system as a possibility to supply a way of security throughout an unsettling time for all of the church’s neighbors.

“It makes excellent sense to be positioned in our church group,” he stated. “Our objective is to do good and assist others, and there’s no higher time than in the course of the aftermath of a storm.”

When the thought arose to put in commercial-scale photo voltaic panels that hook up with a backup battery storage system, the Rev. Duane Gidney of Degree Floor Neighborhood Church within the Hollygrove neighborhood recommended the “Neighborhood Lighthouse” title, drawing on the chance to construct beacons to offer not solely electrical energy but in addition hope and help.

Whereas the undertaking has introduced many individuals a heightened sense of particular person religion, most see the bigger profit as making a stronger accountability between the church and its neighboring group.

“For me, the church has at all times been a spot not simply to develop my very own spirituality, however to make use of its energy within the bigger group,” stated Max Reichard, a member of St. Paul Lutheran Church.

“I don’t know why we exist if we’re not on the market doing for different individuals what they’ll’t do for themselves.”

Religion as a way to develop group resilience

In coastal New Orleans, which bears the brunt of hurricane season most years, the significance of the Neighborhood Lighthouse is straight away recognizable. However throughout Louisiana, the attraction is deeper than simply having vitality when the grid goes down.

Ben Peterson, a group organizer with Collectively New Orleans who beforehand labored for Central Louisiana Interfaith, stated that even away from the coast, one of the interesting facets of the undertaking is the human part.

Along with connecting congregations throughout denominations, the Neighborhood Lighthouse initiative has required relationship-building with every church’s rapid neighbors.

In making a Neighborhood Lighthouse resilience hub, a congregation or civic heart additionally builds a crew of people who find themselves deeply related to their neighbors. This has created resilience past group catastrophe response, stated Jen Scott, an affiliate professor of social work at Louisiana State College.

Scott credit a lot of the Neighborhood Lighthouse program’s success to its grassroots growth and the collaboration of on a regular basis individuals who had been curious about working with their communities to construct new methods to look after each other.

“It’s serving to to re-anchor establishments of their neighborhoods,” she stated.

Joshua Blount, a comparatively new member of Bethlehem Lutheran Church, was looking for a option to get extra concerned in his group. He discovered it throughout the church’s Neighborhood Lighthouse program.

Blount took on the function of head “lighthouse keeper” at Bethlehem Lutheran in Central Metropolis, changing into the go-to skilled on holding the photo voltaic panels and backup batteries operating year-round. He additionally helps preserve monitor of parishioners and neighbors who may have further help throughout emergencies.

Reichard additionally credit the Neighborhood Lighthouse undertaking for strengthening St. Paul Lutheran’s relationship with the native neighborhood affiliation, which has helped the lighthouse crew discover volunteers.

Working with the group was key to scaling an concept right into a community of operational solar-powered neighborhood shelters throughout congregations.

To introduce this idea of photo voltaic microgrids to communities, Collectively New Orleans developed structured displays referred to as Civic Academies to coach these curious about creating these new resilience hubs. These trainings have taken place repeatedly over the previous couple of years.

Educating the congregation took endurance, stated Reichard of St. Paul Lutheran. During the last two years, he labored to maintain his group knowledgeable concerning the alternative afforded by Collectively New Orleans. Photo voltaic panels and batteries had been put in at his church within the Marigny neighborhood in 2025.

The Civic Academies “helped to promote not solely our communities however the metropolis at giant on investing on this course of, as a result of it was simply an concept and we didn’t have any cash for it,” Johnson of Cornerstone UMC stated.

Community provides greater than electrical energy

Though the thought is a straightforward one — providing shelter to neighbors in occasions of want — the execution is complicated and extends past disaster response.

Johnson stated he was impressed by the significance positioned on supporting every congregation in its particular person journey, together with the emphasis on creating apprenticeships to present individuals new financial alternatives.

The initiative works with organizations such because the Worldwide Brotherhood of Electrical Employees to rent unionized inexperienced vitality consultants and the Louisiana Inexperienced Corps to supply apprenticeships to younger individuals curious about discovering their place within the inexperienced vitality economic system.

And along with technical coaching, the initiative prepares lighthouse keepers to reply to psychological well being crises.

Scott and different social employees developed a quick group psychological well being intervention referred to as Communities Organizing for Energy by way of Empathy (COPE) to show coping abilities for on a regular basis individuals thrust into caregiving roles. The event of this coaching was impressed by psychological well being workshops provided after Hurricane Katrina to handle the immense burden and traumas wrought by the levee failure throughout and after Katrina.

“It’s a tense state of affairs when persons are having to come back into this lighthouse as a result of they don’t have any energy and don’t know once they’re going to,” stated Michele Firestone, a member of the Neighborhood Church Unitarian Universalist within the Lakeview district.

“We realized some coping abilities for ourselves and in addition to assist handle the individuals who come to us in that state of affairs.”

Increasing the community

A mixture of public-private partnerships and philanthropic donations has funded the undertaking, together with $2 million from the Metropolis of New Orleans and $3.8 million in federal funding secured by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter (D-LA). This fundraising has allowed even small congregations to afford the commercial-scale photo voltaic panels and backup batteries.

At First Grace, for instance, the gear price round $300,000. The congregation didn’t pay a cent.

On Sept. 9, 2025, the Nationwide Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Drugs’s Gulf Analysis Program and Lever for Change introduced the Neighborhood Lighthouse Initiative as one in every of 10 finalists for the $50 million Gulf Futures Problem.

That funding would enable Collectively Louisiana to scale the Neighborhood Lighthouse technique. Broderick Bagert, lead organizer of Collectively New Orleans, stated such enlargement would create a systemic strategy to handle the social isolation that always determines well being outcomes throughout emergencies.

The scope of labor can be increasing. In December, the New Orleans Metropolis Council superior a plan to spend $28 million from an influence firm overcharge settlement on lots of of battery installations throughout the town. This follows a pilot undertaking launched on the Sisters of the Holy Household to cut back electrical energy payments for his or her neighbors in New Orleans East.

Throughout this yr’s Epiphany, which kicks off the Carnival season in New Orleans, Anglim and leaders at First Grace celebrated the enlargement of the town’s inclusive microgrid.

Collectively Louisiana’s Neighborhood Lighthouse initiative grew from parishioners’ sense of accelerating urgency to take motion after that they had waited for many years for a governmental group to create a plan to maintain the town’s residents secure.

Probably the most susceptible communities in New Orleans have lengthy distrusted the federal government, going again to the Nice Mississippi River Flood of 1927, when white elites used dynamite to explode components of the levee that protected poor Black and Acadian communities.

And earlier than Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters burst by way of the levees in 2005, a 1965 storm referred to as Hurricane Betsy overtopped the town’s earthen protections and breached the levee in the identical place the place the Decrease Ninth Ward would flood 40 years later.

As extra hurricane seasons handed with no plan rising to guard these most susceptible within the aftermath of a storm, New Orleans congregations and their allies took it upon themselves to create a system that might provide a brand new manner ahead.

This want is prone to develop throughout the nation as storms develop into extra extreme and frequent; excessive climate locations immense stress on growing old vitality infrastructure, resulting in a rise in weather-related energy outages.

“Don’t anticipate another person to do it,” stated Peterson, of Collectively New Orleans. “You’re going to be the one.”

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