The Resilient Red Hook (RRH) group grew out of a NYS-funded program NY Rising which was a response to hurricanes Ira, Lee and Sandy.  PortSide's ED Carolina Salguero was one of the appointed members of NY Rising and in RRH for a several years after NY Rising completed the NYS-funded work. 

After completing the state-funded work in Spring 2014, some NY Rising people kept meeting, led by Gita Nandan and rebranded as Resilient Red Hook (RRH.) The group decided to NOT have its mission include preparing Red Hook for floods in a hands-on, first-responder way, and their approach has been to host more of a planning and advocacy conversation about resiliency using a small in-group, rather than a a conversation shared iteratively and transparently with the community like a civic organization. Both decisions prompted Salguero/PortSide to leave the group.

RRH started doing a master plan for Red Hook  development with consultants Perkins & Will, talked a lot about climate change issues, and in 2020 and 2021, were talking about plans for mitigating truck traffic expected from the multiple last mile facilities being built in Red Hook. However, by the pandemic, the group was largely inactive, their social media stopped updating in 2021. 

Sometime in 2023, the group resumed meeting, but we find no public schedule for these meetings.

History of the NY Rising committee and its resiliency plan for Red Hook: 

The NYS Governors Office for Storm Recovery (GOSR) created the NY Rising "Community Reconstruction Program" (CRP), an 8-month planning process that kicked off in September, 2013, for 45 areas in the state, including Red Hook, affected by storms Sandy, Irene and Lee.  $3MM in federal funding was allocated to Red Hook's plan.  Red Hook, like the other the 45 areas, had to create a plan for the allocated funds by having a state-selected committee of community members work with, and be a liaison between, the community and state-hired consultants.  The committee met every two weeks and had multiple public engagement events.  

The idea was that the State would provide funding and consultants for communities to develop resiliency plans, bringing planning resources to small communities that usually could not afford them.  The Red Hook group, working with some of the top planning and design firms in NYC, was charged with making a neighborhood resiliency plan with a budget of $3 million dollars during a work period from September 2013 to April 2014.  The State picked the consultants, the Red Hook people to be on the committee and drove the process (timeline, framework, etc), so though there was a strong grassroots voice, it was not a grassroots-driven process.

The committee continued to meet after completing that State-initiated work in April, 2014.  

In February 2017, the committee changed its name to Resilient Red Hook to reflect that its mission was moving beyond the original State-funded plan. At the same time, it began a process to design its own website.

The final CRP plans were rolled out in Albany on April 23, 2013:

Mini brochure summarizing the NY Rising Plan

Executive Summary and full final Red Hook NY Rising plan

The Resilient Red Hook webpage conveniently breaks the plan into separate sections, each with its own link 

Committee members on the blog about the process.

Official NYS webpages

https://stormrecovery.ny.gov/regional-communities/red-hook

http://stormrecovery.ny.gov/nyrcr/community/red-hook

Current RRH info

Prior to covid, the committee had been meeting the 2^nd Monday of the month at 6:30pm, usually at the Kentler Gallery at 353 Van Brunt Street or Realty Collective at 351 Van Brunt. 

Contact email resilientredhook@gmail.com

website

https://www.facebook.com/resilientredhook  

https://www.instagram.com/resilientredhook/

The committee blog which covered the 2013-2014 period is at http://redhookcrp.wordpress.com/