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Our current infrastructure was built for a world that no longer exists. How do we build the power to survive when the systems we depend on fail us? In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with guests Keyante Aytch, Alice Liu, and Brandon Bunt about the tools and relationships that can help make communities resilient — from mesh networks and off-grid solar to neighborhood disaster hubs.

Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes.

Today, we’re talking about what it means to build communities that can weather catastrophe — not simply by stockpiling supplies or preparing as individuals, but by creating relationships, skills, and infrastructure that allow people to take care of one another and exercise control over the systems their lives depend on.

No Abandonment, No Bunkers: Preparing for Disaster Together

My guests are Keyante Aytch, Alice Liu, and Brandon Bunt, three participants in Climate Mobilization Project’s National Climate Survival Incubator. Keyante is a Chicago-based solar installer who is building off-grid energy systems at community gardens and urban farms. Alice works with West Street Recovery in Houston, where neighborhood-based disaster hubs combine material preparedness with community organizing. And Brandon runs Kiau Technologies, an ecological technology studio developing decentralized tools for farmers, including solar-powered soil sensors and communications systems designed around autonomy and data sovereignty.

This conversation was recorded before the severe storms that struck Northwest Indiana on August 11. In Gary, a predominantly Black city, more than 38,000 utility customers lost power, and some residents went nearly two weeks without electricity. The prolonged blackout disrupted access to food, medicine, communications, and other necessities, while creating especially dangerous conditions for people who rely on electricity for medical care. We won’t be discussing that disaster directly in this episode, but I encourage listeners to listen to this conversation while thinking about what the people of Gary endured — and about what forms of preparedness and infrastructure will allow our communities to care for one another when the systems we depend on fail us.

That work is at the heart of what Keyante, Alice, and Brandon are building. In this episode, we talk about neighborhood disaster hubs, community-controlled solar power, food and energy sovereignty, decentralized communications, and what becomes possible when we stop thinking of resilience as an individual responsibility and start treating it as a collective project. Their work also raises a larger political question: What kinds of power can communities build when they have greater control over the systems that sustain everyday life?

All three of my guests will also be featured in an upcoming event that I’m participating in with Climate Mobilization Project Project. On September 17, they’re hosting Before the Storm, a free online national town hall focused on the 2026 Super El Niño, grassroots climate resilience, and movement strategy in an era of escalating climate disruption and authoritarianism. Keyante, Alice, and Brandon will be sharing lessons from the resilience projects they’re building, and I’ll be joining Daniel Aldana Cohen, co-author of A Planet to Win, for a conversation about political power, local ownership, and where movements need to evolve in the years ahead.

The event is September 17 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Eastern, or 6 to 7:30 Central. You can find the registration link in the show notes.

For now, I hope you’ll sit with what my guests have to say about the infrastructures we inherit, the infrastructures we build, and the kinds of relationships that might help us survive what’s coming while creating something better.

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Kelly Hayes: Keyante, Alice, Brandon, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Alice Liu: Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Keyante Aytch: Thank you.

Brandon Bunt: Thank you for having us.

Keyante Aytch: Yeah, this is great.

Kelly Hayes: How are you all doing today?

Keyante Aytch: Solid, solid. Feeling pretty well. It’s a beautiful day in August in the summertime. Rocking and rolling.

Brandon Bunt: I’m based in Denver and we’ve had an exceptionally hot and dry summer, and I just finished moving to a new space, so it’s been a little bit tough, but I’m very excited about the new space. It’s a live-work studio that I live in, but also now the headquarters of our company. So it’s been hard, but exciting nonetheless.

Alice Liu: And I’m calling in from Houston. It is a rainy day over here. It’s also been super hot, so the rain is a nice break from the summer heat.

Kelly Hayes: Well I am so happy to be in conversation with you all today. Could each of you tell the audience a bit about yourselves and the work you do?

Keyante Aytch: Sure thing. So again, I’m Keyante Aytch from Chicago as well, Kelly. So I am a solar installer by trade. I’ve been in this particular industry for about six years now, a little over half a decade. And the work that I do now through my contracting services is installing what are called off-grid or standalone energy systems in community gardens and urban farms. And through my current project, I am developing an emergency response program and plan to be able to utilize these energy systems to support the nearby residents at these sites during power outages.

Alice Liu: Hey, you all. My name is Alice. I am based in Houston, and I have been working with a disaster recovery organization called West Street Recovery since 2020. So it’s been six years. West Street Recovery is a grassroots project that started in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, one of the country’s deadliest and most costly natural disasters to date. It responded out of the total lack of governmental support to individuals and neighborhoods in crisis. And now, a full nine years later, we run a hyper-local disaster response and preparedness program, and we also use that as the basis for building power to improve policy for climate resilience here in Houston.

Brandon Bunt: Hi, I’m Brandon. I run Kiau Technologies, what we’ve been calling an ecological technology studio. We build solar-powered soil sensors that communicate over mesh networks for small and diversified farms, mostly in water-scarce parts of the West. I grew up caring about food justice and about how healthy food actually reaches people, and I studied engineering because I wanted to build tools that could act on that.

Our work spans a lot of areas. Of course, it’s taken me a while to find the thread tying our seemingly separate but actually related projects together. And what I’ve landed on is autonomy. Most technology is built to make life more convenient, and we’re building tools to help people become more autonomous, protect the resources of the land that they’re on, and reclaim control over their own decisions and attention with their own data. So soil moisture sensing is where we started, but not where we’re stopping.

Kelly Hayes: I want to start with disaster response and community power. Alice, West Street Recovery describes disaster recovery as a way to build community power. What does that look like in practice?

Alice Liu: Yeah, so for West Street, since the start of our project, we have had a dual approach to what we believe effective disaster response has to entail. And that’s number one, intervening in the material conditions that precede and follow a disaster, especially here in Houston. We’re on the Gulf Coast, we’re in the Gulf South, and we’re facing some of those shared political conditions with other states here in the South. And that means that disasters are followed by deep government neglect, and they’re also preceded by conditions of existing economic precarity.

So for us, when we are in pursuit of this goal of building community power and increasing community autonomy on the front lines of the climate crisis, first and foremost, that looks like making sure people have a safe home to live in, people have food on the table because economic hardship and survival is not an accident. It’s politically intentional. We see with cutting federal food stamps, hunger, not having housing, all of these things are weaponized because when people are struggling, that makes it harder to carve out time to join a political project and resist the erosion of our rights that’s happening here in the U.S.

So for us, we started as mainly a home repair project, which means that when homes are flooded, oftentimes the most vulnerable and low-income neighborhoods are en masse, denied from federal recovery programs like FEMA, which are designed to support the middle class. And we saw after Hurricane Harvey that the average wealth of white households here in the city actually increased after this disaster because of the way that federal aid and insurance operated and was distributed.

So West Street Recovery, we are based in Northeast Houston, and we repair homes free of charge for low-income houses that are denied and sort of fall through the cracks of these other programs. And that’s step one of bringing people into our community. We have a sister organization called the Northeast Action Collective, which is almost entirely made up of disaster survivors, whether that’s Hurricane Harvey or the three or four other disasters that have happened since then. And because people are able to stay in their homes because they’re not being displaced following an ice storm or a power outage or a flood, this is sort of increasing the community’s social resilience.

And it also is a really strong foundation of trust to where we get to know each other on the ground in the streets, literally shoveling dirt out of drains, generally just getting really dirty. And then from there, we try to facilitate conversations about, okay, your home was flooded, you were unable to afford repair. Also, you’ve been paying taxes in this city for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and your streets look absolutely horrible. So if the money isn’t going towards infrastructure, where is that money going?

Generally politicizing the disaster. And yeah, that’s really the base of the community group that we organize with. And in practice, it means that we have about 100 to 150 people now across the city who every year, there’s multiple campaign moments that we mobilize around. And over the past five years, we’ve been able to shift over 100 million dollars in the local city budget to go towards more equitable climate resilience, sort of flood infrastructure that isn’t just protecting the richest neighborhoods, but is actually being built in the most vulnerable parts of the city that need it the most.

Kelly Hayes: That sounds like powerful work. You’ve talked about disaster response as both meeting people’s immediate needs and creating the relationships that make organizing possible. Can you tell us how West Street Recovery’s hub homes work? What have you learned about what people need in order to take care of one another during a crisis?

Alice Liu: Yeah, absolutely. So West Street Recovery’s hub homes basically serve as hyper-local disaster preparedness and response centers that are located in people’s homes and backyards. So currently, we have seven established hub homes across Northeast Houston and are also currently operating a hub school, where we’re training four additional hub home leaders to also create hubs in their own neighborhoods. Each hub is equipped with backup solar panels and batteries so that they are operational and can serve as a gathering space and sort of crisis center when and if the power goes out.

Hubs are also equipped with essential rescue supplies, medical equipment, and food and some........

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