View the original recording of the webinar, Empowering Community Voices for Blue Green Infrastructure in the Chollas Creek Watershed, recorded May 22, 2025, on the Environmental Finance Center Network’s YouTube channel.
When the thousand-year storm hit San Diego’s Chollas Creek watershed on January 22, 2024, it didn’t affect all neighborhoods equally. The communities that bore the brunt of the flooding — with residents forced to restart their lives and businesses devastated — were the same historically underserved areas that had long advocated for better infrastructure, more trees and flood protection.
But what emerged from this crisis wasn’t just another top-down recovery effort. Instead, it became a powerful example of how communities can shift from traditional stakeholder consultation to genuine partnership in infrastructure development.
Re-imagining Community Partnership
The Chollas Creek Resident Empowerment Training (RET) Program, a collaboration between Groundwork San Diego and Greenprint Partners, challenges a fundamental assumption in infrastructure development. Too often, Greenprint CEO April Mendez explains, communities are viewed as “a risk to involve in our projects” because they may not understand the full scope of challenges.
This program flips that dynamic entirely, positioning community members as allies who can help achieve far more than agencies could accomplish alone. The results speak for themselves: resident leaders now sit at decision-making tables with department heads, have influenced millions in potential funding streams, and are seeing their community ideas transform into actual planted trees and flood mitigation projects.
The Power of Proper Investment
The RET Program’s design reflects a commitment to meaningful engagement. Twenty participants from nine neighborhoods committed to eight two-hour sessions over four months — a total of 16 hours of training. Notably, they were paid $37.50 per hour for their time (much higher than minimum wage), totaling just under $600 per participant to avoid tax implications.
“It was really important to Groundwork that residents were paid well for the time that they were spending on this program,” Mendez noted. This investment signaled respect for participants’ expertise and time while ensuring the program was accessible to residents who couldn’t afford to volunteer.
The curriculum covered seven comprehensive modules, from understanding blue green infrastructure to power analysis and campaign planning. But at its heart was a project-based approach where residents identified sites in their neighborhoods, formed teams and worked with Greenprint’s engineering team to develop conceptual designs and community engagement plans for their projects.
Real Projects, Real Impact
The program’s structure generated tangible results that participants can see in their daily lives. Brian Flaigmore, a resident fellow, worked on Stream View — a mile-long, 200-foot-wide street that had become a heat island and dumping ground with severe flooding issues.
“The city had a project planned that was mostly stormwater [management] and some roundabouts,” Flaigmore explained, “but the residents really wanted some trees in this area because it’s been measured at around 130 degrees Fahrenheit in that area on hot days with the surface temperature.”
Through building consensus and rallying neighbors, residents successfully advocated for nearly 100 trees to be included in the city’s project, which began construction this year. More importantly, the city now includes these trained resident leaders in early planning processes for community outreach.
Lived Experiences Uncover Opportunities
The program’s impact extends beyond individual projects to systemic change. Howard Cuarezma, another resident fellow from the Mountain View neighborhood, describes how the January 2024 storm became “a big wake-up call” that helped city officials understand the disparities in infrastructure investment.
“Now you start hearing a lot of officials ask questions as to why this neighborhood is not funded the same as this other neighborhood in San Diego,” Cuarezma observed. The storm’s disproportionate impact on historically underserved communities made visible what residents had long experienced.
The program created space for residents to ask “out of the box questions” that professionals might miss. Flaigmore shared how his knowledge of local geography led to a breakthrough in funding strategy. When discussing potential revenue streams from development fees for off-site stormwater mitigation, he realized that expanding beyond the Chollas Creek watershed to include the entire Pueblo watershed — which encompasses downtown San Diego’s development boom — could create substantial funding for community projects.
“They all looked at each other and said ‘Yeah I don’t see why not,’” Flagmore recalled. “So now we’re working on a potential real funding stream for these projects.”
Transforming Families and Futures
A particularly powerful testimony came from Jacinta Hinojosa, whose participation began when her son questioned why their community lacked good trails with green canopies. The program’s impact rippled through her entire family.
Through her participation, her family all learned together about capital improvement projects and community advocacy. “You have a voice even if you don’t speak the language — you’re a resident here in the community and you know what’s best for your community.” Her 11th-grade son, initially skeptical of the program, has since changed his career aspirations from architecture to environmental engineering after learning alongside his mother and seeing her deep involvement.
Having city officials in the workshops also allowed Hinojosa to learn more about the planning process, which in turn empowered her to testify at City Hall — something she didn’t know she could do before — to help shape the budget for blue green infrastructure.
The Spectrum of Participation
Central to the program’s approach was training on the International Association for Public Participation’s spectrum of engagement, which ranges from “inform” to “empower.” This framework helped both residents and city staff clarify expectations and power dynamics.
“It was interesting to see the residents grappling with this in the same way that you see city officials grappling with it,” Mendez noted. Residents found themselves asking the same questions about technical expertise and decision-making authority that typically occupy city planners.
This shared framework created common ground for genuine collaboration rather than consultation.
Scaling Success: The Blue Green Collaborative
The program’s success led to the formation of the Chollas Creek Blue Green Collaborative, now comprising 65 members including major public agencies, city departments, regional planning commissions and resident leaders who “sit intentionally at each of the tables and to host the conversation” during meetings.
The Collaborative is now developing a comprehensive vision for blue green infrastructure across the entire watershed, mapping potential sites, developing conceptual plans and securing funding for implementation. The effort exemplifies how breaking down silos and centering community knowledge can generate solutions that serve both technical requirements and lived experience.
Lessons for Replication
The program’s initial $25,000 investment from local foundations (San Diego Foundation and Resources Legacy Foundation) demonstrates that meaningful community engagement doesn’t require massive budgets, but it does require genuine commitment to power-sharing and long-term relationship building.
Key elements for replication include:
- Authentic Investment: Paying participants fairly and respecting their time and expertise
- Project-Based Learning: Moving beyond abstract concepts to concrete neighborhood improvements
- Long-Term Commitment: Extending beyond initial training to ongoing organizing and implementation opportunities
- Power Analysis: Explicitly addressing how decisions get made and who has influence
- Professional Support: Providing access to technical expertise (engineers, planners) that serves community vision
A New Model for Infrastructure Democracy
The Chollas Creek program offers a roadmap for transforming infrastructure development from a top-down process that informs communities to a genuinely collaborative effort that centers resident knowledge and priorities.
As communities across the country grapple with aging infrastructure and climate resilience, this model demonstrates that the choice isn’t between technical expertise and community input — it’s about creating structures and spaces where both can inform and strengthen each other.
The real measure of success isn’t just the trees planted or the floods prevented, but the transformation in relationships and collaboration that makes such projects possible. When Howard Cuarezma drives down Ocean View Boulevard and sees trees that began as a brainstorm in a community meeting, he’s witnessing more than infrastructure improvement — he’s seeing democracy in action.
The Chollas Creek Resident Empowerment Training Program was run by Groundwork San Diego, Greenprint Partners, CityWorks and Iconico. It was supported by the San Diego Foundation, Resources Legacy Foundation, Pisces Foundation and Partners for Places.