NEW ORLEANS – The Water Collaborative announced that its executive director, Jessica Dandridge-Smith, was selected for the 2024 Grist 50 Fixers List. Grist, a nonprofit and independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices, began publication of their annual “Grist 50” list in 2016.
The list features climate leaders to know right now — people working on unique and impactful solutions to the most pressing climate problems of today. Each year’s list is driven by thousands of reader nominations, and illustrates what a vibrant, diverse climate movement looks like, while amplifying stories of those making a difference.
2024 has been a year marked by ever-increasing climate risks, and halting progress that is yet to meet the moment. But that story is incomplete without the stories of those fighting back, bringing change to their communities, and inventing a better future. The “Grist 50” is just a small slice of those stories — 50 people who are tackling the most pressing climate problems of today in innovative and exciting ways: teachers, scientists, doctors, farmers, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who are putting climate front and center in their work.
Dandridge-Smith is featured as a leader in policy and advocacy. For more than 14 years, she has dedicated herself to community engagement in New Orleans. She joined the Water Collaborative as Executive Director in 2019.
“I was asked to be the ED not because I had a background in environmental science or in hydrology. It was because I have a background in people,” reads a statement from Dandridge-Smith’s Grist feature page. Under her leadership, The Water Collaborative blossomed from a coalition of architects and engineers looking for solutions to the city’s water infrastructure failings, to a regional leader in water quality, access and affordability, and an innovator in urban stormwater management.
Dandridge-Smith concluded, “We’re always trying to find innovative ways to have fun, exciting conversations with water at the center.”
According to her biography, Dandridge-Smith grew up in Louisiana, where “water is a part of everybody’s story.” Hers took a radical turn the day before her 16th birthday, when Hurricane Katrina hit. Seeing the devastation, and its concentration in New Orleans’ low-income, Black neighborhoods, angered her. “My mom was like, ‘You need to do something with all that frustration and that anger,’” she said.
Over the next 14 years, Dandridge-Smith worked with more than two dozen organizations, developing a deep knowledge of community engagement, politics and the South.
