NEW ORLEANS – As cars whizzed past today on Claiborne Avenue and above on the I-10 in the 7th Ward, Dr. Angela Chalk, founder and director of the nonprofit Healthy Community Services, stood in a verdant, tree-filled park her organization created to receive a giant check for $20,000 from the global financial technology platform Intuit.
This is the fifth year of the QuickBooks and Mailchimp Small Business Hero Program, an initiative that celebrates the impact small businesses make in their communities. Although thousands of organizations around the country applied to be honored, Healthy Community Services was one of only three awarded an Intuit QuickBooks and Mailchimp Small Business Hero and the financial award.
Founded in 2013 by Chalk, Healthy Community Services is committed to educating the local community within four focus areas at the intersection of climate and health: urban agriculture, stormwater management, coastal resiliency, and urban reforestation.
Within its core tenet of stormwater management, HCS delivers education and installed green infrastructure that helps residents mitigate repetitive flooding using nature-based solutions.
One example is the Vision to Reality Stormwater Management Park at the 7th Ward North Claiborne Avenue and I-10 corridor. Located on a hurricane evacuation route, the park includes a bioswale with the capability to manage 67,500 gallons of water per rain event.
“Through the work of Groundwork New Orleans, the linear path also hosts a weather station, and the entire park is solar powered,” added Chalk.
The first phase of the park, the bioswale, was design and constructed in 2021. The second phase, the green space and added features, opened last fall.
“Residents have watched the transformation of this site from it being a rutted-out area, to a bioswale, to now being a full park that provides residence to have a green space right in the center of an urban area,” said Chalk, who added that the new green space has attracted butterflies and bees with its native vegetation.
Todd Reynolds, executive director of Groundwork New Orleans — a nonprofit that provides workforce development opportunities for local youth in environmental conservation and green infrastructure — partnered to create the bioswale and park.
“The point of this is to not only be a public greenspace and stormwater management space, but also to serve as a community resilience hub in terms of our frequent power outages,” said Reynolds. “People can come here and charge their phones, charge their devices — we’ll be installing free Wi-Fi for those emergency periods.”
For more information on this park, and all of the efforts of both of these organizations, visit https://www.hcsnola.org/ and groundwork-neworleans.org
