Turning Community Centers into Heat-Ready Lifelines

The gale took the pines first, bending and then snapping them like pencils. Power blinked out. Coffee-colored water swallowed the main road as the Great Coharie Creek burst its banks in the fury of Hurricane Matthew. With access cut and the grid down, another danger moved in: houses grew stifling, medicines warmed, elders had no way to reach safe cooling or power for medical devices. Flooding was the headline; heat was the quiet emergency.

“We were actually cut off as a community,” Greg Jacobs, Tribal Administrator for the Coharie Intra-Tribal Council, headquartered in Clinton, North Carolina (N.C.), recalls of the devastating 2016 storm that proved a wake-up call that still shapes the tribe’s planning.

Floodwaters redrew the map in this region of eastern N.C., plunging whole blocks under water and turning fields into lakes. Residents dumped spoiled refrigerators and clinics discarded temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines. The tribe and its partners set about clearing miles of storm-choked waterways. The toll: 26 deaths statewide, US$ 4.8 billion in damage, and widespread destruction of homes, businesses, and infrastructure.

“We were ill-prepared,” Jacobs said. “We’re very resilient people and we take whatever comes and do the best we can. But the quality of life was not good during these events…That made us as a whole really decide we needed to find a way to act rather than react.”

With that mandate, the 3,000-member Coharie community, settled along the river since the first half of the 1700s, reimagined its community gymnasium as an emergency hub and cooling center, expanding hours, installing backup power and formalizing elder check-ins.

Now, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, Duke University’s Heat Policy Innovation Hub is helping to transcribe, formalize, and scale emergency measures like these to confront the growing threat of extreme heat—life-saving measures in a state that recorded 4,688 heat-related emergency department visits in the summer of 2024, nearly 20 percent more than in 2023. They will offer a structured pathway for trusted institutions – like the Coharie Community Center – to grow into readiness over time to eventually operate as fully-fledged Community Lighthouses, or hubs designed to keep people informed, safe, and connected during disasters.

The ‘Pathways to Heat Resilience’ initiative aims to position extreme heat as a national priority, delivering 50 state and 435 congressional-district heat briefs; piloting the Community Lighthouse model in up to seven rural, Tribal, and under-resourced communities; and convening leaders to turn data into bipartisan action. Together, these efforts will empower vulnerable communities, inform policymakers, and build durable collaboration across agencies and sectors.

From Response to Readiness

“One of the challenges with extreme heat is it is not as dramatic as what we see with hurricanes or tornadoes,” noted the Hub’s director, Dr. Ashley Ward. “So it sort of quietly erodes our health, our economies, our infrastructure, our productivity…. Once it becomes really damaging, really extreme, that’s when we start to react to it. And that’s usually the worst way to react to hazards.”

Launched by Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability in June 2023, the Hub brings together Duke scholars, government agencies, communities, and partners to translate science into action that protects people from extreme heat. In Clinton, the focus is on standing up the Community Lighthouse approach: equipping trusted sites like churches, clinics, and community centers with solar and battery storage so they can stay open when the grid fails, providing cooling, device charging, refrigeration for medicines, communications, and door-to-door wellness checks.

One of the largest Community Lighthouses operates out of a former K-Mart in St. John Parish, Louisiana—now home to New Wine Christian Fellowship, a sprawling and church and community center powered by solar energy.

Pastor Neil Bernard launched the Lighthouse in 2021 after Hurricane Ida left neighbors sweltering for days without power. With funding and support from the Greater New Orleans Foundation and Together New Orleans, his team transformed the building into a resilient hub for both disaster response and everyday community life.

Just four years later, state and local officials now see New Wine as a cornerstone of their extreme heat plans. “Our [officials] look to us to be the leader in providing recovery and solutions,” Bernard said. “The Lighthouse is workable, scalable, and affordable…and the goal is to have centers within fifteen minutes of every vulnerable community across the state.”

Ward’s team at Duke has studied New Orleans’ experience to help adapt the model beyond Louisiana, with an emphasis on rural and isolated communities. She first met Coharie leader Jacobs when she was working with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific agency within the Department of Commerce that monitors climate, weather, oceans, and coasts. In that capacity, she traveled to Sampson County fully expecting to hear about the challenges of flooding. Instead, she heard about heat.

“Communities have long identified this problem as something they’re dealing with,” she said. “They’ve just been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.” Heat itself has changed, she added. In this part of the United States, higher humidity often drives risk. “It’s not the same heat from your grandparents’ era anymore.”

Designing for Rural Realities

The risks in rural places look different: homes are farther apart, cooling sites and clinics are farther away, and outages can last longer. Multi-state analyses show higher rates of heat-related emergency-department visits in rural counties than urban ones; rural residents also face slower EMS response times, which compounds risk when cooling or care is far away; and agricultural workers—predominantly rural—are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related illnesses compared with U.S. workers overall.

For Jacobs, those numbers aren’t abstract. “The sun, it seems to burn my actual flesh now,” he says. That’s why a place where people can come to stay cool and find community is so important.

Duke’s focus on rural communities is intentional, Ward noted. “Most of the interventions that we’ve developed for heat fit an urban environment,” but do not translate easily to rural communities, she said. “You layer that—a lack of tools in the toolbox around heat—with an already underlying existing disparity between rural and urban communities around aging housing stock, around high heat exposure occupations, lack of access to health care to manage chronic illness…. It becomes a cascading effect.”

Extreme heat doesn’t land in a single inbox, Ward noted. It strains health systems, reshapes labor, stresses housing and energy, and disrupts transportation, while touching schools, agriculture, and emergency response. Because the risks and remedies cut across so many fronts, effective policy has to be multi-sectoral and involve shared data, clear roles, and joint operations, so when temperatures spike, communities can prevent harm rather than scramble after it.

The Lighthouse model focuses on working through leaders already trusted within a community, Ward said, and that’s where the Coharie community leaders come in. “They have a true public service culture and approach. They have long been leaders in this space,” she said. “We have a lot to learn from them that can be translated to other organizations that want to do the same.”

Jacobs also celebrated the Hub’s approach to centering locally led solutions. “Duke has come and listened with all their soul to the needs of the community,” Jacobs said, “and asked us, how can we help you meet your objectives?”

Ingenuity and community have carried the Coharie for generations. “We were poor—we were farmers and lived off the land,” Jacobs says. “There wasn’t much money, but there was a security blanket in each other. I’ve come to realize we were rich because we had each other.” He hopes the Coharie response to growing heat danger can offer a roadmap for other rural communities. “We’re looking into a future that’s uncertain,” he said, “but together we can figure it out.”

What the Coharie are building with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and Duke offers a roadmap rural communities can adapt as summers lengthen and storms return.

“Community Lighthouses can grow when we bring together public funds, community ownership, and private partners,” noted Alex Robinson, Manager for Health at Rockefeller. “Local tools like solar cooperatives, community clean energy bonds, and support from nonprofits and utilities can help cut costs and build trust. With philanthropy to jumpstart projects and blended financing to scale them, we can turn neighborhood resilience hubs into a national movement to protect health and wellbeing in the face of extreme heat.”