Susannah Burley stood in front of a young red maple tree in Gentilly, pointing out its bright red leaves. Her nonprofit planted this tree last spring. It’s deciduous so it has leaves in the summer, and loses them in the winter.
“When you plant them on the south side of a house, it allows the sun to hit the house in the winter and keep it warm, keeping your electricity bills low, and then in the summer it shades your house, keeping your electricity bills low,” she said.
Burley is the executive director of Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, or SOUL. It plants trees all over the city, aiming to increase the canopy. Trees are known to cool down neighborhoods, improve health and quality of life and take up water during storms.
But Burley says she doesn’t know if she will be able to keep the organization running in the next couple of months. Funding from the Inflation Reduction Act made up 80% of the organization’s budget, and now it can’t access that money.
“When we go to work, we don't know what we should be doing," she said. "Should we be preparing to close the doors, or should we be preparing for the next planting season?”
Despite two federal court orders, billions in federal funding remain frozen under executive orders signed by President Donald Trump. That includes millions for projects in New Orleans aimed at improving the environment and fighting climate change. This is also endangering New Orleans’ environmental nonprofits and the livelihoods of people who work at them.
Most of the IRA funding SOUL is waiting on is administered by the city’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability. Another grant, which passed through the national nonprofit, the Arbor Day Foundation, would have given SOUL $1 million for reforestation. According to an email from the Arbor Day Foundation to SOUL, not only were those funds frozen, that entire pass-through program was terminated by the USDA Forest Service last week.
Burley says the loss of that funding means 1,600 trees will no longer go in the ground. SOUL has suspended planting for the rest of the season. Burley says this year, before the pause, it almost finished planting trees on every street in the Lower 9th Ward. It would have been the third neighborhood where SOUL accomplished that, which would have been significant progress towards the city’s goal of 10% canopy coverage in every neighborhood.
The missing funding also means the organization can no longer grow like it was planning. Burley was on the verge of hiring three more people, but had to stop.
“I had actually sent an offer letter to one person,” she said. “So painful. She's so sad.”
If SOUL doesn’t get the rest of the money, it would likely have to shut down, causing the four people working there to lose their jobs too.
It would also affect the jobs under contractors SOUL employs. It’s not enough to plant these trees, someone has to keep them watered for the first year so they survive. Audubon Tree Care was hired to do that. Stosh Kozlowski, the owner, employs eight people in total. He said if SOUL doesn’t get this funding, his contract with the nonprofit would end.
“I'm going to have to start letting people go, frankly,” he said. “And, you know, we'll watch these trees die, and then residents will come out in droves saying you're letting everything die.”
SOUL and Audubon Tree Care are far from alone in this struggle. The City of New Orleans received almost $140 million in grants, all intended to improve and protect the environment. Greg Nichols, the director of the Office of Resilience and Sustainability said it was the largest amount of climate funding the city ever received.
“We've had some large grants to do climate adaptation or green infrastructure projects in the city, but never this level of funding towards reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
One of those grants, from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, would put almost $50 million towards reducing climate pollution. It is supposed to go toward solar installation, bikeways and e-bikes and planting trees in the city. The city has not spent any of that funding yet because it was waiting on approval from the EPA, but it is procuring contractors for all that work.
Nichols said the freeze has thrown a wrench in their operations, but it is much more threatening to the 16 community partners working with the city on these projects.
“Many of these nonprofits do amazing work in our city to move forward climate action,” said Nichols.
He says the office is looking into whether the city can step in in the short term – and hopes the money will soon be restored.
“The question is whether the city to what degree – if any – has the ability to front some of this money particularly for these small nonprofits in the interim,” said Nichols.
Another organization in financial limbo is Louisiana Green Corps, a nonprofit providing training for jobs in areas like conservation or construction of green infrastructure. The program trains and pays 60 people a year.
“It's an earn-and-learn model and we heavily rely on federal funding to ensure that students are able to focus on our training – be able to complete it while also getting paid – and that funding is in jeopardy,” said Ryan Mattingly, Louisiana Green Corps’ executive director.
The nonprofit will lose 50% of its budget if it doesn’t get the funding. Like SOUL, the funding pause is also halting the organization’s plans for growth, but Mattingly said they have no plans to shut down and are going to try to keep growing anyway.
“We're determined because we know the importance of addressing these two biggest challenges that we face as a region that of climate change and that of ensuring local residents have opportunities,” said Mattingly.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated SOUL can only plant trees in the spring. SOUL's planting season is actually from October to March.
