Rain Activated uses public art to change how East Flatbush sees and responds to flooding. The centerpiece is a stencil-based street art installation made with hydrophobic paint. When the sidewalk gets wet, hidden messages appear and point residents to flood resources.

The project also includes a Flood Response and Community Care Toolkit, built with partner FWD. The toolkit gives homeowners and tenants real, local resources for before, during, and after a storm.

Through co-design with 60+ residents and the capture of 30+ community stories, we’ve built a body of hyperlocal, community-generated data that didn’t exist before. It has captured the workarounds, memories, and visions for change that city flood maps miss entirely. Rain Activated has shifted flooding from something residents quietly absorb into something the block talks about, documents, and organizes around.

Homeowners and tenants now have a toolkit that connects them to flood-proofing guidance and local repair professionals, and the broader neighborhood has a shared visual language for naming a problem that’s too often treated as inevitable.

The benefit isn’t just preparedness for our neighborhood, but it’s the flooding stories that are being told, archived, and used. We have leveraged a different versioning of an advocacy infrastructure, not just by intentional design and technology, but by the community itself.