Get Free 2025 Speaker Deon Haywood On New Orleans, Black Feminism And Thriving When ‘Sh— Hits the Fan’ [Exclusive] - Page 2

“I must start this with we started out doing these events once a year at the beginning of hurricane season,” Haywood explained. “This is our third year holding the event, and this year coming into it, we were like, ‘Wait a minute, we are going to have to look at food access.’ In New Orleans, we talk about making groceries. For Hurricane Season, in case you don’t have a way to refrigerate food, something that you can eat to get through the hurricane… No, we’re saying, how are we going to get you through this moment? How are we going to get through this moment of tariffs and increasing food costs? What is in your pantry? Do you have flour? Do you know how to make bread? Do you have anything sustainable that you can use to build your pantry? Do you have tools?”

“We’ve just expanded that to look at that like, the sh*t’s ‘bout to hit the fan. He hasn’t done it yet. Some of us are feeling it a little bit, but it’s going to hit the fan,” said Haywood. “I’m thinking late fall in 2026, we’re going to see all of this stuff that is happening affect people. I see people now, I hear my clients saying, ‘I don’t have no food.’ But really, it’s helping people understand how to make groceries, and making sure you have flashlights. But it’s also saying, Do you know how to protect yourself? Do you know how to use a gun? Did you take a gun training and survivalist training?”

It’s imortant for Haywood that the entire staff has training at the gun range, as well as her family, understanding what it means to have the right to protect themselves so that when sh*t does hit the fan, and when things like reimagining reproductive justice continues to become a reality, our community has what is needed not only to survive, but also thrive.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina 20 years later.

August 29th will mark 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana, ultimately leaving 80 percent of the city of New Orleans underwater when flood waters breached the levees.

“What I learned about Hurricane Katrina is we were made stronger by it, but also it’s the amount of work that came after Hurricane Katrina,” said Haywood.

“Yeah, we were doing the work before,” she continued. “But after Hurricane Katrina, we started looking at policy differently. That we needed policy in our people’s lives. We looked at housing and education. We’ve been able to call out injustices from FEMA to the then-president, and when I say president, really just the government, both local, state, and national, on how they fail us every time. And so 20 years later, we’ve been able to uncover, to grow, and to build in a way that we know is sustainable, even in the face of a governor that’s a MAGA lover, a governor who doesn’t want to invest in FEMA himself; it is the people. One thing hurricanes have taught me is that we need to care for ourselves. We take care of ourselves.  It’s interesting; my grandson is 23, and he said, ‘Momo, if it gets bad, just remember, we’re not leaving.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘Why would we leave a place where you can fish? Where people can grow food.’ So, I felt good about that because that meant I taught him something. He learned something over here.”

She went on to note that, now that it has been nearly two decades since Hurricane Katrina, the work they’ve done in New Orleans includes changing the criminal justice system, as well as the work within Women With A Vision. 

“We have the only diversion program for sex workers in the country that operates outside the court system. It happens at our office,” said Haywood. “Our reentry programs, right? A young woman with a vision that really, or it’s a Black girl radical book club, and it’s other organizations here that have done so much after Hurricane Katrina to change the conditions that were laid bare for the world to see, that was community people doing that work. It’s the Black people who were working in their communities to rebuild.”

Get Free 2025 will feature a keynote from renowned activist Angela Davis, as well as sessions led by speakers including Deon Haywood, Dominique Morgan, Sesali Bowen, Beulah Osueke, and many others.

Ready to connect, strategize, and mobilize with fellow Black feminists? Grab your ticket to “Get Free: A Black Feminist Reunion” in New Orleans here.

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