Jacqueline “Jackie” Jones wasn’t looking for a second career when the Tennessee native settled in tiny Reidsville, Georgia, after retiring from crunching numbers for the IRS.

But she quickly found herself thrust into the position of environmental activist when the role practically washed up on her doorstep — or rather, up to her windowsills — with flooding that inundated her property.

Reidsville, a rural community with a population of about 2,500, lies about 66 miles west of Savannah and 200 miles southeast of Atlanta.

Attracted by the quiet of the small town, Jones bought a house and moved there in March 2018. However, her sought-after peaceful retirement soon dissolved into an environmental nightmare.

In December that year, Jones’ backyard flooded after a rainstorm, leaving water pooled on her property for months. The pattern would repeat, even after the briefest of storms, eventually getting worse, with floodwaters at one point lapping at her windowsills. And another issue was developing: mold.

Walking the neighborhood, Jones found similarly situated longtime residents who confirmed that pervasive flooding had long been an issue in Reidsville, even sometimes causing the local school to close due to flooded roads. She also learned about a decades-old clogged drainage system and outdated maps that did not accurately reflect Reidsville’s flooding issues.

Jones formed the one-woman organization Reidsville Georgia Community Floods and reached out to city, county, state and federal officials and agencies for help — with no success. By the time she learned about and reached out to Anthropocene Alliance, she was understandably frustrated and skeptical.

Despite Jones’ initial doubts, A2 has proved pivotal in pulling together a coalition of government, nonprofit and private entities to connect Reidsville and its residents to financial resources, technical assistance and self-empowerment to help alleviate their floodwater woes.

Sherwood Design Engineers, the company commissioned by A2 through a grant from the Environmental Integrity Project to study flooding at six properties — three in Reidsville, including Jones’, and three in nearby Collins, a community experiencing a similar situation — identified the problem. Ancient history — the town sits on an old seabed — combined with unchecked development and poorly designed and maintained drainage infrastructure, created a veritable blueprint for flooding.

The A2 team also applied for and received additional grant funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s National Coastal Resilience Fund to conduct a regional study of drainage patterns and develop a restorative landscape plan.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in collaboration with the interagency Georgia Silver Jackets flood mitigation team, has provided pro bono work to produce flood inundation data for Tattnall County and the city of Reidsville. And scientists from North Carolina State University have partnered with A2 and the Thriving Earth Exchange — a technical service for environmentally stressed communities — to use satellite imagery to validate community members’ lived experiences of flooding.

With resources now pouring into Reidsville, Jones has become a fixture at community meetings, formed friendships with other A2 members whose communities are facing similar flooding issues and has even dabbled in local politics, publicly endorsing a mayoral candidate who went on to win the office in November 2023.

Reidsville is still vulnerable to flooding — though there’s been a lot of planning, no actual work has been done yet to alleviate it. “But compared to 2018,” Jones says, “a tremendous number of things have taken place.”

She adds, “Through my work and volunteerism, my voice is finally being heard.”

This article was condensed from the full version that appears on the U.S. News and World Report website. Dorothy Terry is a journalist/writer with Anthropocene Alliance.