Prior to UNA’s formation on March 18, 2018, founding members organized citizen science and beach clean-ups, a rain garden, and advocated for better conditions. 

Secured philanthropic support and technical assistance totaling $625,100 for UNA’s climate and resilience initiatives have come from Kresge, Pisces, and Mosaic Foundations, the Patagonia Foundation (via a subgrant from the RiverNetwork), the American Planning Association, the AGU’s ThrivingEarth Exchange, Para la Naturaleza, and HUD's CDBG-DR program, to name a few. 

With this support, UNA implemented a solar and potable water resilience hub, reforestation projects, a nursery for food production and distribution, and has developed an inventory of unused properties and areas prone to flooding with an eye to transforming these into a Community Land Trust to provide community goods, economic, physical, and social resilience for neighbors. 

UNA’s advocacy prompted the Municipality to sponsor a USACE Flood Plain Management Services project valued at $400,000, which began in January 2023. The organization helped the barrio's communities win a Puerto Rico's CDBG-DR-funded Whole Communities Resilience Planning (WRCP) program.  The WRCP grant will enable a community-based participatory planning initiative in Playa de Ponce to improve community resiliency and surface flood perceptions, understanding of sea-level rise, and desires around climate migration and/or mitigation and infrastructure strategies. 

In December 2022, UNA's proposal to the National Fish and Wildlife Federation's Coastal Resiliency Fund won funding to produce Community Capacity and Planning that draws on technical data, such as wave modeling, flood mapping, and assessments of spatially explicit and risk-informed nature-based solutions options for Playa de Ponce.  This technical data will support an analysis that illuminates the social data gathered through participatory processes with at least 400 neighbors to identify the most vulnerable flood sectors, integrating local knowledge of and experiences with climate change impacts through guided discussions around interactive mapping of green infrastructure and marine restoration.  The information will be combined in a plan to identify potential sites for mangrove planting, oyster reef restoration, coral reef restoration, a living shoreline and/or other restoration activities that will have the maximum flood resilience impact, while providing habitat for fish and wildlife. This model for community-led coastal restoration in Puerto Rico will be documented to allow neighborhoods across the island replicate the approach.

Potential total technical assistance and philanthropy is upwards of $1.2 million.   See below for a table of funding requests and funded projects to date.