When tropical storms hit New York City, internet connectivity is often the first thing to go down. The next time it happens in the low-lying coastal community of Red Hook, Brooklyn, it will be a group of teenagers running something called a Wi-Fi Mesh Network that will come to the rescue–providing a model for a low-cost, community-built solution to the so-called Last Mile gaps that the massive telcos can’t (or won’t) bridge.

A year ago, a community organization called Red Hook Initiative (RHI) had just started a pilot program for a Red Hook Wi-Fi mesh. A “mesh network” is a system of inexpensive router nodes that beam Wi-Fi around above the streets for everyone to use, and even if the internet connection goes down, the mesh allows communication within its bounds. So while you can’t watch Netflix over a closed mesh network, you can still communicate with people in your vicinity–which is obviously crucial in emergency scenarios.

In the hurricane’s aftermath, RHI handed the reins of the Red Hook Wi-Fi mesh project to a new group calling themselves The Digital Stewards, comprised of eight 19- to 25-year-olds. Do we really want kids running our backup systems?

As it turns out, RHI has lots of experience getting middle school and high school kids in its youth programs to stay on for leadership positions, but the Digital Stewards is a one-of-a-kind job training experience. Over its year-long course, not only will the youth have built up technical skill installing and maintaining their Wi-Fi network–they’ll have built lasting infrastructure in their own community, where their own neighbors are relying on their technical expertise.

But getting this mesh network started relied on an entirely different network–specifically, RHI Director of Media Programs Anthony Schloss’ network of tech professionals. His contact with the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) led to a partnership to adopt its open-source Digital Stewards curriculum, already piloted in a team in Detroit, for Red Hook’s youth. In exchange for code line-level tech support, financial assistance, and personnel visits to share expertise, the Washington, D.C.-based OTI uses the Digital Stewards as a guinea pig for their vision of wireless community connection: Commotion Wireless.

Citing the state-led disabling of local Internet during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian protests, OTI presents Commotion’s open source wireless receivers/transmitters as a lynchpin of both everyday local interaction and as a civic network secure from government interference. While protecting against state censorship/intrusion isn’t anywhere on Schloss’ priority list, privacy concerns have driven recent interest in Wi-Fi mesh since the Snowden NSA leaks. Regardless of motivation, the low expense of Wi-Fi mesh allows the scrappy network concept to be set up anywhere, as Schloss learned when his nascent network got FEMA’s attention in the days after Sandy and they hooked it up to their satellite connection, spreading wireless internet around Coffey Park where the Red Cross had set up shop.

Currently, Schloss and the RHI pay local ISP Brooklyn Fiber to stream internet through a five-router distribution layer of Ubiquiti Nanostation routers (which have about a mile line-of-site range) mounted on tall buildings, which in turn relay the signal through omnidirectional Ubiquiti Pico omnidirectional Wi-Fi routers–which are tough, waterproof, cheap ($80), and low-power (about $20/year each). Those area routers project Wi-Fi as normal at speeds of 6-10 MBps–quite enough for mobile Red Hook users, but not enough for sustained desktop data download (which nobody has abused to torrent massive files yet, says Schloss). The Digital Steward youth install the Pico routers themselves in less than an hour, either attaching router nodes to windows via adhesive or installing roof mounts, which often requires drilling.