Is it the sole internet or backup is an important question to answer.
Find a local ham group, they may already be doing something similar and might be interested in other projects.
Funny you mention hammers. I checked and my local ham group is run by a bunch of right-wing nut jobs, so I don't think they would be interested in a meshnet.
When I was in college at NJIT I had access to a building, with roof access, 10G networking, head of networking was a friend, battery backup, and staff members on site at all times [0] and attempted to figure out what we'd need to connect to NYC Mesh or if they'd be interested in starting a sister mesh. We're in NJ so connecting to the NYC Mesh might have been difficult but we likely had line-of-sight to some parts of Manhattan.
tl;dr: No one was able to help at the time and we'd have to foot the bill for the equipment which was not possible at the time. This is obviously completely reasonable but hopefully as they grow they can do more outreach.
A Mesh alternative to standard ISPs is critical in my opinion. It could even be used for emergency communications in the next Sandy-like scenario.
[0] - https://www.k2mff.club/ & https://web.njit.edu/~k2mff/ourwork.html
> and we'd have to foot the bill for the equipment which was not possible at the time. This is obviously completely reasonable but hopefully as they grow they can do more