Infrastructure design and planning tools tend to reproduce the conditions they were built inside: who counts as a credible proposer, what formats evidence must take, and which scales of knowledge travel. The Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a participatory mapping platform co-designed with more than 50 neighborhood, watershed, and institutional partners over four years in Greater Los Angeles, holds place-sourced knowledge and technical data in the same artifact, with neither subordinated to the other. This paper reports what that has made possible: communities leading over US$7 million in feasibility grants, and the first community-led group to succeed in a program no group had navigated—a shift not just in funding but in who is recognized as capable. It traces a reckoning with the gap between a tool about living infrastructure and one that is of it, and asks what this work might offer elsewhere.