After the Storm: Sowing Seeds for Recovery

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"Everyone in our community felt an instinctive drive to help."
Madi Holzman, Equal Plates Project

After the Storm: Sowing Seeds for Recovery

Pilot Partnerships Help Farmers Flourish after Helene

As we approach the four-month mark since Hurricane Helene, the journey toward long-term recovery is just getting started. Addressing the catastrophic damage to Western North Carolina (WNC) will require significant coordinated efforts for many years to come. But it’s important to acknowledge how much has been accomplished already. The way the region has rallied to support friends and neighbors is a testament to WNC’s resilience and solidarity.

Impact Health, WNC’s network lead for the Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP), has spent the last several months focused on resourcing partner organizations that support residents with critical social health needs like food and housing. While Impact Health’s network wasn’t initially designed for disaster relief, it has proved highly effective in that capacity.

“There were two levels to our response: relational and logistical,” said Laurie Stradley, Impact Health’s executive director. “Because of our relationship with Dogwood Health Trust (DHT) and our 60-plus agencies already active in damaged communities, we didn’t need to vet anyone. We know they’re solid because we’ve worked with them. These established relationships also meant we knew how to reach people even when cell service and internet was down.”

The first round of DHT funding was swiftly distributed to agencies without restrictions. This provided immediate aid to farmers for food that would have otherwise gone to waste, supported tradespeople who lost their jobs, and helped nonprofits meet their payroll needs.

The storm’s effect on local farms was significant. Mother Earth Food, a pilot vendor and WNC-based distributor of regionally farmed goods, collaborated with HOP service providers and other nonprofits to distribute fresh food to affected communities. Their established network helped them ensure thousands of Western North Carolinians had access to fresh, healthy local food in the early days after the storm. This initiative also provided local farmers with buyers for their produce and other foods at a time when most restaurants and farmers markets—their primary income sources—were shut down.

Andrea DuVall, co-founder of Mother Earth Food, explained, “What came to me on day one of the hurricane was ‘Why is no one talking about the farmers?’ We saw so much free food coming in from everywhere, but my heart kept saying we need resources going to local farmers, not only to sustain them in the short term but so we can even have a local food system moving forward.” Madi Holzman, executive director of HOP service provider Equal Plates Project, echoed DuVall’s concerns. “Everyone in our community felt an instinctive drive to help. Many of the farmers we work with, without being asked, sent larger volumes of their crops than usual, with the mindset of, ‘We know you need food; we’ll worry about payment later. We want to get this out to the community now.’ The grant funding through Impact Health ensured they received the compensation they deserved.”

In total, Impact Health allocated $4 million in grant funds from DHT in phases over the final quarter of 2024. The initial two phases were largely unrestricted, allowing partner organizations the flexibility to allocate the funds where they identified the greatest need.

Stradley highlighted the integrity of these partner organizations.

“Often nonprofits feel compelled to request the maximum amount of funds,” she said. “However, in this instance, that wasn’t the case. People seemed to understand that asking for only what they truly needed would allow other agencies to receive the same opportunity. Under these circumstances, there was a heightened sense of equity.”

“The most significant way our farm partners showed up was by ensuring we had enough water to cook at scale, even in the very early days,” Holzman recalls. “Farmers from Gaining Ground Farm in Leicester were lugging large coolers of well water to us every day for the first two weeks. Dry Ridge Farm—from whom we source eggs and beef—set up a tote and pump system and refilled it every couple of days with water from their well. Without this level of dedication, we wouldn’t have been able to keep our kitchen running.”

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