Jeff had broken his leg before Helene, and they had nowhere to go after, so the couple asked around for a camper. It was Mountain Projects — a  nonprofit improving social, educational, and quality-of-life conditions of those living in poverty in Haywood and Jackson counties — that stepped in to help, in no small part due to the group’s deep roots in the community. 

Local entrepreneur and active Helene relief volunteer Lorelei Garnes had initially connected Parker to Mountain Projects as an act of reciprocity.  

“I have worked as a paramedic. I’ve worked in dialysis for 15 years, and I worked at a doctor’s office,” Parker said

In those professions, Parker had occasion to take care of several people’s beloved family members, including Garnes’ stepfather.

The first camper was unlivable. “[Mountain Projects] ended up throwing it away,” Parker said, adding that the nonprofit was able to get another.

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Helene destroyed the Parkers' remodeled home. Michelle Parker photo

She and her husband were planning to live in the second camper — until a Mountain Projects employee got wind of her story and donated a camper Parker described as “almost brand new and big.”

Parker’s experience after Helene is threaded into the patchwork of interlocking relationships and boots-on-the-ground advocacy that Mountain Projects wore not as a cape, but a satchel. With 183 employees, 350 volunteers, $19 million in 2024 annual revenues and an 18-seat board of directors that includes six spots for representatives from the same low-income communities it routinely helps, Mountain Projects never posited itself as a savior. It’s a network of people helping their neighbors, finding all the energy and strength they could muster and slinging it gently around their shoulders. 

On the one-year anniversary of Helene, the increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related emergencies combined with federal budget cuts to nonprofit groups and social services raises a difficult question. In a future natural disaster, can a small nonprofit like Mountain Projects continue to step into a role traditionally filled by the government? And if it can’t, who will be left behind?

Calm before the storm 

To former Mountain Projects Executive Director Patsy Davis, the most important measure to take before a storm like Helene is a phone call. Davis witnessed twin storms Frances and Ivan, which hit the region nine days apart in September 2004.

“[Mountain Projects] did a project in partnership with Haywood County and Clyde called ‘Barefoot Ridge’ zone [after Frances and Ivan] … I learned early in storms that sometimes options to relocate are not plentiful for a lot of people,” Davis said.

So you’ve got to get folks out early, she said — before the storm. 

While the abundance of relocation options varies communities, so too does the ability to evacuate. An article for The Conversation examined reasons why people stay put during a disaster, chief among them financial constraints, refusal to abandon household pets, incarceration, impaired health, physical disability and lack of transportation. 

“Even at 5 o’clock on that Friday morning [of Sept. 27], I was calling [our clients] to make sure they had rides, because a lot of people don’t have transportation,” Davis said, adding that the nonprofit had also worked to get supplies into the broader community to, among other things, ensure people had food, flashlights, a plan and medical supplies.  

The Conversation reported that risk perception also can influence whether someone will evacuate. Likewise, surviving Fred taught Michelle Parker and her husband to take any hurricane threat seriously.

“We left the night before [Helene] … everybody in our neighborhood left,” Parker said. 

But Davis admitted that even with her lived experience grappling with the impacts of three other hurricanes, she wasn’t as prepared as she’d thought.

“I would listen to these calls,” Davis said. “The National Weather Service would say, ‘Catastrophic impact and potential catastrophic loss of life’ … I thought I knew what was coming, but I realized quickly that Friday morning I had no clue.” 

Helene hits WNC

Mountain Projects Executive Director Si Simmons, who was transportation director during Helene, recalled that he and Davis were on the road at 3:30 that morning heading to Haywood County Public Transit.

“Immediately the rain was coming sideways … I had never experienced rain like that,” he said.

Simmons and Davis — and about a half dozen Mountain Projects van drivers — were called to evacuate the Autumn Care nursing home in Waynesville not long after arriving at the public transit station. The facility is located on Old Balsam Road very near Richland Creek, which caused much of the damage in Waynesville.

“When we arrived there, we got off of Exit 98 and literally were pushing water with the front of the vehicles,” Davis said.

She started loading residents into the vans while Simmons drove his vehicle along the back to see if there was an egress route there.

“[He] came back, and he said, ‘No, we can’t get out,’” Davis said. “And having to unload those folks and put them back in the building surrounded by water was one of the saddest, most challenging times of my career.” 

Davis said the team was then asked to try to get to some other similar facilities.

“We couldn’t,” Davis said. “We were surrounded by water.” 

When the water had risen past the vehicles’ wheels, Mountain Projects had to get the fleet off the road. They found the most promising high ground in none other than an Ingles parking lot and waited there until the worst of the flooding subsided.

“Two or three hours later, we made our way back up Old Balsam Road and back up on the four lane,” Simmons said, adding that they returned to the transit station.

“Like everybody,” he said, “we thought the worst was over.” But as the weekend rolled around, “things started becoming very clear … we had a huge problem.” 

The weekend of the storm, Michelle Parker was on Soco Mountain with her husband, so she didn’t see the worst of the flooding. In fact, Parker said the only sign of the hurricane was a light wind. A neighbor who’d stayed home sent photos of their house — and that’s how she knew it was gone. 

She and Jeff went back to see the devastation for themselves.

“My cousin’s camper that was left there, a little Coleman, flew up the road and crashed into the bank, and one of our buildings just completely disappeared,” Parker said.

When Davis got access to communications channels, she recalled finding out the Ingles warehouse had flooded. In response, Mountain Projects ordered as many bulk items as possible from the food vendor it used most often.

“We knew food resources may be scarce until the donations started,” she said. 

Davis explained that Mountain Projects stocked its commercial kitchen in Jackson County with some of the inventory and shared some with other nonprofits combatting hunger, like Community Kitchen and Jackson Community Table. But because not everyone could access food distribution sites, Mountain Projects began using its public transit vans as delivery vehicles. 

The nonprofit also collected and supplied other resources. Simmons said by that Monday following the storm, Mountain Projects had established an emergency center. 

“Because of our 60-year history and unfortunately our fourth go-round with things like this [community members] knew they could come here for diapers, food, clothing — all the essentials,” he said.

Davis said her most poignant experience during Helene had to do with a clothing request.

“I was so humbled, to have to go and get somebody some underwear, which I don’t mind at all,” she said. “But I thought, ‘you know, that could be me, and how would I feel?’” 

Navigating FEMA

Davis said she hadn’t heard much about FEMA involvement in the region during Helene. She did remember being told that FEMA was trying to evacuate people to Greenville, South Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. With all the destroyed roads and lack of transportation, she wondered how the agency would even get to either of those places. 

Parker said FEMA had supplied the $750 assistance payment for essential supplies and around $2,000 in rental aid, which it promised to continue. Yet, she said, “I’ve called them in the past, five or six times, and have turned in everything they wanted, and they’ve never paid us back for the rent in this lot.” 

While Parker did credit FEMA for its offer to pay for hotels for hurricane survivors, she said that “the only hotels that were available that they would pay for were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. You couldn’t even get to Tennessee.”

While its assistance seemed, to many, few and far between, at its organizational high point FEMA’s efforts were robust.

FEMA was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter as a disaster relief, prevention and mitigation organization. According to reporting from Wired, behind the scenes, however, it was primarily concerned with responding to a nuclear attack or disaster. When disasters did strike, FEMA was unprepared and ill-equipped. 

Having taken office amid an onslaught of criticism about FEMA disaster response operations, in 1993, President Bill Clinton made a dedicated effort to bolster the organization’s inner workings. The president appointed disaster management veteran James Lee Witt to the agency and gave FEMA cabinet-level status. Witt pioneered federal disaster mitigation, de-prioritized national security efforts and streamlined aid efforts within the agency.

In those years, FEMA was a functional arm of the government that both responded to disasters and worked to prevent them.  

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, ushered in an entirely new national agenda. President George W. Bush signed into law a bipartisan congressional act mandating the creation of a Department of Homeland Security.

In 2003, FEMA was absorbed by DHS, losing its status as an independent body. Top officials left, and morale was lower than ever, according to PBS reports. Counterterrorism once again took priority over disaster relief. At no time was FEMA’s failure to act more apparent than during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

In 2006, Congress increased funding to the agency, and in response to Katrina-era director Michael Brown’s lack of relevant experience, passed a law requiring disaster preparedness familiarity for any future FEMA director. Throughout the next 20-something years, a litany of bipartisan reforms strengthened the agency and increased funding.

But even during Helene in 2024, FEMA’s slow and grinding bureaucracy indicated it hadn’t achieved the level of effectiveness it possessed before the DHS integration. 

So Mountain Projects, for its own part, became a hyperlocal FEMA. Staff used the resources they had to shelter whomever they could in nearby hotels and motels.

This relocation effort “progressed over time into getting into the camper business,” said Davis.

The nonprofit housed folks in “lots of campers,” she noted, adding that there are still people in campers.

No end in sight 

One year after Hurricane Helene, Parker is one of the survivors still living in a camper.

After experiencing their first natural disaster — Tropical Storm Fred in 2021 — the Parkers got by with a payout of half of the house’s value allotted by flood insurance and a grant from the state to remodel the property. For nearly two years, their place wasn’t habitable, so the Parkers were paying its mortgage while renting an apartment.

“It was still hard … and we had a lot of medical problems,” Parker said.

In July 2023, they finally got their house back. Around a year later, they lost it again — for good. 

Michelle Parker still lives in her camper (featured) today. Michelle Parker photo

Parker said after the remodeling, her house was worth over $209,000, in comparison to its $80,000 market value before Tropical Storm Fred. She and her husband still had flood insurance. The Parkers received $80,000, the full value of their old house. They knew they’d be wasting their time and finances by trying to rebuild.

“We just took the money … and paid off the [mortgage],” she said. 

Their only choice was to spend that particularly brutal winter in their camper. Parker said although the camper was better winterized than most, she and her husband needed space heaters in addition to the furnace to keep warm.

“We were paying $300 for gas every two weeks,” she recalled.

At the end of the day, it came down to something she and Mountain Projects staff members emphasized to The Smoky Mountain News in separate instances: campers aren’t meant to be lived in permanently. 

A little while after the Parkers’ relocation, Davis called to ask if they’d be interested in participating in Homes for Hope, a coordinated program between United Way, Habitat for Humanity and Mountain Projects.

Each organization, Mountain Projects Affordable Housing Manager Maggie Leftwich said, has committed to building two new houses for folks displaced by Hurricane Helene.

“The cool thing is that they’re getting brand new homes and at a fraction of what they’re going to be worth,” Leftwich said. 

Still, as of July, Parker said she and her husband had everything they needed to pursue their dream of getting another house.
“His income, my income … We had a pre-approval from a mortgage company from the remainder of the house that they’ve ordered, and that is ready,” she said. “It’s just not set up yet.” 

But on July 11, Jeff unexpectedly stopped breathing. Michelle performed CPR, but it was too late. As if losing her husband weren’t traumatic enough, without his income, she wasn’t making enough to pay what she owed for the new home. 

Parker said Mountain Projects employees have busied themselves trying to find her an alternative to a loan, but the nonprofit is stretched thin. Mountain Projects has temporarily paused Housing for Hope; Leftwich cited its need for increased volunteer labor and funding sources. 

The nonprofit reported 350 annual volunteers in fiscal year 2024, about twice its number of paid workers, but significantly fewer than its volunteer count of 925 one decade earlier. Volunteer numbers started dropping around the time the pandemic hit – from 712 in fiscal year 2019 to 400 in fiscal year 2020 – and despite yearly ebbs and flows, engagement has been trending downward ever since.

Section 8 shortfall 

To get a complete view of the housing crisis Mountain Projects has battled since Helene, one needs to look past Homes for Hope — and to a longtime federal program called Section 8.

Section 8 vouchers enable low-income individuals to afford subsidized private housing. According to Section 8 Rental Assistance Coordinator Amanda Singletary, Mountain Projects is currently administering the program to 840 households in Haywood and Jackson counties on behalf of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  

But there’s a caveat. 

“In August of [2024], we ran out of funding,” Singletary said. “We went into what [HUD] calls a ‘shortfall,’ which means that the funding that was set aside for us was inadequate to cover the growing rent costs. And when you go into shortfall as a public housing agency, you have to follow HUD’s rules, and one of them is ceasing issuing new vouchers.”

Mountain Projects has been unable to issue new vouchers due to frozen federal funding since one month before Helene — though not for lack of trying. Congress, in turn, funds the Department of Housing and Urban Development through its annual budget.

“We have been in touch constantly with [Edwards’ and Tillis’] office with no success” to unfreeze the shortfall, said Davis.

Congress wouldn’t even unfreeze Section 8 temporarily as a disaster-related exception. 

To add insult to injury, Singletary said that during Helene, 22 Section 8 rental units were destroyed.

Both Singletary and Davis emphasized the essential role the program might have played for someone who had lost a non-Section 8 rental unit but no longer could afford nonsubsidized rates. 

“We actually had to close our wait list to new applicants at the end of October 2024 because it reached the two-year threshold,” Singletary said, noting that at the time, there were 530 families on the waitlist. 

“In every other disaster, we were able to put a preference on the Section 8 vouchers for anybody who qualified for that voucher, if they had lost their home or substantially damaged … This time, we didn’t have that resource,” said Davis. 

An uncertain future 

Even with the storms she’s been through, Davis has noticed a distinct pattern in folks impacted by Hurricane Helene.

“You didn’t even have to ask if they were a Helene survivor,” she said. “You could tell it. You could tell it on their face.”

Disasters like Helene destroy entire communities, and climate experts predict more in the years and decades to come. Yet the state of disaster management in this country appears more fraught. 

President Donald Trump has delayed or canceled billions of FEMA dollars sent to states to use for risk mitigation projects. In the months since the president took office, the agency has ended door-to-door canvassing in disaster-affected regions and lost about a third of its full-time workforce. Acting administrator David Richards — FEMA’s first emergency management novice since Michael Brown to head up the agency — said he didn’t know there was such a thing as “hurricane season.”

Because FEMA is under the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kristi Noem was able to institute a requirement that she personally reviews every contract above $100,000. Environmental Health News reported that such micromanagement has slashed Western North Carolina’s monthly Helene aid from $40 million to $6.5 million.

At the same time, according to a BBC article, FEMA is willing to dole out over $600 million to states and locales that detain undocumented migrants en route to detention centers. 

FEMA cuts force local nonprofits to take on even more disaster aid. Meanwhile, federal policy toward nonprofits severely undermines these groups’ ability to carry it out. Small nonprofits like Mountain Projects tend to be chronically underfunded and under-resourced in the face of the problems they’re expected to tackle.

“Too many funders, whether they’re government or philanthropic, really want to plow their money into programs and also want to restrict their dollars by line item. And so you end up having to create jobs based on this patchwork quilt of funding,” said Rusty Stahl, President and CEO of Found the People.

Stahl added that government will contract social services to local nonprofits — like Section 8 in the case of Mountain Projects — that include salaries of program staff.

“If those contracts don’t include decent level salaries or cost of living adjustments, which they often don’t, they’re often just flat year over year,” Stahl said.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that this funds-to-output discrepancy first accelerated when Reagan signed into law massive funding cuts to the likes of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, free school lunches and the National Endowment for the Arts, forcing nonprofits, which also saw massive decreases in funding, to take on the responsibilities of social welfare. 

According to Stahl, that’s an impossible task.

“Philanthropy and nonprofits do not have the scale of dollars or other kinds of resources to back them in filling the holes left when government walks away,” he said.

But while Stahl said that healthcare, for example, should be administered by the government rather than businesses, “not everything should be left to the government.”  

“You can get someone running government who is corrupt or is going to shut down these services,” he said, noting that it’s crucial to have community organizations that aren’t completely reliant on public funding.  

As for Mountain Projects, Simmons told SMN, “We’re very resourceful with what we have, and we have been very blessed by private and other philanthropists to provide the services that we provide.” 

Indeed, Mountain Projects has seen increased total revenue, expenses and assets between fiscal years 2020 and 2024. Its 2024 total revenues were just over $19 million compared to around $13 million four years prior. 

Mountain Projects recorded $16 million in contributions and grants for the 2024 fiscal year, and 80% of this total — over $13 million — came from federal and state funding sources.

Meanwhile, congressional legislation and executive policy during the Trump administration’s second term mimic massive Reagan-era funding cuts to both the social safety net and the nonprofit sector, adding precarity even to federal funding already earmarked.

Mountain Projects’ largest single grant is the $3 million it receives annually from the Department of Health and Human Services for Head Start and Early Head Start programming. Fortunately, the Haywood-Jackson nonprofit was awarded its 2025 Head Start funding in a timely manner, but the Government Accountability Office in July reported that the Trump administration had illegally withheld funds from the DHHS program for months.

The Trump administration, moreover, is now engaging in unprecedented challegenes to the First Ammendment as a means of limiting nonprofit funding.

In what he described as “strategic attacks,” Stahl said that “groups that believe in racial equity or say they do have been … pressured to walk away from those values and those words, and they’ve had funding cut.” 

Ultimately, none of Mountain Projects’ immediate post-disaster operations, however lifesaving and essential, were funded by the government or big-name foundations. In fact, in the days after Helene, according to Davis, Mountain Projects was struggling to stay afloat with what it had received prior to the storm.

“We were having to get whatever donations we could find,” she said. 

(This article was reported through a fellowship supported by the Lilly Endowment and administered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The Smoky Mountain News is solely responsible for all content.)