Hurricane Helene devastated the Western NC community a little over two years ago during late September 2024, but the remembrance hasn’t been lost over the years. Last fall, Mindy Weathers, Principal Investigator; Mark Poff, Co-Principal Investigator; and Matt Binford, Co-Principal Investigator, joined forces across the Communications Department to research and analyze our community’s response to Helene in a project titled “Voices of Resilience: Documenting the Human Impact of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.”
Research assistants Jacob Pendergraph, Megan Baker, and Frankie Gonzalez worked to plan, schedule, and facilitate 13 video interviews with community members from emergency response teams to mutual aid organization leaders that are hosted on the research website here: https://sites.google.com/view/voices-of-resilience-document/oral-history. Across these interviews, the key themes that arose were the difficulties of communication, the increased sense of community that the relief efforts brought, and the long-term struggles that these communities continue to face due to the lack of preparedness.
The research team is using their findings to develop educational resources to share these stories to develop disaster response and advocacy initiatives that inform more effective policy and enhance disaster response strategies, so that comprehensive climate adaptation policies that are rooted in community-based knowledge and experiences are developed. There is still a lot more to come of this project, and the researchers plan to present their findings at different research conferences in the upcoming year. Along with this, Matt Binford and Mark Poff are working towards a documentary with the interviews and film from after the hurricane hit to further communicate their research.
Jacob Pendergraph served as a communications research assistant during the time of the project and has since graduated with an undergraduate degree from the Communication Department. He is now working as a project manager at Next Level AVL in Birmingham, Alabama, using his experiences from the Department and the project to advance his career. When asked what he gained from participating in the project, Pendergraph said, “Working on Voices of Resilience has given me an open-heart mindset, giving me a drive to continue to learn new skills so that I may better serve my team and community. Having this mindset has helped me rise into a career path that I never imagined for myself, and while I may still be young in my career, I believe that my drive to serve my team, community, and family. Living through Hurricane Helene and the realities that I experienced while volunteering in the aftermath have given me a drive to build and support my community, wherever that may be.”
The “Voices of Resilience” project is testimony to our community’s strength in the face of Hurricane Helene as the research team concludes data collection and begins to share their findings. By documenting these lived experiences, and hearing about relief efforts and ongoing struggles, research like this is transforming local stories into vital tools for future disaster preparedness and policy change.