Generous to a Fault
The mountain victims of Hurricane Helene still need your help
It’s the season of giving, so there’s no better time to talk about generosity — our drives, our judgements, our stories, and everything in between.
This week I will dive into what happens in our brains when we’re being generous. I will talk about why people still need help in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene even though millions of dollars in aid have flooded the region. And finally, I will give you a list of individuals and small farms that need your help today. Tomorrow’s needs will be different, which means there’s no better time to flex your charitable adaptability.
Being adjustable — being philosophically pliant, being non-judgmentally flexible — is hard work for us humans who crave security and certainty.
Let’s get started.
Your Brain on Giving
When you give to someone, when you offer a gift and you’re met with gratitude and appreciation, the pleasure centers of your brain light up and flood your body with feel-good hormones.
Pumped with dopamine and oxytocin, you’re primed for social connection and trust.
Hardwired for building community, our system feels safer when we reciprocate and benefit from the actions of people around us. If you see someone else giving, you feel inspired to do the same. That’s why your favorite nonprofits fundraise through personal stories and social gatherings.
If you’re a black sheep, a non-conformist who believes you’re immune to the establishment, your brain still operates with the same drives but the landscape of the community you’re joining and impressing is different. You may be on the fringes, but the outskirts are still a place with its own cast of characters that form your community.
Wanting to be a part of something larger than yourself is a very good thing. We have the luxury of living in a society where individualism is prized but this is a modern phenomenon. Our nervous system still functions through ancient urges. We feel safer when our communities and families support us. We’re human animals who crave a pack, a herd, a place to belong. Widespread loneliness is the root of our societal dysfunction. We’ve forgotten how we’re primed to live in relationship with others.
When we give, our generosity craves an audience — again, not a bad thing, just a biological impulse. That’s why we have names on buildings. Even anonymous donations feel better when you’re contributing to something larger than yourself, when you’re a part of something bigger.
I’m outlining all this for a reason. Weighing right and wrong informs our choices — we do this every waking second. But it also leads to a tendency toward judgment. Self-judgment is one we carry around all day like a backpack filled with bricks. I’m not here to judge you, so feel free to put your bags down and hang out with me for a while.
I have a mean collection of teas.
We want recognition for our generosity. That’s okay. It’s how we’re made. Like a horse not understanding the big circle we’re asking them to make when they know that cutting across in a straight line will conserve energy and take them to the same destination — we’re programmed to need logic and validation. It’s an internal compass that pays emotional dividends.
Safety. Security. Acceptance.
Control versus chaos.
Survival.
Why Giving in the Aftermath of Hurricane Helene is Different
Helene was a thousand-year storm, a geological event, in a location without the infrastructure to handle large volumes of water and strong winds.
Like a crow flying over, let’s look down from the top: the nation, the state, the county, the town, the highway, the road, a long driveway of switchbacks to what was once a residence.
The family that lived in this house might be camped in their yard or they’re one of the lucky ones who secured a camper. They are not eligible for the permits needed for a tiny home or shed.
Propane to fuel heating and cooking is expensive and in short supply. The power lines taken out by fallen trees are the family’s responsibility to clear before the electrical company can restore power to structures that have been declared a total loss by FEMA. Their house is condemned and national aid for rebuilding is pennies on the dollar.
The family did not have flood insurance.
The family’s one vehicle was old. They didn’t carry collision. The truck was flooded and crushed by a falling tree. There is a shortage of affordable, used vehicles in the area.
The family didn’t have savings before the storm. Their jobs were washed away by floodwaters in an area that historically had few jobs available before the destruction.
The land itself has been in the family for generations.
FEMA is a federal initiative. They’re the last to reach disaster areas because government wheels turn slowly — it’s just the nature of the beast. Bureaucracy works like a blueprint. It doesn’t color outside the lines.
Emergency first responders are just that — the first on the scene. From the National Guard to local fire departments to private citizens, they were on the ground as the flood waters receded and provided critical help fast. Like trying to use a surgeon as a primary care provider, when the wound has been sutured, you’re not going to check into the OR for a follow-up. Healing takes time and a different support network.
Big, national nonprofits like Samaritan’s Purse and The Red Cross work within an established scope. They’re beholden to their boards of directors to deliver maximum benefit with expediency and defined perimeters. People seeking aid gain approval by proving their eligibility for very specific needs.
We have not created a program — yet — that helps someone rebuild all the components of their lives after a disaster. There are numerous organizations at work, each providing very specific aids. And the disaster of Hurricane Helene is unique. We’ve never seen one like this in our lifetimes.
We want our behemoth charities to operate in smooth, predictable, and direct ways. We need them to stay within their scope. If they were all willy-nilly, corruption would be greater than it already is. These big machines, because of their transparency and guidelines, are where large donors — like Concert for the Carolinas with 24 million dollars raised — put their contributions.
Donors, trusts, high-rollers, those in the public eye, need their charities to be squeaky clean and socially accepted. Their donation direction requires a proven track record, or they’re setting themselves up for a scandal. What wants that kind of drama when you’re trying to do something good?
On the local level, smaller nonprofits — many created recently to target very specific needs or operating under the umbrella of a fiscal sponsor — do immense, hands-on work, but there is only so much they can do with limited coffers and a shortage of volunteers.
In the early days of the storm, people came from all over to help. But three months out and the holidays calling, manpower is limited. The people who have been in action since day one post-Helene are tired, burned out, and mentally/emotionally exhausted. They need a break, but if they stop working — who will take over and see that needs are being met in freezing temperatures and the dregs of donations remaining now that the world has moved on to other things?
The long-term residents of Appalachia are quiet. They don’t ask for help. They’ve been historically ignored, overlooked, discredited, and discounted. They’re weary of motivations and strangers. They’d rather suck it up than ask for what they need.
The countless pleas for continued help are a sign of how dire the need in the mountains remains.
The worst-hit victims of the storm lost the building blocks of their lives: clothes, memories, electronics, storage, food, jobs, beds, vehicles, bathrooms, documents that prove their identity. Entire lives are not going to be rebuilt with FEMA hotel vouchers that expire in the new year. Many people are just getting started.
And like the early days of the storm, the bulk of aid work is currently provided by individuals and word of mouth. It’s not coming from corporations or large organizations. The connections are happening through people like you and me who see a need and seek to fill it.
Compassion fatigue is real and we were all burnt out from caring before this storm when our newsfeeds were clogged with GoFundMe’s for medical emergencies and burial expenses in a world where basic needs are crowdsourced.
As we take stock of what’s left over at the end of the year for charitable giving, there’s a reason that fundraisers bloom around the holidays — it’s the end of the fiscal calendar for most people. We think we’re getting a tax write-off. This is normal and everyone from large corporations to your grandmother thinks they are taking advantage of an IRS boon.
You donate to a non-profit, you get a write-off. You donate to an individual or a local small business, you do not get a write-off.
But how many people are giving large enough to meet the standard IRS deduction? I know I’m not.
In the psychology of reciprocity, we learn that we’re apt to be generous when we’re receiving something tangible back from giving — whether the return is real or not.
Anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox claim we live in a “web of indebtedness.” It’s what makes us human. Reciprocity governs that web. Giving into a void isn’t inspiring. We might do it once, but without a dopamine hit from receiving something back, we’re less likely to do it again.
Why Post-Helene Direct Donations Matter
In the early days following the storm, my list of vetted sources that needed your contributions were a collection of organizations and some individuals, mainly pilots, who were busy getting supplies and rescues accomplished before the behemoth of bureaucracy could organize and move in.
I’m well outside the catastrophic ground zero of the storm, but my metropolis in the foothills of upstate South Carolina is a changed landscape. Now that the autumn leaves are off the trees, I see deep into the devastation of the woodlands as I drive past. Many home roofs are still covered in blue tarps, or structurally damaged to the point that there is a tale-tell red slip attached to the front showing that the structure is uninhabitable.
I live nowhere near the epicenter of the storm.
This was a thousand-year storm in a place where hurricanes do not happen. This region is deeply inland and the mountains usually protect us from major weather systems. But in the case of Helene, the mountains became a funnel for unprecedented rainfall followed by unprecedented wind. Mudslides, falling trees, flooding — structures far removed from waterways were decimated.
In the early hours of the storm, I moved the people and animals inside my house — a farm in the center of the forest — to the center of the structure where there were no windows. I said a prayer for the horses in their old, wooden barn with a tin roof. When we finally emerged, the air smelled like a sawmill thick with wet, snapped wood.
The chainsaw we bought to dig the driveways and pastures out from fallen trees cost $500. FEMA reimbursed us $219. We lost the food in our freezers and refrigerators and a pony is suffering canker — a bacterial autoimmune response — in her feet from standing in a flooded stall for hours. Our Helene cost is in the thousands of dollars.
And yet we had it extraordinarily good.
Imagine that family with kids in the crows-eye descent into the epicenter of the storm in Western North Carolina. Pennies on the dollar in federal aid, if they’re eligible, will not see them through the winter. Their well is destroyed — they don’t have water. They do not have electricity. They don’t have a structure to live in, or funds arriving to rebuild because the old house destroyed by a redirected river is now on a flood plain. They don’t have a vehicle. They don’t have a job to return to. Without a home to live in, they could lose their kids.
There are saints on the ground doing daily work to help people keep or find a place to live, who are delivering aid to people camped out in cars and tents. The people who had the least in the community before Helene have even less now.
They need dollars and goods, but they deeply need hope.
“I want people to understand the scale, including the size of the region that was impacted and the number of communities and the number of people. I want them to understand that we are not entering some kind of easy recovery phase anytime soon, that we are still in crisis, and that the crisis is actually getting worse. The thing that is needed most is unrestricted money to families and communities,” says Beth Trigg, one of those saints who has worked tirelessly in her community since the storm to help people who have fallen through the cracks of available aid.
Diamond Brand Gear Co. has been a staple of the outdoors industry for 143 years and they’re permanently closing their doors as, “. . .a direct result of the catastrophic damage sustained during Hurricane Helene on September 27th, 2024.”
One of the few brands that had stemmed the tide of outsourcing and managed to keep production in the United States, Diamond Brand manufactured the first backpacks for the Boy Scouts in 1931 and supplied products to all the big-name outdoor companies: North Face, Patagonia. You’ve probably used their gear.
A GoFundMe with a balance of $11k will be distributed to the company’s thirty-five employees — that’s $315 each.
“How many of their former employees won’t be able to pay rent or mortgage next month?” asks Beth Trigg. “This is what I mean when I say we are experiencing economic collapse.”
In their goodbye note to customers, Diamond Brand wrote, “When we look back and reflect on what we were able to do over these many years, we can take comfort in the fact that we always did good work for our customers. We can also take comfort that in recent years, we stayed true to our big idea which was to inspire creativity, exploration and personal growth.”
Giving for the Sake of Giving
It is possible to change our relationship with giving. To do this, we must visualize the organism of our community in a different way.
My connections from the storm grew from an already existing network of people that I met through the worldwide horse community. Their personal stories gave me a basis of understanding that a news clip could not. We live in a world of editorial. We need context to verify our facts.
Stories matter. They contextualize the impossible and drive us into action.
To change our relationship with giving, we must allow stories to slip into the cracks of our defensive barriers. We have to be prepared to get dirty. The mountains are still covered in dust and mud. The stories emerging from the landslides aren’t edited and polished. These stories don’t have a structure yet. They’re sentences strung together without fluff or context.
They’re cries for help.
We must be prepared to give and have no certainty that the dollars are going to be utilized in a way that make us feel empowered. Giving for the sake of giving, you may receive no tangible thanks.
Your giving provides autonomy and that equals hope to someone who has lost everything from the world before Helene. Economic uncertainty is as destructive as flooding, and like water, it trickles out and changes the world around it. Healing begins with the individual but the effects ripple out.
My constantly updated list of vetted sources where you can give to support the victims of Hurricane Helene will be showcasing a list of individuals at the top, ever changing and rotating due to need, who need your help today. Soon the list will also be showcasing the community world-changers who are daily helping people find housing and car payments and trauma support.
Here are organizations and individuals that need your help today:
Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, keeping so many people from evictions. Their fund is out of money. Please help.
Hannah Heiser of Transformative Horsemanship, Asheville, NC
Jenifer Gutierrez, Burnsville, NC
Mitch Rumfelt and Sari Janczlik, Asheville NC
Jeremy Webster, Swannanoa, NC
And here are community aid workers to follow:
|| Beth Trigg || Sheri Barker || Patty Helmsworth || John Piper Watters ||
In the coming days I’ll launch an episode of my podcast, Relatively Stable, where I’m talking to Tamar Reno from her Bear Creek Farm in Green Creek, NC. Since the early days following the storm, Tamar has written words that are a balm for the mountain while broadcasting stories of need, aid, and the people who are delivering life support to their communities. I hope you’ll follow her words if you’re not already.
My gratitude for you is immense. Thank you for following my words. I took a break from writing about the storm for a few weeks, but my hope is that you dig into the true meaning of the holiday season, whatever that personally means to you, and join the mountain community by caring about the region’s slow march toward rebuilding.
This begins with relationships, and I’m so thankful for you, your support, and your time.
Thank you for being here with me.
Love,
Kim
Your voice on behalf of your community is clear and strong. Thank you!