Dear All Hands & Hearts Family,
It’s the second anniversary of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the back-to-back storms that inflicted more than $100 billion in damage across six southeastern states in the fall of 2024. Most of the damage occurred in North Carolina and Florida, where All Hands & Hearts has been working nonstop over the past two years.
The anniversaries also happen to coincide with my retirement. After 13 hurricane seasons with AH&H, I find myself reflecting on all that I have learned on this organization’s journey toward community-centered recovery that lasts.
When I started at AH&H, it was in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, during the organization’s first attempt in the U.S. to stay beyond responding to immediate needs for debris removal and stabilization (skills we’d been honing since Hurricane Katrina). First, we decided to learn how to perform mold sanitizing, a need volunteers and staff were seeing all around them in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Long Island. AH&H became one of the first nonprofit volunteer groups to offer this service, and we’ve done it ever since. To keep meeting storm survivors where they were as needs evolved from cleanup to rebuilding, the team took the next step up the learning curve, and AH&H launched its long-term recovery capability in home repairs.
This anniversary retrospective of Hurricanes Helene and Milton illustrates how far AH&H’s long-term U.S. recovery expertise and philosophy have come.
Durable recovery is built together.
Our starting point is that recovery is accomplished with communities, not delivered to them. It’s not about swooping in to clean up the mess and fix what was broken. Our teams listen to local leaders, grassroots organizations, and disaster survivors, then stay for the long haul, working shoulder to shoulder with them to restore what makes a community whole.
That is why, in Florida and North Carolina, AH&H’s recovery projects have included rehabilitating parks and historic gathering places, supporting local food systems, helping small businesses reopen, in addition to repairing homes.
Partnerships are essential to AH&H’s community-centered approach, and in Florida and North Carolina, they have been the key to multiplying impact.
The scale of Helene and Milton created enormous recovery needs that no single sector can meet. Over the past two years, AH&H has supported 11,000 people, completed 20 community projects, repaired 149 homes, and provided cleanup and stabilization services for another 221 residential properties across Western North Carolina and the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Who made that impact possible? Donors. Area contractors. Grassroots organizations. Local agencies. Churches. National and community partners. Staff and volunteers. In other words: all of us together. Over 20 implementing and funding partnerships across the two states have helped stretch scarce resources farther.
Lasting recovery means leaving people and places better prepared for the next disaster.
AH&H hasn’t simply repaired damaged homes in Florida and North Carolina; we’ve used the recovery process as an opportunity to build resilience, incorporating materials and practices designed to withstand future water, mold, and storm damage, such as storm shutters in areas repeatedly battered by hurricanes, moisture barriers in crawlspaces under homes at risk of future flooding, providing homeowners with DIY mold-sanitizing kits and instructions, and developing new hazardous-materials procedures.
In response to the complexity of the flood damage in Western North Carolina and the hurricane vulnerability of Florida’s Gulf Coast, these two programs firmly established contractor management as one of our U.S. recovery capabilities, complementing our volunteer-powered repair services. Our contractor managers operate from the mission-driven perspective of an advocate and buffer between commercial companies and traumatized, vulnerable homeowners, while giving us the capability to take on even the most complex repairs, like roofing, septic systems, and foundation repairs.
The Helene and Milton programs will continue into the fall after I leave. Other long-term recovery programs will follow, and I’m confident our creative, compassionate teams will keep innovating in the years ahead to keep up with a changing world. What I’m most proud to reflect on is that whatever we do, wherever we go, AH&H’s commitment to community-first and to building resilience in people and places is rooted in our DNA.
For all that has been accomplished by this two-year anniversary, and all that remains to be done, I am grateful that we’ve been in it together: with the hundreds of donors whose generosity enabled AH&H to invest $11 million in Hurricane Helene and Milton relief; with the volunteers who contributed nearly 100,000 hours of their time and talent; with the extraordinarily devoted staff managing this complex recovery; and with the partners who expanded our reach. Thank you all.
And finally, to the people of North Carolina and Florida: thank you for showing me and my colleagues what perseverance, grit, and hope look like.
It has been an honor to be a member of this nonprofit family.
