Grassroots organizers power Swannanoa’s recovery

In the hours and days following Tropical Storm Helene, without cell and internet service, sisters Beth Trigg and Mary Etheridge-Trigg weren’t sure just how bad the damage was across the region. They were focused on helping their immediate neighbors near Warren Wilson College, half of whom had lost their homes in the Sept. 27 storm.

Once everyone’s basic needs were met, at least temporarily, the sisters, who live less than a mile apart, began working their way out of the neighborhood to see who else needed assistance.

“How do I get out of here with all the roads blocked? How do I get access to fuel? All of those things everybody in all these different pockets was figuring out in their own family systems or small neighborhoods,” Etheridge-Trigg reflects.

Etheridge-Trigg’s husband, John Etheridge, went on a search for fuel across state lines to power people’s generators and cars, navigating back roads however he could to get through. Meanwhile, Trigg hosted displaced neighbors at her house and began collecting and redistributing supplies as they became available. Before long, the two sisters felt as if they had a system in place that could work. So they expanded their efforts, doing wellness checks throughout the community.

The pair has since launched Swannanoa Communities Together (SCT), a grassroots organization focused on rebuilding efforts. But they are not alone. Following the storm, several other ad hoc organizations have formed in Swannanoa — one of the areas hardest hit by Helene.

‘Actually, we are the helpers’

The Jasper Apartments, an affordable multifamily housing complex, occupies a hill near the corner of U.S. 70 and Warren Wilson Road. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, its younger residents hauled buckets of water from a nearby retention pond for their families and elderly neighbors. For more than a week, the complex remained without power and water. During this time, Trigg made her way to the apartments for a wellness check.

It was amid these early efforts, says Etheridge-Trigg, that she realized the help she assumed might be on its way, be it from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or a large nonprofit entity, was not coming — at least not in the way she had imagined.

“I kept waiting for some entity to step in. I remember having a conversation with Beth and being like, ‘Well, we don’t want to get in the way of the helpers.’ Then we realized, ‘Actually, we are the help.’”

According to a FEMA news release, the organization had granted more than $47 million in individual disaster assistance by Oct. 4. Additionally, Buncombe County put out a release noting survivor assistance teams were posted on Park Street in Swannannoa the first week of October. A community care station was also set up in Swannanoa in the Ingles parking lot Oct. 9. Still, more help was needed.

The Jasper complex offered its community room as a storage center for supplies, and Trigg and Etheridge-Trigg set up a community resource hub in the parking lot. Everyone was doing whatever they could, Trigg says.

“They were self-organizing [at Jasper]. We were self-organizing. People were taking care of each other,” Trigg says.

While at Jasper, Trigg met Angela McGee, a single mother of eight who had lost her home in the flood. She was at the complex to apply for an apartment, but no units were available. Through her network, Trigg was able to connect McGee to the Charlotte-based landlords who owned a vacation rental in Oakley that they were willing to provide for a storm victim. (See sidebar.)

Beyond friends and neighbors, McGee was the first stranger Trigg assisted during the recovery, which helped her and her sister realize that they could expand their services if they established a formal organization. Around late October, SCT was born.

Bringing communities together

Like many rural places in the mountains, the Swannanoa community is scattered around hollers and dead-end roads, with pockets of the population tucked behind numerous bridges crisscrossing the river and its tributaries. Because of this, people in each specific neighborhood had unique experiences in the storm, whether they were near forested slopes off Bee Tree Road or in riverside complexes within the flood plain.

As Trigg, her sister and their helpers started branching out farther from home, they ran into others doing the same work in other neighborhoods. Kym Maisch, who would later become a core member of SCT, was focused on the Moffitt Road neighborhood behind the former Root Bar, where two people died when an apartment building came off its foundation and floated down the river.

John Piper Waters crossed paths with Trigg on Facebook amid a search for missing residents of a trailer park on the east end of Swannanoa. That led to a lasting partnership between the two, who continue to connect displaced residents with resources.

Down in Beacon Village, near what some consider “central” Swannanoa off Whitson Avenue, Tissica Schoch was doing her own organizing.

Schoch says she was fortunate to own the one house on Edwards Avenue that did not flood. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, she opened her door to another family. Once she learned about the twice-daily county briefings on Blue Ridge Public Radio, she became the unofficial news source for Beacon Village.

“I love synthesizing information and spreading it. So from that point on at 10 [a.m.] and 4 [p.m.] I would turn my car on and listen to the radio. We would charge people’s phones, I would take extensive notes, and then I would go around and tell everybody what I found out,” Schoch says.

About a week after the storm, the neighborhood began regularly meeting to share information and resources. Schoch, who worked remotely for a finance consulting firm before the storm and will return to that role at some point, got her hands on a Starlink portable internet modem to help in her communications role, and she kept disseminating information.

Eventually, Schoch joined organizers George Scott, Carol Groben and others to form the Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance (SGA). According to the group’s website, its mission is “to inform the community and support relief, recovery, and rebuilding efforts in the Swannanoa Valley.”

Forming alliances

SGA, a collaborative group without hierarchical structure, holds decentralized meetings where everyone shares their needs as well as what they can offer.

During a recent meeting on a cold January morning, about 20 attendees sat on chairs in a circle in the sanctuary of the former Swannanoa United Methodist Church on Whitson Avenue. Scott, one of the group’s rotating facilitators, says the group has met 46 times since Oct. 4 with a total attendance of more than 1,000, as of Jan. 7. They still meet two to three times a week.

The goal of the meeting, Scott told the group at the outset, was to connect attendees and figure out how to best share the resources available to them. All attendees introduced themselves, shared information about recent projects, what issues they were facing or what services they were offering.

Cody Johnmeyer, a demolition contractor from Missouri, said he was there with his crew to help, earning praise and thanks from the crowd. But longtime Swannanoa resident DeDe Styles shared the best-received news at the gathering: She planned to bring strawberries back to town.

With Swannanoa’s Ingles temporarily closed due to sustained damage and Ledford’s Produce stand destroyed, the valley has become a food desert, with the closest grocery stores in Black Mountain or East Asheville. At the meeting, Styles said residents need a place where they can get strawberries, ramps and pickled quail eggs.

“I worry that people can’t get strawberries. People in Swannanoa really depend on that,” she told the crowd to joyful exclamations.

Groben says it’s been “overwhelming and humbling” to see how the community has come together after the storm. “It’s extraordinary. I never expected something like this. I’m so proud of this community coming together to help their neighbors recover.”

Schoch says it’s refreshing to see how a community that didn’t know each other before now can’t live without each other.

“We want to continue this community that we’ve established and have monthly potlucks. And, you know, I think a lot of us are going to be more active in just sitting on porches and saying hello to people who pass by. I mean, on Sept. 26 we didn’t know each other’s names, but now I can’t get down the street without saying hello to everybody,” Schoch says.

Biggest barrier

For grassroots organizers working to bring more resources to Swannanoa and help its blue-collar residents find replacement housing, a thematic roadblock emerged. The area’s status as an unincorporated, census-designated place without a town council or mayor complicates recovery efforts.

Unlike larger Asheville to the west or Black Mountain to the east, there is no clear town square in Swannanoa, no obvious gathering place for residents to go to for resources and no hyperlocal government official to call for help. That, say both Trigg and Schoch, has made it more difficult for residents there to get access to the same resources, information and recovery infrastructure available elsewhere.

“The reality is that if you live in an unincorporated part of the county, the only local government you have is the county government. You don’t have what the people who live in the city of Asheville have or what people who live in Black Mountain have,” Trigg says.

In 2009, Swannanoa residents voted down a referendum to incorporate the community. Some are now seeing the value of incorporation in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

“The biggest barrier to Swannanoa getting back on its feet is the fact that we are unincorporated, and so we don’t have a channel to access all of the grants and state funding,” Schoch adds. “If that was out of the way, we would be in great shape for recovery.”

Despite those roadblocks, the fight goes on for organizers, and something about working with your neighbors, for your neighbors is refreshing, Schoch says.

“It was like a little very messed-up utopia that we had. No money ever exchanged hands. It was just, ‘What do you need?’ and ‘I’ve got you,’” she adds.

Kicking into high gear 

Similar to other communities post-Helene, there have been standout businesses and nonprofits shifting their typical operations to ensure the community gets fed in Swannanoa.

You can’t have a conversation about the post-storm atmosphere without talking about Blunt Pretzels, just down the block from where SGA holds its meetings.

The day after the storm, Chris Smith and his wife, who live one mile from the pretzel cafe, walked to Blunt in search of water. Owner Eddy Shoeffmann already had the griddle warmed up with pretzels heating and was cooking up burgers and bratwursts for the community.

Smith, who works in software sales and previously owned a food truck, asked Shoeffmann if he needed help. Just like that, Blunt had a new volunteer chef.

For 60 days, Blunt served breakfast, lunch and dinner, with supplies donated by local restaurants closed from the storm and staple ingredients supplied by World Central Kitchen. At its apex, the operation was serving 2,000 meals a day, Smith says.

Four months later, Smith and the volunteer team are still cooking dinner seven days a week, serving between 200 and 400 people each night, he says. They plan to continue through at least mid-April and hope to extend the effort by loaning the space to restaurateurs who lost their kitchens or by offering classes on how to prepare more obscure food items, Smith says.

Meanwhile, Swannanoa-based food nonprofit Bounty & Soul kicked into high gear providing food not only to Swannanoa but all over Buncombe County after the headquarters of MANNA FoodBank was destroyed in East Asheville, forcing the larger nonprofit to relocate.

“We completely filled the need for fresh food access. MANNA’s capacity for fridges was at 20%. We had to step in in a bigger way,” says Ali Casparian, executive director of Bounty & Soul.

The supplier went from distributing fresh food to 17,000 people a month to around 24,000 after the storm, she says. The nonprofit has focused its efforts on areas hardest hit, especially Swannanoa.

Bounty & Soul set up regular markets on Whitson Avenue in a mobile produce truck, giving locals dependable access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

It also expanded its reach beyond food, using community connections to help secure mattresses for people who lost everything in the flood, Casparian says.

Winter efforts 

Back on the west side of Swannanoa, as water returned to the taps in the Jasper Apartment complex, its residents needed their community room back, and SCT needed a more permanent home.

Trigg found a vacant building on U.S. 70, across from where Tarwheels Skateway used to be.

Carmen Ybarra, community organizer with Just Economics, joined the team to help communicate with the area’s Spanish-speaking community and has stayed on with Maisch and the sisters to help in additional ways.

At SCT headquarters, as volunteers unwrap a donated fridge that the crew plans to stock with available perishables, Trigg vents about the group’s more recent efforts: homelessness avoidance.

Trigg, Maisch, Waters and others have spent much of the last couple of months scrabbling together funds from various, mostly private, sources to help residents facing the threat of eviction. More recently, the group has assisted those who are living at hotels and motels paid for by FEMA navigate the federal agency’s requirements. Among these efforts, they have been appealing for more time and assistance. Many, Trigg says, still have nowhere to go.

Etheridge-Trigg says on average, two to four people come to SCT every day for housing-related financial assistance. They never turn anyone away, she adds.

Ultimately, beyond their pressing day-to-day work, the members of SCT aim to unite the community  and give a voice to all residents who wish to be a part of Swannanoa’s recovery.

“What we are trying to do here is hold a space for all those communities to work together on what we need right now and on the future of Swannanoa, and do it through building connections and trust,” Trigg says.

During Xpress’ visit, an organizer living along N.C. Highway 9 arrived, looking for resources and help supplying her neighbors. Up until that moment, Etheridge-Trigg says, they hadn’t heard from anyone in that area.

The visit is an example of how many people in different neighborhoods are still in great need, Etheridge-Trigg says. She hopes word will spread that SCT is a place where anyone interested in Swannanoa’s future can be a part of rebuilding.

“We need to make sure that everybody who wants to have a voice in figuring out what Swannanoa is going to do from here, and how Swannanoa will look from here, and how we can support each other … has a space to have a voice,” she adds.