‘Our guardian angels’: A small but mighty effort to bring holiday joy to NC Helene victims
James Scarborough has been homeless before — and Hurricane Helene, he says, very nearly made him homeless again.
He and his wife Joy met while living on the streets during Covid and earlier this year finally got approved for a public housing voucher that enabled them to move into a trailer home in McDowell County. But Helene’s fierce winds and rains chased them out of the tree-filled park, and after they strung together a week’s worth of hotel stays with the help of friends and FEMA, the couple returned to find their residence muddy, waterlogged and entirely unlivable.
“There was not much we could salvage, besides things that were high up, some dishes and things like that,” says Scarborough, who is 46. “Other than that, our couches, dressers, everything was wet — ruined.”
It was a monumental setback for a couple that lived check to check. His wife had an unstable job situation, and he lives off disability, a diabetic who is sorely in need of back surgery and drawing government assistance of just $1,000 a month. “We went from working ourselves up from off the streets to getting a vehicle, getting Section 8, getting a place to live ... And then it felt like it was just all taken from us, in one night.
“That first week, that’s the thought in our head. We’re going right back to where we started, back on the streets again.”
But that second week, Scarborough found what turned out to be a form of salvation.
While perusing Facebook, he stumbled upon and joined a newly created group with fewer than 200 members named “Western NC Holiday Hope: Thanksgiving & Adopt a Family for Christmas Relief.”
The idea was simple: Families in Western North Carolina who were impacted by the hurricane could create a “wish list” on Amazon’s website and fill it with relatively modest needs and wants, then apply or be nominated to be “adopted” by donors who could then purchase some or all of the items for them.
In the several weeks since, the group has ballooned to more than 3,500 members and Scarborough — who the group’s founder says had to, like all “adoptees,” undergo a vetting process — has received everything on his list and has been asked to add yet more things.
“For people to be willing to help us and to stick their neck out ... to get things replaced, to be willing to adopt our family — even if you have kids or you don’t have kids, if you’re elderly or adult — and people wanting to take you and treat you like family and do that?” Scarborough says. “It started making me believe in people again. ... You go from it being a nightmare to, well, there’s some sunshine to this.”
“They will never truly know what they mean to us,” he continues. “I mean, this group and these donors that have helped and sent things to us and helped us — and Dana — they’re our guardian angels.”
A desire ‘to naturally go where people need help’
Dana Flaherty wasn’t exactly looking to add more to her workload.
Already, the 48-year-old resident of Willow Spring (about 15 miles south of Raleigh) was juggling a pair of jobs, one as a part-time marketing specialist for a home-care company and another as a family and children’s portrait photographer.
But after Helene hit, Flaherty — a Long Island transplant who along with her husband John has become a lover of Western North Carolina’s mountains since they moved to the Tar Heel state four years ago — felt moved to seek out a fitting way to help. She too found it on Facebook, via a post by someone on a volunteer rescue crew who was looking for a photographer to document the devastation and his team’s relief efforts.
The destruction was so much worse than she imagined. The volunteers, so much more inspiring. All of it rekindled in her a desire, she says, “just to naturally go where people need help,” something she did as a social worker in New York before switching careers a little over a decade ago.
While out there, she and her husband wound up helping with food deliveries and other relief work. And “I don’t know,” Flaherty says, “it just left a mark on me.”
By the time they got back to Willow Spring...
“I’m like, Oh my God, this has happened right around the holidays,” she says. “These people don’t have a house. They lost family members. The children lost all their toys. So I was like, I really want to do something for the holidays to help these people.”
It didn’t take her long to come up with the idea, which was this: a Facebook group designed to match Western NC families impacted by the hurricane with donors, simply by letting those prospective donors view a family’s description of its situation as well as its Amazon “wish list.”
Flaherty created application forms for both donors and prospective “adoptees” (who also could be nominated by someone else), and came up with an approval process for the latter that involves providing to her documentation verifying the family’s plight. “Because,” she says, “unfortunately, there’s a lot of people that are taking advantage that don’t even live in the mountains and try to get things for free.”
She launched the “Western NC Holiday Hope: Thanksgiving & Adopt a Family for Christmas Relief” Facebook group on Oct. 8 — less than two weeks after Helene blew through the state — including in her first post a tease that she planned to organize a Thanksgiving food and coat drive.
“Then I shared it in a few other groups around North Carolina,” Flaherty says, “and it kinda just took off from there.”
‘Holiday normalcy after everything that happened’
Compared to the efforts of larger, more-formal organizations with staffs and the ability to receive and distribute huge cash donations, Flaherty’s grassroots efforts are admittedly pint-sized. In just over six weeks since launching, she says not quite 300 Helene-affected families have been “adopted.”
But her “Holiday Hope” group’s advantage is that it can be much more personal.
If you’ve, say, supported local business efforts to help victims, or if you bought a ticket to the Concert for Carolina, there’s really no way of knowing how exactly your contribution has been or will be distributed. With Flaherty’s program, she allows vetted families to directly post to the group, to a captive audience of prospective donors — who can buy one, several, or all of the items on a particular family’s Amazon list.
Unless the donor chooses to remain anonymous, the family is provided with their contact information so it can send a thank-you note. As a result, the donor and the family often wind up in direct contact.
Mary Christ, a retired schoolteacher who lives in Concord just outside of Charlotte, says she was grateful to find an opportunity to help her fellow North Carolinians this way because “I’m not a person that can cut down trees or plow roads or do anything like that.”
Initially, she helped James Scarborough, the formerly homeless man whose trailer was rendered uninhabitable by Helene. “He had listed several things, because they basically lost everything,” Christ says. “It can be really expensive to give all that stuff.
“But Dana really stressed this: ‘You decide and you pick a few things. You don’t have to get everything.’ So I got them socks, and she was looking for a hairbrush and hair clips, just basic things that would have been difficult as a woman (in her situation) to replace, to pay for everything. After getting a few things from them, he thanked me and went on, asking for more people to adopt him.”
Christ’s own attention then turned to a post by a woman in Mills River outside of Asheville with four children — including a six-month-old baby — and a husband who is unable to work and trying to finalize his disability assistance.
The extended power and cell-service outages weren’t ruinous for Casey Bradley’s family, but there were enough unforeseen expenses added to an already tenuous financial situation that Bradley felt like she had to do something she’s never been very comfortable doing. She had to ask for help.
Reluctantly, she did, “wanting to have some kind of holiday normalcy after everything that happened.”
But Christ — who had partnered with another woman to share the responsibility for “adopting” Bradley’s family — had some surprising concerns about Mom’s wish list.
Trying to ‘bring things back into perspective for us’
“We had only put things on the list for our kids,” Bradley says, “to kind of see what they wanted to do for Christmas. A few items each. And they were excited to do that. Mary actually reached out to me I think about a week ago, though, and said, ‘Hey, so we noticed that you didn’t have any items on there for you and your husband. Please add some extra things.’
“It’s just really been an above-and-beyond level of support and just community coming together, from all over.”
“Holiday Hope” has, indeed, spread beyond the borders of North Carolina.
For instance, Theresa King — a 47-year-old project manager for a hospital laboratory — lives in the Illinois city of Lacon, about 2-1/2 hours southwest of Chicago.
She says that after the holiday season last year her family and several relatives wanted to shake up their giving routines by finding an “adopt-a-family”-type program, to “bring things back into perspective for us.” The plan for most of the year was to support a local effort. But when Helene hit, they knew there was going to be a lot of need in the worst-affected areas and decided to try to concentrate on finding a program supporting those.
Along came Dana Flaherty, and King and her nine family members used the program to match with April Woody, a single mother on disability who lives in a trailer park in Spruce Pine with her three kids.
Like Casey Bradley, Woody initially had only included items for her children. “I had told Dana that if she paired me up with somebody who got my kids just one gift, it would be a blessing,” recalls Woody, who lost cell service for a week, power for nine days, and water for 22 days.
And like Mary Christ, Theresa King’s family insisted on getting some things for Mom as well. When all was said and done, they joined forces to buy more than $1,000 worth of products on Amazon, effectively knocking out the Woodys’ entire original wish list and then some.
Basic stuff like socks, shoes, underwear, and toiletries, but also board games for her 18-year-old son who has autism; anime collectibles for her 15-year-old daughter; and video-game-themed items for her 13-year-old son. “They will have an awesome Christmas,” Woody says — “something that I wouldn’t have been able to have provided because I’m so behind on my bills.”
It’s exactly the kind of help King’s family hoped to provide, and Theresa King has loved watching Flaherty’s idea flourish.
“It lifts everybody’s spirits, especially around the holidays when there’s a need,” she says. “With all the other political stress and everything else going on in the world today, it’s good to see. It’s nice to shut everything else down and then just appreciate, Oh my gosh, this started off as such a small thing, and it’s blowing up bigger.”
‘I never thought it was gonna be that way again’
Christmas aside, though, Flaherty also has both shorter-term and longer-range missions.
More immediately, she’s trying to do something nice for Helene victims for Thanksgiving, by assembling about 40 baskets that she, her husband and her daughter will personally deliver to families in Western North Carolina next week. They’ll include foods that can be prepared without ovens, since some families might not have the luxury of one; but also gift cards for those who do, so families can go buy a turkey if one’s desired.
Then — more important than either of the two big looming holidays, she says — the focus will be on what comes after for those in need. “I want to continue to at least go up there twice a month,” she says, “help as much as we can. They shouldn’t be forgotten about.”
Flaherty even says she’s exploring the possibility of creating a 501(c)(3) so that she can continue pursuing this rekindled passion.
So that she can continue making a difference in the lives of people like Crystal Barrett of Leicester, which is about 20 minutes northwest of Asheville. The trailer home Barrett and her husband and their three children share lost water and power for more than two weeks, and a downed tree damaged their shed.
Since then, almost everything on her family’s list has been purchased, and the Barretts are also set to be on the receiving end of one of those Thanksgiving baskets Flaherty is readying for delivery.
“To know that there are real people out there who are willing to take time out and stuff and come up and help us when they don’t know us from Adam ... it’s just amazing,” Barrett says. “Because I just never thought it was ever gonna be that way again. I’m almost 40, and I grew up where we helped one another. You could pick up a person on the side of the road and take ’em somewhere and not have to worry about it. But you slowly, over the years, have seen it dissipate and go away. Everyone’s skeptical about everything anymore.
“But to see Dana just step up and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do it. Who’s behind me?’ And to see so many who have rallied behind her and helped? It’s absolutely amazing.”
How to join the ‘Holiday Hope’ effort
Search “Western NC Holiday Hope” on Facebook, or click here.
This story was originally published November 20, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
