In Asheville, A Community Gathers to Consider What “Resiliency” Requires

More than 200 people gathered at the Neighborhood Economics conference, which took place in Asheville, NC, in April 2025. The event had been scheduled for November but was postponed due to the damage Hurricane Helene had wrought two months before.

As NPQ has previously covered, Neighborhood Economics brings together faith-based organizations and impact investors to support local community wealth building, which the conference reflected in its usual range of sessions on the topics of leveraging faith-based institutions to support housing and community development. However, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, this time the theme of rebuilding was front and center.

As Rosa Lee Harden, executive producer at Neighborhood Economics, the conference’s host organization, recalled in the opening plenary, “Our house is 100 feet from the river. We were flooded.” The same was true for the homes of two other conference organizers. Six months after the storm, Harden’s farm near the Swannanoa River was still “three feet of sand dunes.”

“We are systematically overinvesting in Fortune 500 companies and underinvesting in community wellbeing.”

As is often true with disaster response, the tourist district in downtown Asheville has already been restored, giving the misleading impression that the storm’s impact is in the past. But rebuilding is ongoing, and road closures persist as of this article’s writing. There are also ongoing disputes about how much federal funding there will be for disaster recovery.

Against this backdrop, conference attendees—many of whom were from the local community—sought to both strategize about how to rebuild and how to identify systemic changes required for the future.

What Is Neighborhood Economics?

The concept of Neighborhood Economics is building local economies through relationships. As Jeremiah Robinson, director of strategic partnerships at Neighborhood Economics, explained, “Small businesses don’t survive off transaction alone. They thrive from the relationships that are created to sustain those businesses.”

A focus on local businesses and supply chains is of no small importance. Economist and author Michael H. Shuman noted at the conference that local credit unions are much more likely than big banks to lend within the communities where they are based. More broadly, he argued, as a society “we are systematically overinvesting in Fortune 500 companies and underinvesting in community wellbeing,” in part because it is far easier to invest in the stock market than to seek out local investing options. The growth of community funds, such as Asheville-based Mountain BizWorks—a local community development financial institution (CDFI)—is beginning to make local, financially safe investing more available, Shuman said.

Local ownership and local supply chains become particularly important during disasters, when global supply chains are likely to break down, as a Federal Emergency Management Agency guide published in 2019 noted.

The concern is not just theoretical. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, global supply chains did break down, leading to shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as surgical marks. Notably, during the pandemic, western North Carolina, because of its textile manufacturing district, became a leading supplier of PPE.

During Helene, too, local supply chains and local networks have been critical for disaster response. As Pastor Amy Cantrell, codirector of BeLoved Asheville, pointed out at the conference, “We realized that there was nobody coming for us but us. It’s got to be us stepping up and stepping in. We are the people we have been waiting for. Let’s take these chants out of the protests and activate them and engage with them.”

A Community Responds

Cantrell and her codirector Gustavo “Ponkho” Bermejo, both of whom were interviewed by NPQ earlier this year for their work assisting 15,000 families in the area, were at the conference and described the immediate response after the hurricane. Bermejo recalled using the organization’s tractor to clear the streets of downed trees. Neighbors, he noted, “started coming with chain saws….It was on us to clean our streets.”

The immediate response is inspiring, but sustaining that energy for the long-term is difficult.

This was just one of many stories of disaster response stories shared at the conference. Tara Brown, director of community engagement at Self-Help Credit Union, a statewide CDFI, noted that her neighbors had a “storefront in the River Arts [District] that we knew was gone. They had a commercial kitchen a mile away. They went and got all the food from the commercial kitchen and fed a whole neighborhood for a week.”

Stephanie Swepson-Twitty, CEO of Eagle Market Streets, an Asheville-based community development corporation, told the story of her hometown of Old Fort (about 25 miles east of Asheville). Helene, she recalled, took out “all the businesses and museum and many other mobile homes and residences there. There is a camp in town. That camp just went into resiliency mode—started feeding 400 families a day, providing showers and clothing and necessary things. We were receiving nourishing meals, hot meals.”

Addressing Longer-Term Issues

The immediate response is inspiring, but sustaining that energy for the long-term is difficult. As one area resident observed, “I don’t see as much relationship building as there could be. That first month was so inspiring. We’re back to business as normal. There are plenty of people who are still suffering.”

At the conference, addressing that challenge was a central item of conversation. For instance, Anna Zuevskaya, executive director of the Asheville-Buncombe Community Land Trust, noted that her organization is supporting more rental housing in the wake of Helene in order to more rapidly respond to people’s housing needs. Matt Raker, executive director of Mountain BizWorks, called attention to how multiple community groups had come together to support WNC Strong, a coalition of small-business partners engaged in hurricane rebuilding efforts in Western North Carolina; he emphasized in particular its Helene Business Recovery Fund, which provides rapid recovery loans to small businesses.

A central challenge identified for long-term recovery was reforming the insurance industry. With the climate crisis, the cost of disasters has risen astonishingly fast. Since 1980, 403 disasters costing at least $1 billion have occurred in the United States.  Within that 45-year period, 115 of those disasters (28.5 percent) have occurred in the past five years at a total cost of $746.7 billion since 2020—or nearly $150 billion a year. As NPQ has previously noted, nationally this could put one in four homeowners at risk of losing their home insurance. And of course, in Asheville right now, preserving insurance coverage is a major concern.

On a panel dedicated to the topic of insurance at the conference, Tucker Teutsch III, executive director of the Firebrand Collective, a disaster recovery organization founded in the wake of the 2020 Almeda Fire in southern Oregon, remarked that he did not know of “another industry that is concentrated on not fulfilling the obligation to their clients.”

Solving the insurance crisis, he observed, takes both admitting the elevated risks due to global heating but also recognizing the value of community mitigations that are happening. Charlie Sidoti, executive director of the insurance innovation firm InnSure, noted that the only way to make insurance affordable is for communities to leverage procurement and buy it as a group. If that happens, insurers will have no choice but to “take the bad with the good,” said Sidoti.

What Comes Next?

In some ways, Asheville may be a relatively well-positioned city for recovery efforts. Not only did its downtown tourist district largely escape the extensive damage of the surrounding area, but the community has a strong local economic base. As Robinson of Neighborhood Economics noted, “Even before the hurricane, [Asheville] was already entrepreneur-centric, local-centric, with deep roots that focus on the people.”

The disaster, particularly in its early stages, created a glimpse of what is possible when people cooperate for common benefit. “I’ve seen community reclaim its agency.…All the folks that are normally left out or an afterthought were put at the center,” concluded Robinson.

Andrea DuVall, co-owner of Mother Earth Food, observed, “Now we have an opportunity to anchor in. We really get to choose how do we wish to build intentionally. How can we support the farms and the people who grow our foods?…I’m so inspired by collaboration right now, and I’m honored to be a part of it.”

A central challenge, noted consultant Tiffani Hart, who was leading a community mapping effort at the conference, is to develop an integrated approach that brings together distinct neighborhood economy elements.

Having a clear community-based vision, Hart argued, is particularly important to ensure that state and federal government resources are employed strategically and not wasted. The goal, she emphasized, has to be tying multiple community ideas together so that neighborhood economies are rooted down, “so it doesn’t get washed away.”