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Chloe Lieberman and Jazz Maltz live in Barnardsville, where Hurricane Helene unpeeled layers of poverty.
After Helene, Myers encountered both of them at a community kitchen and aid hub, where they were busy cooking, delivering supplies, and knocking on doors to see what their neighbors needed. Now, they're building on those connections for the long haul.
For Lieberman, a gardener, that means delivering fresh produce with Mother Earth Food and incorporating a new nonprofit aid network; for Maltz, a forester by training, that means starting up a community lumber mill and free firewood program, called the Full Circle Forestry Collective.
Maltz is worried about fire risk, and the neighbors he knows can't afford to heat their homes. "There’s a lot of things hanging in our community, and no really clear way forward for people,” he said.
Now that many of the state and federal Helene relief programs are expiring, though, Lieberman is worried that her community’s needs will only increase. At least now, they have the collective experience of surviving together. “It touched the land where all of us live,” she said. “There was this sense of like a silver lining of it, of taking people out of that isolation and loneliness.”