During the fallout of Hurricane Helene, troves of people depended on community centers, local businesses and town squares to find food, water and other crucial resources. These ad hoc places have an official name: resilience hubs. Now, for the City of Asheville, there’s growing support among policy makers to invest in them as a form of official social infrastructure.
Asheville has pledged $2.1 million in federal recovery funds towards supporting resilience hubs. And city manager D.K. Wesley made a soft commitment to allocate a total of $10 million to seed the program at a Feb. 24 Policy, Finance and Infrastructure Committee meeting.
“What I heard loud and clear, even before this meeting, was that a great majority of the Council members actually want to reserve some funding for resilience hubs,” Wesley said. “$10 million is a great start,” she added, though she did not specify when and where the money would come from.
A resilience hub is a trusted place where people know they can go during an emergency, explained Bridget Herring, the city’s Helene Recovery Coordinator.
“It’s not about creating something new. It's about bolstering the spaces that the community already has established, and thinking about how we can add additional pieces to that,” she said.
“It's a space that provides community support 365 days out of the year and that also serves as a hub for resources in times of disruption.”
Creating designated hubs, equipped with everything from water filtration and solar power to satellite internet systems,can help people in a variety of emergencies, whether it’s a drought, wildfire, or heat wave, Herring said.
For Asheville City Council member Sheneika Smith, this public investment is long overdue. She first pitched the idea to Council in 2022, after she was inspired by the way local churches responded to people’s needs during the pandemic.
“I started to feel this internal nudge, like Asheville needs to begin preparing for climate related disasters,” she said. She said she remembers thinking that resilience hubs could help people better navigate climate disasters and encourage communities to work together and share resources “on regular days,” too.
Then Helene hit, and the need for these hubs quickly became apparent. As Asheville grappled with a near-total communications blackout and months-long water crisis, people turned to mutual aid hubs stationed at book stores, churches and parks as a place where they could wash their hands, charge their phones or find information about how to apply for government aid.
“It saved the day,” Smith said. “A lot of goodness flowed through our entire city, which made me very hopeful that the [resilience hub] idea just wasn't an idea and that we can probably do some re-prioritization to get that at the top of our list.”
In a separate but related project, the city allocated $70,000 to the nonprofit Thrive Asheville to map the hubs’ locations and identify where people may have fallen through the cracks during Helene. Thrive plans to release a final report and make recommendations in July, which should inform the city’s strategy on how to strengthen what already exists.
Asheville isn’t the only community seeking to codify local resource hubs. In Cambridge, MA, San Leandro, CA and Minneapolis, MN, local governments have invested in the creation of climate-resilient public spaces.
In San Leandro, for instance, the city is supporting five sites where people can go for resources. During normal times, the sites will serve as places for workshops, meals and community events. But in the event of an emergency, those same sites can quickly pivot into emergency response mode, helping people prepare for and respond to disasters.
Council members Maggie Ullman and Kim Roney are two other vocal supporters of the resilience hub concept. While the plan is still in its early phases, they say they have some ideas about how public funds could be used.
“I’d like to see investments in durable, one-time infrastructure in the places people already turned to for safety — things like backup energy, water access, and communications,” Ullman told BPR in an email. “These aren’t ongoing operational dollars, so we need to focus on investments that will make a lasting difference in preparedness and resilience.”
Roney added that she’d like to see the program function as a micro-grant, where neighborhoods could document gaps and apply for what they establish as a need.
“Some may already have community gardens and solar installed, others like parts of East Asheville were cut off from access to facilities and need more infrastructure,” she said. “All of them likely need a large-scale water filtration set up that’s easy to maintain and an emergency operations plan with maps.”
