(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
‘Come Hell or High Water’: A Harm Reduction Team Amps It Up in Response to a Disaster [1]
['Taylor Sisk', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-06-19
By noon Friday, September 27, 2024, downtown Marshall was pretty much washed under, but Ainsley Bryce was as yet unaware.
Bryce lives on a communal plot of land just outside Marshall, a town of 800 residents in the mountains of western North Carolina. When Hurricane Helene hit, communications were shut down, and roads into town were impassable. “We didn’t know the extent of how devastating it was,” she says.
Marshall is bordered on three sides by precipitous mountain slopes and on the fourth by the French Broad River. Here, Helene found a basin to fill. Main Street and the French Broad became one.
“Immediately, our group got together,” Bryce says. “I was, like, ‘I’m going to try to go find food for us.’” Others set out to check on neighbors.
Mobilizing was instinctive. At the time, Bryce was director of Holler Harm Reduction, a nonprofit organization that, as its website explains, “works with folks who use drugs and the people who care about them to ensure access to health, community and advocacy.” (Though no longer director, Bryce still provides grant-writing and other assistance. You can never fully walk away from this work, she says.)
Rising to the occasion is what Holler does each day.
“Within hours into it,” says Kimberly Treadaway, Holler’s organizational director, “people were, like, ‘Okay; phones aren’t working. Wi Fi isn’t coming back. We can stop waiting for that.’”
Holler was uniquely positioned to “amp it up,” Treadaway attests. Mutual aid is in its DNA.
‘Inherently Worthy of Care’
When Holler Harm Reduction settled on “Hell or high water, we come when you holler” as a slogan, little could they know.
Unlike Bryce, Kerry Nolan saw downtown go under. Nolan, a Holler outreach specialist, lives on a hill overlooking town. “It was crazy,” she says. Watching the floodwater inch ever higher, her reaction was, “What the f**k?”
Helene’s waters peaked that Friday evening at 27 feet, breaking by some four feet the high-water mark of the historic 1916 flood (“the flood to end all floods”). The Marshall Depot floated down Main Street. Damage across the region is estimated at some $50 billion. One hundred and seven North Carolinians lost their lives.
Relief efforts quickly took shape. Holler partnered with Rural Organizing and Resilience, or ROAR, which offers support and services throughout the community under the banner of “Y’all Means All.” On the Monday after the storm, 40 or so people arrived to pitch in.
“It wasn’t something where we had to figure out, ‘What could this look like,’” Treadaway says. “It was, like, ‘Okay, how do we beef up what we’re already doing – and how do we do it without telephones?’”
Soon, folks from throughout the community were gravitating to Holler, not knowing, but guessing, that people would be there and ready to assist. They knew it was a safe place, one that would provide what it could and help connect to what it couldn’t.
Harm reduction is founded on a set of evidence-based strategies for reducing the negative consequences of drug use to keep people alive and as healthy as possible. As the National Harm Reduction Coalition describes it, harm reduction incorporates a spectrum of strategies that include safer use, managed use, and abstinence, “addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.”
In addition to providing sterile syringes in exchange for used ones, Holler offers naloxone, fentanyl test strips, condoms, vitamin C, Band-Aids, and much more. It also provides referrals to other services.
Harm reduction is guided, Treadaway says, “by a fundamental belief that people are inherently worthy of care.”
Holler was well poised for what their participants and the broader community now faced, in large measure because, Bryce says, “We have to be adaptable in every possible way. Fentanyl comes on the scene: You have to learn how to manage a much stronger opioid than you were used to. Xylazine comes on the scene: You have to figure out how to deal with this.”
Effectively practicing harm reduction, she says, means “constantly reassessing the needs.”
In those first days, Nolan says, it was a simple matter of asking, “What do you need right now? How can I help you?”
Kerry Nolan, a Holler outreach specialist, said the organization’s focus expanded from harm reduction to all sorts of survival supplies in the weeks following Hurricane Helene. (Photo by Taylor Sisk / The Daily Yonder)
“People would be, like, ‘I need hay for my animals,’” Bryce says. It had not previously occurred to her that as a harm reduction specialist, she’d be asked if she had a hay hookup. “But then we did have a hay hookup.”
Supplies for the community at large were offered a few doors down from Holler’s offices. Bayla Ostrach, a medical anthropologist who provides Holler with evaluation support and technical assistance, says there was concern that Holler participants might feel intimidated by arriving to pick up supplies for safe-drug consumption “when there’s suddenly a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and a lot going on.”
An effort was made to keep the two distribution points distinct. Over time, that distinction faded, and Holler’s participants incrementally grew more comfortable availing themselves of the full range of what was offered.
“People would be super shy and super deferential,” Ostrach says, “this very Appalachian thing of, like, ‘Oh, no; I’m good. I don’t need anything else.’” It took some urging: “‘Get you some food. Get you some socks. Get you a sleeping bag.’”
Folks would arrive to exchange syringes and leave with a sack of food for the neighbors.
On the flip side, Bryce recalls an elderly couple who came in every day to help distribute supplies. After a week or so, in addition to loading up canned goods or animal feed, they were also venturing out with naloxone.
Finding Community
The day of the storm, when Angela Sams lost power, “It was just me and my two little dogs at my house, and it freaked me out so bad when it got pitch black dark.” She headed for Holler, and slept there the next three nights. Sams is Holler’s drop-in manager. When people began arriving, with donations or in need, there she was.
When Sams first walked through Holler’s doors, a couple of years prior, it was with considerable trepidation. “I thought these people were the police,” she says. “It took me a while to warm up to them.”
She was suffering then with what Bryce recalls was a “crazy abscess” on her leg and had been unable to receive proper care. “The doctors around here just looked at me like I had some sort of disease or something. I couldn’t even get antibiotics for it.”
She came to Holler to ask for a heat pack. The Holler team arranged to have a nurse examine her wound and asked that she check back in every few days.
“I came down here, like, twice a week for about six or eight weeks, and they cleaned my wound and got my leg better, and we ate dinner and hung out. I got to know these people.”
Treadaway likewise found her community through this work.
“I really didn’t believe in or know good people who would show up for me until I got involved in harm reduction,” she says. “I was not used to friends checking on me.” She was unaccustomed to having someone volunteer “to sleep on my couch when I was afraid of an ex. I was used to facing things on my own.”
Bayla Ostrach, a medical anthropologist who works with Holler, said the organization has given him a sense of belonging in Marshall. “I feel more a part of this place where I live.” (Photo by Taylor Sisk / The Daily Yonder)
“We’ve got this whole crew of people out here who don’t just do harm reduction work together,” Ostrach says. “We’re friends and we’re family, we spend holidays together, and we take care of each other.”
Now, having lived through this experience, “I just feel more connected to the community; I feel more connected beyond just the folks I work with immediately at Holler,” Ostrach says. “That feels good. I feel more a part of this place where I live.”
From the Heart
There’s a stereotype ascribed to folks in these mountains – this “Appalachian thing” Ostrach alluded to: that they’re religiously self-reliant, averse to asking for help.
To that, Ostrach says, “Well, of course people are going to be mistrustful and only want to rely on themselves when any time outsiders have come in it’s been to extract and exploit, right?”
The essence of harm reduction, Treadaway says, is “no-strings-attached, coming-from-the-heart” support absent a “power dynamic of the helper and the helped.”
Marshall is rebuilding, downtown businesses are reopening. A community is now more securely bound through mutual reliance.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/come-hell-or-high-water-a-harm-reduction-team-amps-it-up-in-response-to-a-disaster/2025/06/19/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
