The day before Hurricane Helene blew into Western North Carolina, Jeneal Hensley, a licensed family child care provider, was taking care of five children in her Swannanoa home. She’d been in business as The Little People’s Place in her house by the river for more than a decade and had cared for dozens of the town’s preschool-age children, along with some of her own grandchildren. Hensley loved her child care routine, but that ordinary Thursday would turn out to be the last normal day she remembers.
Before dawn the next morning, her daughter who lived nearby called to urgently insist: “leave now.” The river was rising, and residents were evacuating. Jeneal and her husband drove out through nearly a foot of water, abandoning her home, belongings, a life-time of photographs, and her livelihood to a merciless flood that would take it all. “I was in a state of shock,” she says. “I made the comment, ‘oh, I guess it’s gonna take a couple of months to clean this up. My husband put his arm around me and he said, ‘Try a year.’ I thought, ‘No way I will be out of business for a year,’ but it was actually more than 500 days.”
During that time while Hensley floundered, trying to sustain her own family while living in space donated by her church, filing for unemployment, and dealing with insurance agents and contractors who first gutted and then rebuilt her house from the ground up, the families who counted on Jeneal also faltered. Many child care programs were closed for weeks. Some parents also lost jobs to the storm or had damage to their own homes. Others were displaced and eventually moved their kids to other child care settings. Of the five she’d cared for before the storm, only one returned. “He was here the first day I reopened,” said Hensley. “Couldn’t wait to get back.”
For Hensley and her community, the return to normal after the disaster took much longer than anyone thought it would. Her recovery, and the survival of the entire early child care ecosystem that working families across the region depend on, relied heavily on local agencies, organizations, and individuals who gave money, resources, and time to sustain these small businesses.
A new documentary, created by Home Grown and a recent report from The Dogwood Health Trust which funds regional non-profits that support child care providers, provides a playbook for other communities where disaster may strike next.
Both stress what child care providers and families themselves have reported: Established relationships with the grassroots groups whose daily work is helping families are the lifeline for immediate response after a disaster and the nucleus where long-term recovery begins.
“Climate events lay bare the fragility that already exists,” in the child care ecosystem, says Joe Waters, the co-founder and CEO of Capita, a think tank that researches and recommends policies to support family health.
In Western North Carolina, like many rural areas, child care needs, especially for infants and toddlers, are often met by home-based child care providers–some operating licensed family child care homes and unregistered providers caring for the kids of family, friends, or neighbors (FFN’s). While many families prefer home-based care and depend on these providers in order to work, profit margins for licensed family child care homes are extremely slim and many struggled to stay afloat even before Hurricane Helene.
In Buncombe County, the bull’s eye for Helene damage, for example, only 7% of infants and toddlers were enrolled in licensed child care (including centers) in 2025, according to a report from the Buncombe County Partnership for Children. A recent survey of parents in the county backs up the truism that working parents often leave the workforce if they are unable to afford child care. Others lean into a patchwork of part-time care provided by family, friends, neighbors, or nannies, often scheduled around a revolving door of shift work: one parent working, while the other cares for the kids, neither one getting much sleep.
After Helene, while the Buncombe County Partnership for Children “was instrumental in getting early childhood providers linked up with FEMA and the National Guard” according to assistant director Caroline Rodier, there were hiccups for family child care homes because they aren’t “non-profit” or “public.” Those on the city water line didn’t have running, potable water for several weeks. In the interim, they had to submit a re-opening plan that ensured they had clean water and hygienic procedures for making formula, washing hands, changing diapers, and toileting. Those plans had to be approved by the county health department, which further delayed reopening. “In the end the agencies agreed to help all centers and home-based programs because they felt it was a public good” but the policy debates between agencies and absent or conflicting guidance frustrated care givers who just wanted to open their doors and take care of families.
Now, organizations and governments at the local and state level are culling the lessons learned from Helene to better prepare for the next emergency. The North Carolina Child Care Health and Safety Resource Center established guidance for agencies and organizations that support child care providers to prepare for the immediate aftermath of a disaster event. A Hurricane Helene State Child Care Task Force, headed by the North Carolina Partnership for Children, has generated a list of questions to ask following an emergency. But using these tools requires coordinated communication between state agencies and individual providers, including familiarity with the state’s disaster plan.
Eric Ager, state representative for North Carolina, and the patriarch of a fifth generation family farm in Western North Carolina, agrees. “We have not done enough at the state or at the federal level to understand how important [child care] is. . . . We’ve got to shift our thinking so that child care is infrastructure . . . not to see it as money we’re throwing at a problem, but to see it as an investment in our economy.”
Toward that end, Waters recommends a systems-level approach that improves the conditions for families with young children generally. For Western North Carolina and other rural regions, that means fully and specifically including home-based child care providers–both licensed and unregistered–who are caring for the majority of children.
“Home-based child care providers are resilient and motivated to help families and their communities,” said Waters. “I spoke with one provider who had lost the roof on her house, but she was eager to reopen because she had children in her care whose parents were EMTs, whose parents were in construction, whose parents were linemen with the internet company, and she had to open so that her community could rebound.”
Emergency workers like these often work nontraditional hours when most child care centers are closed. Home-based programs like Mama Freda’s Tiny Tots, operated by Arikco Watkins, are licensed for second shift and even overnight care. “My second shift families, they work in a factory,” said Watkins. “I have a nurse who works 12 hour shifts, sometimes from 6 in the evening till 6 in the morning.”
Another thing that local and state officials agree on is “the importance of community-driven responses, neighbors taking care of and looking out for one another,” said Rachael Sawyer, Buncombe County’s Director of Strategic Partnerships. “Certainly in the post-Helene days and weeks, when communication was limited and transportation from one place to another geographically was limited, it was those grassroots endeavors that helped people take care of each other and their kids.”
For home-based providers across Western North Carolina, mutual aid came from the Family Child Care Center and Enrichment Foundation (FCCEF), headquartered in Charlotte, a peer-led network of home-based child care providers that leads with both hearts and hands. Leaders at FCCEF already knew most of the family child care homes in the region and they recognized that what providers and families need most in the first days after disaster strikes is fast, flexible, cash.
After Helene, providers and families lost power, internet, phone service, even access to clean water. ATM machines were down. Roads were impassable. Gas stations that had gas couldn’t take credit cards. In that situation, cash was essential for purchasing groceries, gas, and other basic necessities.
The day after the storm, Alissa Rhodes, who had recently closed her own family child care home in Swannanoa to be the Foundation’s secretary and director of communications evacuated her own family to stay with her sister in Maryland. The next day, she started reaching out to check up on home-based providers in seven counties across the region to find out what they needed. The answer in many cases was simply cash.
She and president Antoinette Savage then contacted Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders that advocates for home-based care givers, which had an already established model for direct cash assistance to family child care providers. Thus was born the Home-Based Child Care Emergency Fund for Severe Weather and National Disaster Response, which provided grants of $800 to $1500 to 89 caregivers across the region.
“Not having strings attached to the Home Grown funds was spectacular. . . they gave funds very quickly. You didn’t have to get an estimate and then send that in and then or get it done first and then get reimbursed. You tell them what you needed, and then they just showed up with what you needed or gave you what you needed,” said Kanika Fox, who’s been running a child care business out of her rural Hendersonville home for 28 years.
Rhodes and Savage also provided critical emotional support, directing providers to other community resources and connecting them to other providers in similar situations through online gatherings and old-fashioned phone trees.
“Understanding that you’re not going through this alone, that there are caring community members and organizations, and having a local organization that can help you navigate the complex systems of disaster response” is really critical, according to Natalie Renew, Home Grown’s executive director. Home Grown’s Emergency Fund also supported home-based care givers in the disaster zone following wild fires in Los Angeles, California.
Renew argues that especially in rural areas where large child care centers are often inaccessible and unaffordable, investing in home-based child care is investing in essential infrastructure–as part of emergency response to a natural disaster and as preparation for future disasters.
“Home-based providers deserve to be elevated and invested in during these times of crisis, because they’re not just standing back up their own business, they are essential infrastructure that shows up for children, for families, and for other care providers when they need it,” Renew said. “
“They are highly motivated to resume childcare services so that families can get back to work, to ensure that essential workers have child care overnight or early morning. And we are all better for that resilience and commitment and leadership on good days, and especially on bad days when disaster strikes.”
The post Childcare Is Key to Disaster Resilience appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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