Supporting Our Resilience After Hurricane Helene

As many of you have seen in the news and on social media, Hurricane Helene decimated Western North Carolina with record breaking flooding and destruction. So many people have lost everything including homes and businesses while others need help keeping businesses alive and people employed while infrastructure is restored.

Some of you may be aware that my studio (Casey Johnson Studio) and team is based in Black Mountain, North Carolina. You may have also seen my plea on Instagram to help evacuate my family with two small children. After we realized the extent of the damage to our towns and saw that our mountain roads in and out of our community were washed away, it left us stranded with no power and no access to food or water. So many of you, family, friends, fellow craft people and designers along with complete strangers came to our aid and helped spread the word about our family and neighbors’ situation. We were able to safely evacuate our home and send aid back to rescue our elderly neighbors and coordinate multiple supply drops to keep our neighbors safe and healthy. Thank you deeply for helping us find a way out and giving us hope while we navigated the initial impact from this devastation. There are so many others still in our situation who need help. Support has started to show up, but more is needed.

Now that my family and neighbors are safe, my focus has been on making sure my team at the studio is safe, stable and taken care of. Some of us are displaced from our homes and need temporary housing, some are without basic utilities, some are focusing efforts on supply runs while we are all just trying to make it day-by-day.

Our studio weathered the storm and has no significant damage to our building and for that, I am beyond grateful. Our struggle is going to be getting operations back and up running so that I can complete projects and pay my team. The water source to our town is severely damaged, roadways destroyed, and people are left with little access to bare human essentials, so it is important to my to keep as many people employed in this area as possible so that we can continue to help those who have lost everything and be a strength in the community. I not only employ my immediate team here at the shop, we also work with other fabrication companies and craftspeople in our area providing work for them as well. There are several of our vendors who have lost entire facilities and who will need places to fabricate and or places of employment, and it’s important that we remain a place of strength to offer help where we can.

I am asking for your help to keep our payroll running while our town's infrastructure is repaired and, in turn, allow us to get back to the projects we have committed to produce without losing employees. We are strong and resilient and are even now making efforts to do what we can to create a functional working environment; however, this is going to take time and resources. In addition to help in supporting our payroll during this time, I am hoping to have the funds to help give other woodworkers and craftspeople a place to work to get back on their feet. Since I am currently operating at my capacity, I am hoping any additional funds can be used to support additional payroll to give displaced craftspeople a place to work while they rebuild.

Please consider giving what you are able to keep our studio thriving and a place of refuge for my team and other woodworkers, makers, and craftspeople who have found themselves in need.