2025 PIC - Serving deeply in Asheville, North Carolina

Video Transcript

Asheville and the surrounding communities is very resilient.

They also have a can-do attitude, but I think I would want people to understand that, you know, the devastation that happened here was unique. The way the floods hit mountains is something that I never really understood.

I mean, gosh, Joe was just, Joe was a workhorse. He was out with a four-wheeler going up mountains, taking supplies. People needed supplies. We had no power. Water, communication. Phone systems were down. Some most of the way you get to people were either with all-terrain vehicles or by foot. We had truckloads and truckloads coming up. Specifically, a group that I work with is 'racing for ALS' brought a 36ft trailer up to, a place here locally, I helped coordinate. 

That 36ft trailer turned into two more trailers, that turned into a major distribution operation. We found out people had needs - we would load them up and hoof them one way or another, up the side of these mountains to these people. 

We had so many people displaced - Kelly Floyd and her husband were helping feed the community right away.

My husband is the general manager here. The hotel turned into a food distribution site, a shelter, kind of a hub for anybody who needed anything. They started cooking and they started feeding the people that were staying here.

What started as feeding eight people here at the hotel turned into feeding the town. We did breakfast, lunch and dinner. We'd never stopped from the first ten days after the storm. There was between 15 and 20,000 meals.

James Messer, one of our BOAs, was helping, and these are unlikely heroes, you know, they just happened to be in a position where they could help, and they just stepped-up and started helping.

I came to work that Monday and everything else took off. I started figuring out what I wanted to do because I had to fight my way to the office through trees, roads closed, cars abandoned, and then a helicopter landed.

It seemed like an interesting way to start the day, so I ran over to see what it was, and it turns out it was World Central Kitchen getting ready to ramp-up to start cooking as many meals as I could every day.

So, we got together with a lot of our connections and figured out how to get a whole kitchen set up outside. We ended up putting out 800,000 meals by the time that I left. I think a lot of these people, they didn't wake up that morning with a goal of like, today, I'm going to be a hero.

Today I'm going to go out and really, you know, make a massive impact. I don't think they woke up that way. It's just kind of in their DNA. Edward Jones Associates, Edward Jones Financial Advisors I mean, I think we hire people that want to help and want to make an impact.