was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of . .

When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight.

Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They later moved into an Airbnb, where they stayed for nearly a year. The months after the storm were a blur, she said — lots of phone calls with insurance and hands-on work to fix their home, and all of that while scrambling to care for the boys, who were two and five at the time.

“We needed time to be childfree so we could work. We needed to be bringing money in so we could have our house back in order,” Crabtree, who works as a therapist, said. “The limited child care was really making it challenging. It was limiting my ability to see clients.”

So she got in contact with Silke Knebel.

A single mom, Knebel founded the National Emergency Child Care Network a few months earlier to help other mothers who might need child care in an emergency. What constitutes an emergency is broadly defined in Knebel’s mind: It could be a disaster like Helene, It could be snowstorms, like the one that brought massive damage to a big slice of the northeast, or just the need for a few hours to recharge after a particularly stressful day.

In the last decade, weather and climate-related disasters have caused damages worth over $200 billion and affected the availability of child care in the long and short term. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 damaged over 650 child care centers, permanently closing 52 facilities. The Maui wildfire in 2023 destroyed four of the nine child care programs that were available in the city of Lahaina. Last year, the Los Angeles wildfires affected over 500 child care providers, with Altadena losing 60% of its child care centers in the tragedy.

Knebel’s desire to help others when a disaster strikes comes from her own experience as a single mom. In kindergarten, her eldest son was diagnosed with a mental health condition known as “conduct disorder,” which manifests as aggressive and behavioral issues.It soaked up a lot of Knebel’s emotional and physical energy. “I feel for other moms, because I had weekends where I cried all day and I needed that five or six hours of [care] from just somebody showing up at my door,” she said.

Her nonprofit is designed to do exactly that — deploy to families in a crisis. The organization is staffed by volunteers who have undergone extensive background checks and are trained in trauma-informed care — “We don’t bring on 16-year-old Care.com babysitters,” Knebel said. The volunteers are typically deployed in pairs to families in need, at no cost.  Many of them are retired teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and mothers and grandmothers who simply want to help.

For Crabtree, they were a godsend. “The kids loved the people who came out and played with them,” she said. They would show up and have different games and toys and animal crackers and the kids were just so excited.”

In the weeks and months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel connected over 50 families like Crabtree’s with child care volunteers. One mother had a sick and disabled husband at home  and when the storm hit, she was left to figure out how to do basic things like find water while taking care of her children and partner. Another, a mother of four, was worried that if she didn’t return to work soon, she wouldn’t be able to pay rent, but her child care center had been closed due to the storm. Then there was the family whose nanny’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Sometimes, the mothers who called — the callers were almost always moms —  were just exhausted or in desperate need of a few hours away from their kids to sort through the piles of paperwork, to call insurance adjustors, to figure out how to rebuild.

The first person to call Knebel’s child care emergency hotline was, however, the manager of a local bank. One of his employees was struggling to find child care weeks after the storm. Employers “try to be accommodating and compassionate,” she said. “But after a while, they’re like, ‘Okay, you need to come to work.’ And that’s when the real burden and stress hits families, because the child care is still not open.”

And it wasn’t the only employer she helped out. United Way of Asheville, an organization that provides disaster relief, requested volunteers to staff a pop-up child care for their employees. Also, an area school requested help for 40 teachers who all needed care for their own kids.

At the same time that parents were struggling to find care, some 148 child care centers and home-based providers had been damaged by Helene — and no one knew how or when they would reopen.

The barriers to getting child care back up and running after a disaster are immense, says Susan Butler-Staub, a senior vice president at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization. “One of the biggest issues is finding a suitable environment,” she said. “If you’re a home-based provider and your home has been flooded or your home is gone, then can you find a temporary place that meets regulation?”

If a provider is able to stay in their location, there’s usually a long list of issues they have to deal with first. “With a flood, you’re going to be dealing with mold in the walls,” she said. In western North Carolina, where Helene hit, “they are still dealing with water quality issues, so you have to filter the water before you can give it to children.”

But even when facilities recover, paying for child care can become too much for families. Crabtree, who utilized child care volunteers mostly to assist while she rebuilt her house, said she could only afford to pay for child care when her extended family helped cover the cost.

A few months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel was faced with another call to action: Catastrophic wildfires were sweeping through Los Angeles and families would need help in the aftermath

Knebel’s organization promptly recruited and trained around 70 volunteers and connected with mothers like Briana Pozner, who had a 2-year-old and went into early labor with twins after the fires. While Pozner’s house wasn’t destroyed by the fire, it was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, forcing the family to move out for a few months.

Pozner and her family had already been preparing for how life would change with twins before the fires struck. She had recently enrolled her son in preschool — but then the preschool burned down. “It was like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to get stability and figure out our son’s school.”

In Los Angeles, the impact of the wildfires on child care was devastating. Cindy Esquivel, program manager at the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that provided small grants to child care providers recovering from the wildfires, said that many home-based providers were still struggling to reopen. In some cases, they lost their homes and their businesses in one fell swoop.

Finding the money for them to rebuild has been difficult. Of the 136 grantees that Esquivel surveyed after the disaster, 40% did not have insurance. Many home-based providers also rent their homes and in the aftermath, rents skyrocketed in the region, making it difficult to find a suitable and affordable location.

Private child care providers do not qualify for FEMA funding. They can apply to the Small Business Administration for low- interest loans, but the process for approval is long and bureaucratic. Instead, a lot of funding comes from foundations and grant-making organizations. States have also chipped in, but the amount available varies by state and is usually a drop in the bucket compared to need, say experts. It’s an industry that, in the best of times, is already underfunded and operating at capacity.

A friend who had been volunteering with Knebel’s organization suggested that Pozner reach out and ask for assistance. Once the family was able to return home, “We had to get the whole house back in order with these little babies that I was breastfeeding,” she said. The volunteers watched her newborns while Pozner and her husband unpacked and organized.

Her son’s preschool eventually reopened, but it is now in its third location. Similar to North Carolina, it has been challenging for child care facilities and schools to find new homes.

Knebel is only set up to offer help in California and North Carolina because that’s where she has volunteers. She plans to expand to other disaster prone states like Florida and Texas but needs to raise more funding to make that a reality. In the meantime, however, she gets calls from all over the country, for women experiencing all sorts of challenges. A few weeks ago, she heard from a woman in a domestic violence shelter who needed someone to watch her two children for a few hours. She has also fielded several calls from women at hospitals who need someone to watch their kids while they undergo surgery. Once, a grandmother whose daughter had just been incarcerated called, in need of someone to help watch her grandkids.

Knebel wishes she could help everyone. “It isn’t really just disasters. It’s school shootings, divorces, it’s a medical crisis, just experiencing a car accident,” she said.

Lately, she’s wondered how she can tap into the network of volunteers her organization trained in Los Angeles to help families who are afraid to send their kids to school because of ICE raids. In the last few days, she’s been emailing volunteers about the potential need for deployments if child care and schools closed in North Carolina, one of the states hit hard by the weekend’s winter storm.

“We just want to be there when children and parents need us,” she said. “Especially now, when things are getting so doom and gloom.”

Running Brushy Middle School near Austin, Texas, had clubs about Star Wars, Pokemon and anime, but 12- and 13-year-olds wouldn’t be interested in serious topics like networking, they said.

“There was no real indicator that it could actually survive in the school as an actual functioning club,” Arjun said. “We didn’t even have that many teacher sponsors because, at first, the idea was hard to push. But at one point, I actually got to secure a meeting with the principal of my school … he gave us a lot of opportunities to grow.”

After Arjun presented his club idea to his seventh-grade class in September 2023, students became interested in networking with business leaders, building skills through competitions and connecting virtually with peers across the U.S. When Arjun’s family moved a month later and he transitioned to homeschooling, he registered the club as a nonprofit that has since engaged more than 4,000 students around the world.

The organization, , is based on the Arabic word taleem, which means “education.” It also stands for Arjun’s interests of technology, leadership, entrepreneurship, engineering and mathematics. 

, now 13, grew up wanting to create his own business to help better the world, but his age was always a barrier when trying to find networking opportunities. His family was low-income and couldn’t afford to send him to events like South by Southwest, a conference in Austin that attracts professionals in tech, music, education and media. Online resources like LinkedIn require users to be at least 16 years old.

“Oftentimes I hear older people calling us [kids] creative, right? If we’re called creative, why can’t we use that creativity to solve some of the world’s biggest problems?” he asked. “Unfortunately, there are barriers for K-12 [students] to network.”

Today, Tleem has 37 chapters in 11 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, India, Indonesia, Morocco and Pakistan. Some meet in person, while others are hybrid or virtual. 

Students can apply to create a club or have an existing club become a local chapter. Tleem student volunteers help chapters boost membership, host speakers, participate in competitions and network with business leaders. The nonprofit also connects chapters with each other.

Tleem will challenge club members to reach specific networking goals such as cold emailing or meeting a certain number of people. Arjun said one of the most popular competitions Tleem helps chapters with are hackathons, which are local contests that challenge student teams to build coding projects within a short timeframe. 

Pavan Kumar, a 17-year-old who attends Granite Bay High School near Sacramento, California, recently helped one Texas chapter secure company sponsors to fund a hackathon as part of Tleem’s chapter committee. The group consists of chapter presidents across the U.S. that help other Tleem clubs accomplish networking goals.

As president of his school’s College and Career Club, Pavan applied to Tleem last summer to boost student networking opportunities and resources. 

Tleem helped Pavan with a marketing campaign that doubled club membership from 80 to 160 students in five months. Tleem volunteers also schedule virtual guest speakers at the club’s biweekly meetings, like staff at UC Santa Barbara who give admissions advice. 

“The main thing about our College and Career Club is to help students progress in high school, and what I personally believe really helps is getting those connections,” Pavan said. “I think networking is the most valuable asset any student can have — if you have the right network in high school, elementary, even middle school, that is going to propel your experience in whatever grade you are.”

Education experts and researchers estimate are obtained through personal connections, while exposure to working adults and strong youth-adult relationships influences student career aspirations and . 

Ariv Sahoo, a 17-year-old from Dougherty Valley High School east of Oakland, California, said his Mobile Application Development Club has connected with entrepreneurs and tech founders by participating in Tleem. Members have even found internships and mentorships by networking with guest speakers the nonprofit has helped book, such as Datta Junnarkar, a chief information officer for Boeing.

“When students wait until they’re upperclassmen to start networking, they often miss out on internships, mentorships or leadership roles that require prior experience or connections,” Ariv said. “Networking through Tleem gave me direct access to professionals in tech, business and nonprofit leadership — people I would’ve never met otherwise.”

Arjun said he hopes Tleem can increase its membership to 10,000 students by the end of the year. The nonprofit recently partnered with Walmart to provide microgrants of $25 to $100 to student-led projects in Austin, Texas.

“As a child, you still have that potential to explore, and that’s one of the best times to network,” Arjun said. “Getting to know about other people, getting to learn your passion, what you truly want to do, is something really powerful.”

Amber Govan often can be found inside an unassuming building off 12th Street in Little Rock working with students during after-school programs or consulting federal agencies on community violence intervention through her nonprofit, Carter’s Crew.

helps teens in Central Arkansas who have been in the justice system or live in crime-heavy neighborhoods; it stems from Govan’s personal experience of being considered “at-risk” in her own life.

With $200,000 in settlement funds from the , the nonprofit will add opioid prevention education to its repertoire.

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“We want to be a one-stop shop for everything that families need, as much as possible,” Govan said. “Part of our process is that families, not just the teens but the whole family, go through an intake [process] and identify areas they need assistance with. Substance abuse is a major one, right behind mental health.”

More than 108,000 people in the United States died of a drug overdose in 2023, according to preliminary data from the . The same data shows Arkansas had 572 drug overdose deaths in 2023, though the figure could change as the data is finalized.

Carter’s Crew will use the settlement funds to hire a peer recovery specialist, substance abuse educator and a case manager tasked with mitigating risk factors for misuse among teens. Staff will manage a program that will run four 12-week sessions annually, followed by nine months of follow-up for each participant, Govan said.

The program mimics a 12-step program and participants will be referred for outside assistance, such as inpatient services or medication management, when necessary, Govan said.

The settlement funds will also help staff develop an online opioid prevention curriculum, which Govan said will be the first of its kind in Arkansas for the demographic.

Content will include 30-minute videos led by other young people and quizzes to test participants’  knowledge along the way. They will receive certificates upon completion, and Govan said she’s currently working to have court judges accept them as part of the conditions for teens who are completing substance abuse programs.

The program is similar to one used for medical professionals at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Govan said.

Along with creating new programs, Govan also hopes the funding will help break down a stigma among different communities.

“In the Black community, people are afraid to bring up the topic of, ‘I’m struggling with being addicted to prescription pills,’ or whatever it may be,” Govan said. “For us…we want families to understand that there are more people out there who are like you, who need this assistance as well. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just something we need to provide services for.”

Breaking down that stigma will hopefully help people feel more comfortable self identifying and letting any agency or healthcare provider know they need help, Govan said.

Available funding

The funding for Carter’s Crew is part of $26 billion in opioid settlement funds to be distributed nationwide. Of that total, Arkansas is set to receive $216 million over 18 years.

The Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership was created in 2022 using city and county settlement funds. The initiative works to distribute funds to projects aimed at abating the opioid epidemic through prevention, treatment and recovery.

Kirk Lane, director of the initiative, said staff look for several features of a project when considering funding, including heart, innovation, location and prevention efforts. For Carter’s Crew, Lane said he was intrigued by the nonprofit receiving referrals from the juvenile courts.

“We look for the heart first,” he said. “If people are looking at the money as money, that’s not the direction we’re wanting to go.”

Every Arkansas county has at least one active program funded by the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership, according . The announcement from Carter’s Crew increased the funded projects in Pulaski County to nine, joining the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office, the Crisis Stabilization Unit at UAMS, the Natural State Recovery Center and others.

“[Carter’s Crew] was one of the ones that we weeded through,” Lane said. “They were providing something different that the state was doing, was in a county that had a tremendous overdose situation and it was empowering young people that came from strong problem areas.”

Meeting the needs in every Arkansas county is one of Lane’s goals, and he said funding a project in a county that has fewer active programs may be prioritized if it has met the requirements.

Funding opportunities are ongoing, and the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership doesn’t have a deadline for organizations to submit applications. Funding proposals must follow a list of , including evidence-based strategies to abate the opioid epidemic and signatures from the county judge and mayor where the program will take place.

Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde and Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. pledged their support for Carter’s Crew.

After an organization has been awarded funding, the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership conducts regular check-ins over the course of five years to ensure the goals are being met. The initiative collects quarterly data specific to the milestones of each program and completes an annual review.

If money was distributed to an organization and not used toward abating the opioid crisis, that amount is returned to the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership. So far, approximately $1 million has been returned, Lane said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

The report by , an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young job seekers, revealing that not all networks are the same. 

It’s particularly crucial to have a network that includes senior professionals, said Sheila Sarem, Basta’s founder. These people unlock resources for first-generation job seekers, like getting a referral or bypassing the typical application. A candidate with a referral was four times more likely to be hired, according to the report.

“The importance of peer and near-peer networks — those networks do matter for a ton for different reasons … [but] the best and fastest and most effective way to [get a job quickly] is to have senior professionals in your network and in your corner,” Sarem said.

First-generation, low-income and underrepresented students have limited access to this type of high-impact social capital, according to the nonpartisan think tank .

“Young people from the top socioeconomic quartile report nearly double the rate of non-family adults accessible to them compared to young people from the bottom quartile,” says a July 2020 institute report. “This gap should be troubling to anyone trying to support students’ success not only in school, but also in accessing high-quality jobs down the line.”

Another major takeaway from the Basta report: Exposure to a broad array of careers counts heavily when trying to land a job, seemingly more important “than just about every other factor we can isolate, including GPA, college major, and having had prior internships.”

The report’s findings were gathered through a career navigation survey software that Basta created in 2020, . More than 10,000 people have used the tool to learn about their strengths, career goals and job search strategies. The majority of Seekr participants are first-generation college students.

Specifically for the report, the data was collected from 3,195 young adults between July 2020 and December 2021. Some 57% were low-income Pell Grant recipients, 62% were first-generation college students, 17% were Black, 21% were Latino, 12% were East Asian or Asian American, 12% were South Asian or Indian American and 6% white. The respondents leaned slightly female — 51% versus 46% who identified as male.

Basta found that most survey participants had a network consisting of personal connections — neighbors, family and friends — and this group asked for career help less often.

Participants with more professional connections asked for help the most, but the ones who sought help most often and converted that assist most successfully were those whose professional networks included senior professionals — professors, managers, mentors. 

Sarem said these findings, plus other Seekr results, help institutions become smarter about how they serve various populations, like first-generation students, and professionals and investors learn more about elevating these critical networks for young people.

Created in 2016, Basta has served more than 9,000 young people and had $3.9 million in annual revenue, according to its most recent 2021 .

“If we believe first-generation college students have everything it takes to succeed in the world of work and we really believe that employers do want to hire across lines of difference, then what’s the problem?” Sarem said. “We built our program model to create some connective tissue across those two audiences.”

A 2023 Center for First-Generation Student Success found that even after earning their bachelor’s degree, first-generation college graduates were less likely to land a job that required it than their peers. One year after getting their bachelor’s in the 2015-16 academic year, 44% of first-generation college graduates had a job that called for the degree versus 52% of graduates who were not the first in their family to finish college.

Basta also offers a free, four- to six-month fellowship program that includes career education and coaching in preparation for a student’s first job out of college. Roughly 81% of fellows secure full-time jobs with an average salary of $62,700, according to Basta. 

Hadler Raymond entered the Basta fellowship in 2020 while attending New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He credits the fellowship for him landing a job at Bloomberg after his 2021 graduation.

Raymond said he would meet with a career success manager once a week to craft resumes and learn transferable skills for future jobs.

“Basta fosters a very strong community,” he said. “Everyone being first-generation is something that helps with that, because everyone could relate to that struggle of having to figure things out by yourself, because your parents can’t necessarily help you with it. The Basta community itself was the perfect network.”

The report, Sachem says, affirms how important social capital is while adding nuance and understanding to what it looks like in practice for first-generation students like Raymond.

“I think over the last four years, there’s just been questions about, like, ‘What does this mean? Do we keep investing in this?’ ” she said. “Well, this is a really important moment to show exactly how critically important the social capital concepts are, when we’re trying to drive economic mobility, which is what education is really designed for — to create more opportunity for more people.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children provide financial support to Basta and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.