Left: a load of books headed for far western Kentucky from our Books for Kids Project. Right: destroyed homes in the aftermath of the Memorial Day tornado in 2024.
Left: ARCH Coaltion CEO manning a forklift at the supply hub. Right: Volunteers helping to run the supply hub.
The ARCH Community Health Coalition is, first and foremost, a community resource. While we mostly work on the larger, systemic issues facing our communities, we also do what we can, when we can to be there when help is needed.
On December 11, 2021, western Kentucky, including much of the ARCH Coalition service area, was hit by a massive and very powerful tornado that ripped through 14 counties, killing over 50 people and leaving a trail of devastated communities behind it.
The ARCH Coalition offered whatever assistance we could provide to help with the recovery and rebuilding. We helped by working with the central supply hub that we set up to manage material donations in the immediate aftermath of the storm. We provided two of our Community Health Workers to work as case managers with relief agencies to help individuals and families impacted by the storm to access desperately-needed resources. Our CHWs continued to work with some of the storm survivors for months afterward. We also helped write some grants with our local United Way to fund construction of a storage facility to store building materials, appliances, furniture and other materials for the rebuilding and to expand and improve food storage and distribution capacity for our local food banks.
We initiated our "Books for Kids" project to help provide age-appropriate books to kids throughout the impacted area to help them deal with their ongoing mental health issues. Anxiety, fear, uncertainty, emotional fragility and depression, among other things, are always challenging our kids, and this project was meant to help with that. The response to the project was so strong that we are going to try to keep the project going in the future, if we can find the funding for it.
Parts of our region were hit again by a tornado on Memorial Day weekend, 2024. Some of the very same communities got hit again. There was one house that had just been rebuilt after the 2021 tornado that was destroyed by the 2024 one. Again, the ARCH Coalition offered our help in the recovery, helping to conduct the survey of the damaged areas and direct people to support services.