From a Small Group to a Growing Movement:
Our Story
When Hurricane Helene made landfall in September 2024, R4 didn’t start as an organization, it started as a parking lot and a hand-written sign. Jessica Maness began mobilizing relief on the ground, and within days connected with Samuel Foster and Corryn Goldschmidt, who were doing similar work through a shared Google Doc called the WNC Needs List. Within weeks, Alex Mengal, Micah Spain, Miriah Edwards, and Dan Van Atta joined them. Together, this small group built the technical and organizational infrastructure that eventually became Resilience, Relief & Recovery, Reach, Inc. and Wnc-Supply-Sites.
From September through December 2024, that infrastructure tracked 1,016 individual supply requests across more than 20 Western North Carolina communities including Marshall, Asheville, Bakersville, Marion, and Burnsville among the hardest hit. The WNC Needs List achieved an 84.4% delivery completion rate. Along the way, the team tackled needs no one else was tracking. We mapped the locations we had heard from and used that data to identify places needing Starlink connectivity. We set up gray water systems using 50 gallon barrels until a large organization caught up to our efforts and started supplying IBC totes. We were even asked for a circus tent for a supply site once it started getting cold.
By early 2025, what started as a Google Doc had become real infrastructure: wnc-supply-sites.com and R4D2 launched as formal logistics tools, a grant from United Way of North Carolina came through, and R4 elected its first permanent board — Alex Mengal as Vice President, Corryn Goldschmidt as Secretary, Nathan Wright as Treasurer, and Micah Spain as Member at Large.
Recognition followed the work. R4 was featured in the Burners Without Borders 2024 Winter Newsletter, listed as a vetted resource in the Knight Foundation-funded WNC Housing Guide, and selected as a research source for a Boston College study on climate-related displacement. In May 2025, Micah Spain and Jessica Maness served as keynote panelists at the Collaborative Journalism Summit in Denver.
Today, R4 operates in all 50 states and Canada, with more than 162,000 food boxes distributed, 3,000+ completed deliveries, and 49 aid partner organizations coordinating through our platforms. What began as one person with a phone is now a 501(c)(3), but the model hasn’t changed. We still believe the people closest to a crisis know what they need best, and our job is to listen, connect, and support.
We’re not done. R4-Commons is bringing all of our tools into one open-source unified platform. Stepping Stones will apply everything we’ve learned about disaster response to one of the most overlooked crises of all: homelessness. And through it all, individual donors, not government grants, remain the reason any of this is possible.
We will always be the bridge. We’re just building a much bigger one now.