Hurricane Helene Assistance Triggers Community Connections with ACS

As people from Florida and southern Georgia in the United States were driving north in late September to escape Hurricane Helene, Joseph Sliker was driving south into the rain already making landfall. Behind the truck he was driving was a three-stall shower trailer making its way to a Red Cross shelter in Valdosta, Georgia. Sliker is Adventist Community Services (ACS) assistant director for the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Georgia-Cumberland Conference, based in Calhoun.

The call earlier that day from Jamaar Franklin Pye, community partnerships manager and voluntary agency liaison with the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA), was a result of the relationships built during the previous two months of assisting communities in need.

Following Hurricane Debbie in August 2024, ACS Disaster Response personnel and volunteers managed a warehouse in Richmond Hill, Georgia. “Even though this wasn’t a big operation, we were there with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] and GEMA authorities,” said Luis Biazotto, Georgia-Cumberland Conference ACS director. This provided opportunities to strengthen their working relationship, he said.

During the conversations, Biazotto mentioned that most of the organization’s pastors and several volunteers are certified by the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF) in emotional and spiritual care. Less than a month later GEMA officials called, wanting to utilize this resource.

In response to the tragic shooting of four people at the Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, GEMA requested a team to provide emotional and spiritual care at a community recovery center they were opening up. While serving this community, Biazotto was again talking with Pye, this time about two shower trailers owned by the Georgia-Cumberland Conference. A few weeks later, the call came in requesting showers for an American Red Cross shelter being set up for Hurricane Helene evacuees.

For nearly two weeks, ACS volunteers served evacuees and clean-up crews, working alongside personnel and volunteers from the Methodist church hosting the shelter, and the American Red Cross.

“The number of people who were like, ‘Oh, this is so cool!’ was amazing,” said Brenda Lipscomb, one of the ACS volunteers who helped with the shower trailer. “Then [they] would ask me questions like, ‘Is this your church?’ ” Despite having trees down on her property and a large hole in the roof of her house, Lipscomb spent more than a week serving people and making connections with Valdosta residents. One of those she developed a relationship with was a sheriff’s deputy stationed at the church. Her conversations and new relationships opened opportunities for the Pathfinders, which Lipscomb also helps with, to serve the community.

“If there had been a similar situation 2,000 years ago, [this is] something that Jesus would have been at,” Lipscomb said. “We were able to touch a lot of lives.”

With 18 Adventist churches in communities in southern Georgia and northeast Tennessee directly impacted by Hurricane Helene, members continued touching lives at both ends of the conference and places in between, regional church leaders said.

“They provided truckloads of water, cleaning supplies, personal hygiene kits, infant and children’s supplies, and more to those impacted by the storm,” they shared. “As the next phase of recovery begins, ACS personnel and volunteers will continue to serve communities and make connections.”

The original version of this story was posted by Southern Tidings.