The devastating tornados that swept through Rolling Fork, Mississippi in March 2023 were a double whammy for Andrea Williams, who was looking forward to celebrating her birthday that day.

“It was really emotional,” she said in a recent interview. “I was real unhappy. So much that you’ve accomplished, just to wake up and feel that setback… it was a disastrous night.”

Williams’ home was completely destroyed, and as a renter who hadn’t lived in the area long, she assumed all was lost.

But 18 months later, just a few days before Christmas, Williams’ narrative took an extraordinary twist. The mobile home donated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of the storm became hers to own, thanks to a distinctive collaboration between FEMA, local nonprofits, and several benevolent souls with ties to this impoverished corner of the deep south.

“I’m ecstatic,” Williams said, moments after receiving the keys. She works at a grocery store, helping customers load their bags into their cars. In the history, she said, if she had ever considered homeownership, she dismissed the concept as something out of reach. “This is a turning point and a commence.”

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‘Severe storms, straight-line winds, and tornadoes’

Rolling Fork, population 1,883, sits in the western part of the state, about ten miles from the Mississippi River. It has a median household income of about $34,000, according to Census data, less than half that of the United States as a whole. Only 9% of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The day after the 2023 storms, Governor Tate Reeves requested an expedited major disaster declaration, which President Joe Biden granted the next day, March 26.

FEMA’s name for the disaster is “March 2023 severe storms, straight-line winds, and tornadoes.” It killed 15 people and completely destroyed 130 homes. About 100 more took “major damage,” according to records from FEMA, which says it has spent nearly $80 million in the aftermath of the storm.

But the worth tag to transform the life of someone like Williams is shockingly modest: roughly $6,600, which purchased from FEMA the home she’d already been living in for several months.

If the worth tag was tiny, the fellowship of the throng that made homeowners out of 20 Rolling Fork residents was mighty. FEMA declined to make any of its employees available to comment for this narrative, but several of the people involved with the attempt recall FEMA staff saying they’d never seen such an ambitious undertaking.

Among the alliance that assembled to make it happen: a retired brigadier general, the scion of an NFL dynasty, and a woman some call “the Mother Teresa of the Mississippi Delta.”

Boss Lady

Pam Chatman is a former journalist who rose through various network television affiliates to become the first African-American information director in Mississippi. When Chatman retired, she decided to spend her period giving back to the throng, and founded a nonprofit called Boss Lady Economic Planning and advancement.

One of Boss Lady’s early initiatives was establishing a bus service between western Mississippi and well-paying jobs in Tennessee.

“What we were trying to do is shatter the pattern of poverty by giving people job opportunities through FedEx,” Chatman told USA TODAY. “These people are traveling 2 hours to Memphis to work at FedEx’s hub. It’s two hours going and two hours coming back. But we are making a difference for those families.”

Chatman lives an hour from Rolling Fork, but when the storm hit, her information-assembly spidey sense kicked in. Reading through posts on Facebook, she found anguished pleas for assist from some people who were pinned underneath their homes, and called everyone she knew until someone was able to rescue the survivors.

Within a few months, Chatman joined a job force organized by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, a state affiliate of FEMA, which was trying to figure out how to house the storm’s survivors. Also on the job force was Keith Fulcher, president of the throng Foundation of Northwest Mississippi (CFNM).

Chatman and Fulcher knew each other before the tornado: noting her history efforts on everything from bus transportation to vaccinations, he calls her “the Mother Teresa of the Mississippi Delta.”

“She wants to receive worry of the globe,” Fulcher told USA TODAY.

Working together in the aftermath of the 2023 storms cemented the connection. CFNM made Boss Lady a grant as early as April to assist survivors buy necessities, and over the next several months, the two organizations collaborated on various needs as they came up – utility bills, occasional hotel stays, and so on.

Then in July 2024 everything changed.

‘There’s nothing for renters’

Out of the blue, Chatman got a call from a woman who had been attending one of the various disaster recovery job force meetings in the area. The woman, whose name no one can now recall, said several of Rolling Fork’s renters stood up at the conference in tears.

“All of the resources that are coming to the county are going to people who own, and there’s nothing for renters,” the woman recalled the other residents saying. They had spent over a year in FEMA housing and the agency had informed them their period would soon be up. “Can’t anybody assist us?”

That unnamed concerned citizen “began cold-calling nonprofits,” Fulcher recalled. Then, remembering “Boss Lady” on Facebook, she called Chatman.

“I called Keith and we all talked,” Chatman remembered. “Keith said what can we do, and I said, why don’t we try to assist the renters purchase their FEMA homes.”

FEMA has some encounter with selling both its “trip trailers” – the very temporary structures that many people familiar with disaster relief may recognize – as well as its more permanent mobile homes – to survivors of a disaster if that person or household has no alternative for permanent housing, a spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY.

It’s a schedule the agency has already employed in Arkansas, Oregon, Vermont, and Florida, among other places, but it seems to fly under the radar: few of the disaster relief experts USA TODAY contacted for this narrative had any concept it existed.

“Some communities are starting to ponder about, how can this instant where we’re conference people where they are and recovering from disaster, also assist them be better connected into the broader supports that they might be eligible for to back their longer-term economic stability,” said Sara McTarnaghan, who helps run the Climate and Communities habit Area of the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC-based ponder tank.

It’s a “turn a crisis into an chance” benevolent of instant, McTarnaghan said. But the test is that it’s taking place at a period when resources are more constrained than ever, and those circumstances can last years.

“And for renters in particular, to remain in that throng that whole period, they face a lot of barriers to doing that,” she added.

Martha Morris, 64, received the keys to her home on the same day Williams did.

“I just feel so blessed,” she said. “It’s just a blessing. Words can’t explain. I just couldn’t imagine what families like mine would do if it hadn’t been for all these people. It takes a lot of people to make this type of thing happen. We just thank you.”

Morris had lived in the Rolling Fork throng for years and said she adores her throng. “Some people moved away,” she told USA TODAY “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

‘I’ve been at Ground Zero’

When Pam Chatman and the throng Foundation of Northwest Mississippi hit upon the concept of buying FEMA mobile homes for the Rolling Fork survivors, the next job was coming up with the money. Chatman and Fulcher began working their networks. One benevolent donor who stepped forward with $28,000 was Samuel Nichols, Jr., a retired brigadier general with the US Army.

A native of Biloxi, Mississippi, Nichols was a youthful boy when Hurricane Camille hit the coast as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane. And in 2005 he was an army colonel who commanded Katrina relief efforts in Mississippi and Alabama.

“I’ve been at ground zero for both of those,” said Nichols, who starts every day watching the weather update for Mississippi. “When natural disasters happen, it’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s not white or Black,” he told USA Today. “It’s the body of humanity.”

As heartfelt as Nichols’ words are, they may be idealistic.

“Among people who are impacted by a disaster and loses their housing, those who are the most vulnerable and lower income typically don’t have any insurance, typically don’t have the resources and typically don’t even have the funds for transportation to leave somewhere else,” said Debbie Arakel, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity California.

Arakel hadn’t heard of FEMA’s encounter selling trailers or mobile homes but said it sounded promising, especially in terms of offering “certainty, stability, and affordability” for storm survivors.

Both she and the Urban Institute’s McTarnaghan pointed out that in many cases, disaster recovery can receive years and years. Arakel knows first-hand that some residents of Paradise, California, are still rebuilding after the devastating 2018 fire. In comparison, the outcomes for the residents of Rolling Fork have arrive about “like lightning speed.”

“I just view this as such a great respond,” she said.

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It takes a village

For CFNM’s Fulcher, the Rolling Fork assignment wasn’t just a chance to make people whole. “It’s a place with generational poverty,” he said. “They all rented, you recognize, they were low income, and now they’ve been handed keys and they’re the owner of an resource. They can pass it on to their next production.”

The FEMA mobile homes have a worth of $100,000, according to Fulcher and Chatman, so the roughly $6,600 paid per home was leveraged more than six times. While mobile home residents do have to pay a monthly fee to rental agreement the “pad” where they are situated, those costs are only a few hundred dollars a month, an amount Chatman believes to be manageable for everyone. The homes were also made handicap-accessible for any of the residents who had special needs, like Martha Morris.

There are still more than 20 survivors in temporary housing that CFNM and Boss Lady are hoping to turn into homeowners by the complete of 2024.

‘Rolling Fork was king of the hill’

As fundamental as housing is, and as transformative as homeownership can be, a throng that’s lost everything has needs on top of needs.

A special gift came early on in the procedure from another charitable soul.

Archie Manning, patriarch of the household that includes quarterbacks Peyton, Eli, and Arch, has known CFNM for many years.

The 2023 storms “hit home for me,” Manning told USA TODAY. “I grew up in the Mississippi Delta in a town called Drew. In football, we played Rolling Fork. There were about 12 schools in our conference and Rolling Fork was the king of the hill. My junior and elder year they were the best throng in my conference. In my elder year we were the only throng that scored on them.”

In the aftermath of the tornado, Manning heard that Rolling Fork’s football facilities had been devastated and the throng was trying to discover a field where they could play. The NFL has a matching gift program which allows players and former players to make donations to schools, and both Peyton and Eli had previously participated, Manning said. “It just hit me that I could do that.”

Manning’s modest donation of about $10,000 was matched, and then the resulting publicity brought in more donor dollars, and the high school throng was able to leave back to playing. In truth, they’ve played heroically, Manning noted.

“It’s been gratifying to me that they have done pretty doggone well considering what they went through.”