Community Initiative

The Foundation mission is: helping the communities, local churches and new pop-up nonprofits to help the residents and people in need. It is a top-down strategy as a service to the bottom-up, that includes advocacy for locals to the authorities. 

1. Expanded access to home testing to give residents and local professional buildings an immediate sense of water quality 

2. Continuing to support bottled water donations for drinking and consumption 

3. Expanded access to water purification technology and tools from single use to industrial, public works level 

4. Continued awareness development with local, county, state, federal officials on risk as the water issue remains overt for most of the region, while conflated in many local areas. 

5. Integrated data sets combining interagency risk data with water flows, tables, watersheds, basins, additional; including but not limited to USGS and USACE publicly available data. 

6. Continued advocacy for the municipalities and two-thirds of the towns and communities that do not have an independent public works, and the 67% of the population that does not have a municipality that represents them. 

7. Reviewing risk of toxic contaminants, including but not limited to #5, #6, plus Sewage system devastation, EPA SuperFund sites that have been stagnant, Debris and Chemicals in the devastation that have mixed into the water and soil, toxic mud, impact of toxicity to public health and infrastructure, and resulting risk to local agriculture, business, and communities at large. 

A. Support qualified organizations in applying for grants to engage Water Studies that may include academia, interdisciplinary departments and interns, internship, Subject Matter Experts and Faculty as Advisory Board, State and Federal Administrations.

B. Engage working sessions as part of A, that can be directly combined with Recovery and Long-term Redevelopment.

C. Volunteer Programs that involve the Public and Public Relations Campaigns.

a. Empower and support the organic movement of volunteers and donors from across the country who have flocked to assist victims of Helene related devastation; including but not limited to small businesses, residents, neighbors, churches, new pop-up local nonprofits and aid groups; by helping to guide, support, and empower donors and volunteers, and includes compliance support with advocacy in this process. 

b. Social media engagement, crowdsourcing and crowd funding, with focus on the minutia of the individual, small groups, and networks.

c. Support communications and navigation on local community, volunteer and donor needs. This is a very fundamental and simple practice of public relations and marketing, applied to the individual and small groups. 

d. Awareness Development: Public Relations, Media Relations; Subject Matter Experts and Personal Testimonies, local aid groups and victims. This drives sponsors and volunteers, while gives victims a greater opportunity to be directly assisted. 

If you would like to participate, please feel free to contact: 

Velma Anne Ruth

Co-Founder

Helene Recovery Foundation

571-977-9537

velmaanne@absnetwork.info