In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Michael Mathes navigated fallen trees and flooding as he drove his four-wheeler up a residential mountainside near his church in rural North Carolina. His ride was chock-full of food to deliver to people who needed supplies but were unreachable by car. After the septuagenarian pastor finished his deliveries, he returned to his home an hour away to no power and no cell service.
“That whole area really got hit hard. A lot of damage, a lot of deaths,” said Mathes, the lead pastor at Boone Mennonite Brethren Church, a historically Black Mennonite congregation located in the town of Boone, about two hours north of Charlotte. Helene hit the area in 2024, and the community is still recovering.
The recipients of Mathes’s food deliveries are among people across the country who rely on local Black churches for help after hurricanes. New philanthropic funding from the Lilly Endowment is expected to bolster those services.
The foundation recently gave a total of $1.5 million in grants to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and COGIC Charities, the humanitarian arm of the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, to help with disaster relief efforts. Other faith-based organizations also received Lilly funding and some—including a Mennonite denomination that helped Mathes’s church—have fundraised on their own.
Disaster-related philanthropy is especially important for Black communities, which tend to experience more natural disasters but receive less aid.
The reasons this happens are complex. The South, where most Black Americans live, is usually hit the hardest by storms. Historical redlining—a practice the federal government, realtors, and banks used to discriminate against minority mortgage borrowers—also plays a factor. Redlining steered Black people to live in neighborhoods that have more pavement than trees. The uneven ratio contributes to hotter temperatures in areas prone to natural disasters, fewer cool breezes, and less soil to soak up water during floods, hurricanes, and other storms.
“That’s going to condition anything that happens in the recovery period, because there were greater vulnerabilities before the storm that were realized during the storm and only compounded after the storm,” said Kevin Smiley, a professor at Louisiana State University who studies disaster-related social inequalities.
Then there’s the aid component of the problem. Insurance and FEMA set their coverage based on the local real estate market and property appraisals. Black populations often live in areas with lower property values, which can lead to smaller payouts and longer recovery times. Research shows financial assistance often favors wealthy communities over low-income neighborhoods, and racial disparities in payouts can persist even when the amount of damage and loss that disaster survivors experience are the same.
Erika Crawford, an AME bishop who oversees more than 200 churches in Louisiana and Mississippi, said that over time these challenges directly correlate to a community’s ability to recover from a natural disaster. “If you survive the storm but you don’t fully recover, when the next storm comes, you’re further behind and you continue to be further behind until you can’t catch up,” she said.
The AME is using the new $1 million Lilly grant to prepare people for potential disasters and give aid to members who have suffered damage and loss. Crawford said its efforts will focus on the South, particularly Louisiana, Mississippi, and rural neighborhoods, as the area recovers from Hurricane Ida in 2021 and disasters throughout the previous decades.
The money will help church members—and potentially some locals—fund home fixtures, pay bills, and cover additional needs. The denomination is also beefing up training for congregants who live in areas prone to hurricanes. Among other things, the training encourages members to keep cash on hand, have an evacuation plan, and store important paperwork in easy-to-reach places.
COGIC Charities plans to use its $500,000 grant to establish regional warehouses that provide food, water, medicine, and other supplies for those displaced after a natural disaster or who might otherwise need help. (Lilly Endowment operates independently of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which last month sued four COGIC church leaders accused of running a fraudulent drug rebate scheme. The philanthropic funding, given prior to the lawsuit, will help expand the denomination’s existing pantries in California, Maryland, and across the Midwest.)
“Our mission has always been to meet people at their point of need, and now we have the resources to build lasting infrastructure that will allow us to respond with greater speed, compassion, and reach,” J. Drew Sheard, COGIC’s presiding bishop, said in a statement.
The denominations are boosting their efforts as the federal government considers overhauling disaster aid. Last year, President Donald Trump said FEMA should be disbanded because its work is too expensive and inefficient. An expert panel he appointed recommended reforms last month that would put more disaster recovery responsibilities on states while also speeding up the disbursement of federal aid.
FEMA underwent reforms during the Biden administration, which made the agency’s application process simpler, relaxed proof of residency requirements to help qualified applicants who would’ve otherwise been denied, and provided immediate assistance for food and other essential items. The changes happened after decades of complaints about the aid agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Troy Williams, the pastor of Bethel AME Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has had his own frustrations with getting FEMA and the church’s insurance company to fund repairs for building damage sustained during Hurricane Ida. He said FEMA covered the cost to remove asbestos but noted the rest should be covered by insurance, which hasn’t paid much. Repairs are still needed in the back of the building, which houses the administrative offices, classrooms, choir room, and kitchen. The second level also needs a new floor.
Bethel has been funding the remaining repairs with its own money and local donations. Williams partly blames the lack of FEMA funding on the church’s poor record keeping. The agency requires proof that every damage was a direct result of a disaster, which the church did not have enough documentation to show. Bethel closed its initial case with FEMA out of frustration with the process. It was only able to get the funding for the asbestos removal after reopening its case in 2023. “We’re working to get something more,” Williams said.
Mathes, the Mennonite pastor in North Carolina, said his church did not have flood insurance. Denominational fundraising paid for all of the building repairs for his church and those of a few other predominately Black Mennonite congregations in the area. It cost the church roughly $30,000 to fix its flooded basement and do smaller siding and painting repairs. The fundraising allowed them to sidestep the FEMA application process.
Over in New Orleans, St. James AME Church finished Hurricane Katrina–related repairs last year primarily using philanthropic grants and income from the film 21 Jump Street, which featured the church building in a few scenes. The 181-year-old structure looks good, but growing the congregation back to its pre-Katrina numbers has been a challenge, said Demetrese Phillips, who pastors the church.
Sunday services at St. James are now a third of what they were 20 years ago, largely due to Katrina evacuees resettling in other cities. Phillips said they have been trying to use social media and “do the old school evangelistic things,” including door knocking, to reach people. There’s been some success, but not as much as they’d like.
One person who moved away from New Orleans after Katrina is Maria Givens. When the deadly storm hit in 2005, it destroyed a new home she had purchased and almost everything inside of it. Her white walls were ripped in half, the refrigerator was upside down, the dishwasher was in the living room, and her bedroom looked like it had been put in a blender. But Givens still remembers finding her new, white choir robe completely unscathed inside the house. She thinks of it as a metaphor for how God protected her during the storm.
After Katrina, Givens went to Baton Rouge, where a local AME church initially provided some temporary supplies and food to help her get back on her feet. She currently owns a new home in the area.
“I got my life,” she said. “Has it been an easy journey? No, but God is good.”
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