During the fallout of Hurricane Helene, troves of people depended on community centers, local businesses and town squares to find food, water and other crucial resources. These ad hoc places have an official name: resilience hubs. Now, for the City of Asheville, there’s growing support among policy makers to invest in them as a form of official social infrastructure.
Asheville has pledged $2.1 million in federal recovery funds towards supporting resilience hubs. And city manager D.K. Wesley made a soft commitment to allocate a total of $10 million to seed the program at a Feb. 24 Policy, Finance and Infrastructure Committee meeting.
“What I heard loud and clear, even before this meeting, was that a great majority of the Council members actually want to reserve some funding for resilience hubs,” Wesley said. “$10 million is a great start,” she added, though she did not specify when and where the money would come from…