Youth Joining Post-Helene Work Saw the Best in People

Keynon Lake in the warehouse at the My Daddy Taught Me That community center near downtown Asheville

While the work following Hurricane Helene was certainly exhausting, Keynon Lake says he doesn’t recall actually feeling exhausted until almost a month after the storm hit. Keynon, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That (MDTMT), managed the resilience hub at MDTMT’s community center near Downtown Asheville.

“I’m sure a lot of it was adrenaline,” he says. “But we just pushed through and never gave up.” That sense of determination helped Keynon and his team of volunteers work 16-hour days for three weeks, distributing supplies throughout the community. The MDTMT location exemplified the concept of resilience hubs, community facilities designed to distribute information and resources during and after emergencies.

The work was a natural fit for him, Keynon says. “I learned years ago that my life’s calling is being able to serve people, and primarily serve youth.” He credits his father, Bennie Lee Lake, for instilling the values that energized his sense of service. Bennie, an Ashville native and a member of the original Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, was a widely recognized community leader. Known for his leadership in youth athletics and his dedication as a social worker for the Juvenile Evaluation Center in Black Mountain, he was “always one of the first people to be called when there was a community need of any kind,” Keynon says.

Inspired by his father, Keynon in 2012 created MDTMT, a program designed to help young people transition to adulthood. Only months after moving to its current home in a former City of Asheville maintenance facility last year, the organization joined numerous other resilience hubs in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. It was one of many featured by Thrive Asheville’s Rise of Resilience Hubs workshop in March, part of the nonprofit’s Lessons for the Recovery series, designed to promote learning about successful preparedness and recovery efforts.

“We were one of the few places in town that had power,” he says. “And I said hey, we’re going to transform our building into a distribution site.” Word got around, and almost immediately, 18-wheelers with supplies were showing up “from Texas, from New Jersey, from all over the place.”

But rather than have long lines of people gathering outside the facility, Keynon and his team of 25 volunteers – many from the ranks of youth served by MDTMT, family members and teachers – formed assembly lines to pack supply boxes with food, water, medical supplies and other essentials. Those packages, each intended to last four days, were loaded onto a fleet of vans dispatched to various community locations. Crews worked to empty the 5,000-square foot warehouse every day, even as trucks arrived to refill it with new shipments – for 22 straight days. After that, the hub served as a classroom extension for Asheville City Schools, providing academic support for middle school and high school students for two weeks until schools re-opened.

Young people who helped in the storm response – many of them “ambassadors” who came up through the MDTMT program – had a rare opportunity to witness human behavior at its best, Keynon says. “What they learned is that people really care. People really do care in times of crisis and times of need.”

The ordeal had a profound impact on him, as well. And he expects the memories to last a long time – in particular the record of what was accomplished by the staff and young people he works with. “We took a little maintenance warehouse that we had been in for less than a year, and we turned this place into one of the major resilience hubs in Western North Carolina. It makes me very proud how we rose to the occasion with no experience. We just jumped into action and did what needed to be done. And we couldn’t have done it without Christ.”

The MDTMT crew sees their experience in part as a training exercise. They were already planning an expansion of their facility long before Helene struck. That plan has now taken on added significance, as it will allow for an even larger resilience hub operation – with rooftop solar panels, showers, and a commercial kitchen – to support response efforts in the event of future disasters. That reconstruction effort will launch with an open house, fundraiser and dedication on June 14 at the facility to honor Keynon’s dad, Bennie, and invite the community to learn more about MDTMT’s program offerings.

“I pray that we’ll never see the likes of anything like Helene again,” he says. “But anytime there’s a disaster, anytime that people need help, they know that they can come here to receive that help. You don’t have to be a kid; we intend to help the entire community.”

Thrive Asheville is working with partners to design opportunities to strengthen the network of resilience hubs. We believe that these front-line leaders are best positioned to inform public and private investments, shape policy, and develop the on-the-ground actions that will make our community more able to meet the next disaster.