2024 Building Hope

Date:November 18, 2024

Venue/Location:Highland Brewing Company

Coming together to celebrate Building Hope!

We are incredibly grateful for BUILDING HOPE: An Evening for Affordable Housing, held at Highland Brewing Company on Monday, November 18th, with 250 of our closest friends. Guests were moved by powerful stories of resilience and learned how your support helps build homes, neighborhoods, and thriving communities—especially now as we work to recover from Hurricane Helene. Originally scheduled for Thursday, September 26th, the event was postponed before we fully understood the devastation the hurricane would bring to our region. As we gathered, many still carried the weight of the storm’s heavy impacts in our region, yet we all have hope for the future with extensive rebuilding, rejuvenation, and revitalization efforts ongoing.

We’ve all heard the stories and seen, personally, our communities in action helping family, friends, and neighbors survive. More now than ever, we remain focused on the central role that affordable housing will play in our resilience as a region. Stories like those of Promise, Robin, and Whitley are a testament to the power of home and rebuilding hope.

“These brave stories illustrate what we know about the transformative power of housing: that all of us thrive when people in our region have a safe, stable, affordable place to call home. This was true before Helene and it feels even more important as we work to repair, rebuild and recover together.”

– Greta Byrd,
MHO Board Member

Housing is a foundational social determinant of health, and yes, that includes mental health. We understand that a safe, secure, affordable home provides more than just shelter from the rain or snow. Home provides a place to seek mental refuge from an outside world that is increasingly stressful, polarized, and filled with hate and hurt. Home provides a place where we can look inward and upward. A place where we can let our thoughts wander, envision the life we seek, and manifest the changes within that will help us endure the many challenges that await us in the outside world. More than anything else, home orients and nourishes our sense of belonging in the world.

About a week after Helene, MHO launched our Housing Recovery Fund. This fund fuels our ability to respond to immediate, near-term, and long-term housing recovery in the region. In the days following the storm, it helped provide resident emergency assistance, including food, water, and sanitation supplies. We are now focused on resident stabilization and rental assistance, providing essential home repairs to storm-damaged homes, and creating new affordable rental and homeownership opportunities. At Building Hope, through your support, we raised nearly $100,000 for this fund!! We now hope you’ll consider supporting the Housing Recovery Fund by spreading the word to your friends and neighbors. If you weren’t able to attend, we hope you’ll consider donating to this fund as we work to rebuild our communities. Together, we will rebuild hope!

DONATE NOW

THANK YOU to those who made Building Hope possible, including our amazing vendors and sponsors! A special shout-out to Highland Brewing for hosting us, DJ Molly Parti for the tunes, 67 Biltmore for delicious hors d’oeuvres and dessert, Indulge Images for photo booth fun, and Oak and Grist for a wonderful cocktail experience. We hope you enjoyed all they had to offer! Without your support, events like this wouldn’t be possible. We look forward to seeing you all at our next event in 2025!