In the UNCG community, there’s a spirit of service that goes back to 1893, when the first 10 graduates of the State Normal and Industrial School for Women adopted the one-word phrase “Service” as the school motto. That spirit has persisted through the days of Woman’s College up to the present.  

Today, Spartan graduates in High Country communities are facing vast challenges after the historic destruction caused by Hurricane Helene. But they’re not going anywhere. In fields like public administration and public health, positions that don’t often get big headlines, Spartan alumni can see the impact of their work in the success and security of their neighbors.

“The common theme in rural communities is collaboration,” says Jodi Brazil ’89, who graduated with a UNCG nursing degree and now works in public health with the Madison County Health Department. “Our church in Mars Hill was the only place that had Wi-Fi. We would go down and work, and there were usually around 50 people working there. It was quite the little hub.”

What does it mean to make real-world impact? For Hugh Sandoe ’15, ’17 MPA, it means creative problem solving. He’s the strategy and performance manager in the Burke County manager’s office. Burke County is home to around 89,000. 

“I always thought I would go work for a big city,” he says, “but I realized when you’re in a large community, you’re one of a million people. Our county government is about 26 departments, and I know all the department heads by name. I know their wife’s name, their husband’s name, their kid’s name. There’s a strong sense of relationship, which is important to me.”    

Wilson Hooper ’06 MPA is city manager in Brevard, N.C. What does he like most about public administration? “Local government suits a curious personality like me, because you get to have your fingers in everything,” he says, for example, planning, finance, communications, and law.  

Hooper sees two “big picture” tasks for municipal managers. “I facilitate the work of the elected officials. That’s one of the main responsibilities of a manager: to advise their city council so that the decisions made on behalf of their constituents are as good as they can be.”  

Next, he helps everyone else understand those decisions. “I take the elected official’s language of stories, hopes, and dreams, and I translate it to the technicians on the ground in their technical language.” Communications is more important than ever, he says.  

That sounds good, but what happens when a crisis hits?

Where in NC?

$44 billion in direct damage

73,000 homes damaged (estimate) 

39 counties designated for federal disaster assistance by FEMA 

$850 million in FEMA individual and public assistance (Dec 2024) 

Source: Office of State Budget and Management, December 13, 2024 

A 1,000 year flood  

“That Wednesday and Thursday of the storm, so much was already happening,” says John Carrico ’23 MBA, business development coordinator at Mission Health, a six-hospital system that serves Western North Carolina. “We had seven or eight inches of rain even before the hurricane hit.”   

Then, beginning Wednesday, September 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene brought record-breaking rainfall. According to a state assessment, in several counties it was a 1,000 year flood event.

People woke up to realize they’d lost power. Sandoe says, “In Burke County, we had about a third of our county without water for a week. We had about 160 structures that were destroyed, and another 300-400 that were severely damaged.”    

At Mission Hospital in Asheville, some staff had been asked to stay the weekend. They were ready to respond. 

Other local citizens and officials got to work as soon as they could. Some of these were trained in areas like public administration, public health, nursing, and business at UNCG. They brought their professional skills to serve the common good.

Remarkable response 

After Burke County’s emergency response, which prioritized lifesaving efforts, Sandoe and his colleagues prioritized distributing supplies and establishing communications. Sandoe led the phone bank. The goal: connect need with relief. “If someone called and said, ‘My mother-in-law needs oxygen and food, but her driveway is blocked by a tree,’ I’d say, ‘Oh, well, Steve just called to volunteer – he has a four-wheel-drive truck and a chainsaw. Let me ask him to go solve his neighbor’s problem.’” The relationships and skills within the community went a long way.  

Especially at first, many had no cell phone or internet access. In Brevard, Hooper and his colleagues collected information and shared it with the public the old-fashioned way. “If you didn’t have a public safety radio, you had to communicate in person. We had city employees driving around all weekend updating one another on the latest.”

But how to get that information to the citizens they served? “I and a staff person and the mayor would put our heads together and throw down on a sheet of paper everything we had heard. We’d take out stuff that was unsubstantiated and put together a report. Then, the mayor would literally walk up and down the street delivering information to the people.”  

Once the radio station was up and running again, the mayor gave updates regularly, Hooper explains. “We were proud that we were able to fill that information vacuum, at least somewhat, for our constituents.”   

UNCG’s Dr. Jeff Milroy is associate professor in the Department of Public Health Education and associate director of the Institute to Promote Athlete Health and Wellness. He says serving clients is one basic goal of public health professionals. “They seek to better understand the needs of the community and coordinate efforts to specifically address those needs.” In practice, that means initiating and maintaining many projects with many community partners.

In Madison County, Brazil works with health promotion, community health, community collaboration – anything that gets the job done. For example, the county had a population of around 22,000, but only two dental practices. So, her department met the need by creating a third dental center for uninsured and underinsured residents.  

Sandoe, Hooper, and Brazil reported huge outpourings of support and supplies from volunteers who sent resources or traveled to lend a hand.  

Hope Niedrich, a UNCG gerontology student, volunteered in Marshall, N.C., by the French Broad River, where the water crested at around 23 feet. She says she found a mostly grassroots effort that provided hazmat suits and transportation to the cleanup sites. “I went to a little hub, put on the hazmat suit, and got shuttled down to Marshall. I worked at the Presbyterian church every day.”  

Community leaders organized volunteers and made the cleanup happen.

The spirit of the region 

Magnolia Long ’20 is the senior planner and rural planning organization director at the Regional Foothills Commission, a governmental body serving Cleveland, McDowell, Polk, and Rutherford counties. It fills a role between local government and state government. 

Foothills assists with disaster training, code enforcement, farmland preservation, and more. After the storm, it helped municipalities coordinate with state and federal bodies effectively. “Local governments were having to provide basic service delivery and manage a natural disaster on top of that. That’s where we came in and filled those gaps,” she says.  

For Long, drive and determination are part of her personal story as much as her professional one. “I feel like I’ve always had the cards stacked against me, but I also feel called to go out and make the world a better place.”  

UNCG was part of that story, she says. “I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when I was six months old, and I got really sick after I started college. I had to get a transplant during spring break, but I stayed in school, made Dean’s List, and was able to graduate. I don’t let anything stop me, and UNCG was exactly where I needed to be.”

Real-world lessons 

As a doctoral student, Adam Hege ’15 PhD “fell in love” with the faculty at UNCG. “I could just tell I was getting the training that was going to help me long term.”   

Today, he’s associate dean for research and graduate education in the Beaver College of Health Sciences at Appalachian State University. When he gives his own students a broad definition of public health, it comes down to one word. 

“The key word is ‘prevention,’” he says. While medical doctors focus on immediate problems, “in public health we direct our attention to trying to address problems before they happen.”

And if a crisis has already happened, public health professionals study it to better prepare for the future. “A lot of public health training is looking at examples like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: What went wrong then, and what can we learn from that?”  

Events like the Covid-19 pandemic make it clear how crucial public health can be, he says. “My students are thinking, ‘We’re at the forefront. We can lead. We have the skills and abilities to be involved with these issues.’”  

Likewise, programs at UNCG prepare leaders and decision-makers. 

In the Master of Public Health (MPH), Milroy says preparation is key. “The program gives students the skills they can use to face the effects of disasters like Hurricane Helene. They learn project development skills that are necessary to manage logistics related to community disasters.”   

They also learn how to work with trauma, he adds. “People don’t enter the field of public health without a passion for service.”   

UNCG’s Master of Public Administration (MPA) program is also focused on real-world success, says Graduate Program Director Hunter Bacot. “Nearly every course provides opportunities for students to incorporate what they are learning to solve active, real-time problems at their work or in communities that reach out to us for support.”  

In jobs that deal with public issues, he says, it’s all about results. “Our alumni perpetuate the excellence in our MPA program by modeling it every day in their work throughout communities.”

Flying High

John Carrico ’23 MBA has over two decades of combined experience as both a 9-1-1 and flight paramedic. But after Helene, the skies were more crowded than usual. “There could have been as many as 50-55 helicopters in the air in the disaster area,” he says. “We’re not used to seeing other helicopters.”  

Carrico is business development coordinator for the Mountain Area Medical Airlift (MAMA), a division of Mission Health that serves rural Western North Carolina. With the MBA, he says, “I was able to have a seat at the table with CEOs and presidents of hospitals. I help us partner with EMS agencies, rural fire departments, and hospital systems to ensure our helicopter is offering the best that we can to our partners.”

Unprecedented response

THE NC NATIONAL GUARD’S response to Hurricane Helene was the longest in its history. Like many Spartans, Major SaQuang Lam, assistant director of student health services at UNCG and longtime member of the National Guard, answered the call to help. He was activated to Avery County and led missions around Grandfather Mountain.

At UNCG, over 8% of enrolled students are military-affiliated, and the University continues to be recognized as a Top 10 Military-Friendly School. Many current students participated in recovery efforts through the National Guard.

A long recovery 

Niedrich recalls seeing Helene’s fresh devastation. “You’re just shocked and silent because it’s overwhelming, and it’s crazy to think that this is literally right in the state of North Carolina.”  

Longterm challenges remain. “There are still people that are really struggling,” she says. In Burke County, 411 residents were displaced. In Mars Hill, 70 families were left without homes. That loss is repeated across the region. And after citizens of all ages have suffered such deep losses, mental health may be a pressing need in the years to come.

Shuttered businesses, crop losses, and unrealized tourism revenues add to the economic hurt. Plus, as state and national efforts wind down, finding resources for needed infrastructure projects can be challenging.  

How to fill the gaps? Carrico observes that long after the water receded, people continued to step up and find ways to contribute. “Having the entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to help people navigate the path to recovery, I think that’s where a lot of those opportunities exist,” he says.  

“It will take everyone joining together to rebuild Asheville,” says Morgan Daniels ’17. She’s working with nonprofit Asheville Rising, which sent the work of four Asheville artists to the 2025 GEM Show in Tucson, Ariz., which had 350,000 attendees, she says.  

There are no easy answers, Bacot admits, but he says UNCG students and alumni have the skills and values to make an impact. “Our students and alumni are in the public sphere because it’s in their DNA to be of service to others. They are equipped to do so by having a command of strategies that allow them to engage complex issues with confidence.”  

It’s been six months since Hurricane Helene. Recently, sections of I-40 that connect North Carolina and Tennessee opened for the first time since the storm. Even still, uncertainty and suffering remain. Across the High Country, the hard work of recovery continues.

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