Drew Johnson is the executive director of South County Community Services (SCCS), one of Kalamazoo Community Foundation’s many nonprofit partners who mobilized quickly after the devastating May 7 tornadoes in Kalamazoo County this past year. Thanks to the Community Urgent Relief Fund (CURF) and a longtime collaboration with United Way of South Central Michigan, KZCF was able to help move funds within days — getting immediate aid to the partners like SCCS who know their communities best.
When Crisis Hits
On the evening of May 7, 2024, a tornado moving at speeds as high as 135 miles per hour cut a devastating swath through Portage, Pavilion Township and Texas Township. Miraculously, there was no loss of life, but trees were uprooted and knocked down, power was lost, and over 500 homes and businesses were damaged or in some cases, destroyed completely. One area that was hit particularly hard was Pavilion Estates, a manufactured home community. Amidst the terror, some of the homes were flipped over, carried up into the air and dropped elsewhere or torn to shreds. Once the storm cleared, 173 units had been damaged and 17 were obliterated. With so many residents having lost the roofs above their heads in an instant, they needed a solution — fast.
Community Partners Step Up
Drew Johnson, executive director of South County Community Services, remembers that night well. “I was taking shelter in my unfinished basement, in the laundry room with my kids, watching a movie. I saw the videos of Pavilion Estates online and knew that the next several months were going to be so difficult for so many people,” Johnson said. Pavilion Estates is within the service area of South County Community Services (SCCS), a nonprofit that serves communities within southern Kalamazoo County. SCCS functions as a basic needs agency, seeking to connect people with lower incomes to vital resources like food, transportation, medication, programs for seniors and emergency financial assistance. The displaced residents of Pavilion Estates certainly fit the bill.
“The biggest thing was housing for people in the immediate aftermath. We started by lining up hotel stays and gave out two $500 gift cards to most residents immediately, the very hardest hit ones that didn’t have any place to go that night.”
— Drew Johnson | Executive Director, SCCS
After a week or two, we were able to scale down to one $500 gift card per household. We ended up distributing about $65,000,” Johnson said.
That money made a big difference in the lives of many people, but it’s a lot for a nonprofit to have access to at a moment’s notice. SCCS was able to make it happen as a direct result of their partnership with Kalamazoo Community Foundation, thanks to our Community Urgent Relief Fund (CURF), a permanent fund established in 2018 that focuses on emergency response and resilience. This time, and across CURF history, KZCF partnered closely with United Way of South Central Michigan to coordinate the granting of dollars out to SCCS staff and volunteers on the ground.
SCCS has assisted the residents of Pavilion Estates for years, and has built up a good relationship with the management and many of the people living there, helping them to become a trusted organization within the park. SCCS worked as an overseer of the efforts being made in the wake of the tornado, but other organizations were there too, such as the Red Cross in the immediate aftermath, and groups that provided centralized distribution places for food and household supplies. With these essentials taken care of, KZCF’s CURF gift cards helped to cover additional costs that would have otherwise fallen between the cracks.
Hope & Healing
More than a year later, the rebuilding efforts continue. “I’m in Pavilion Estates a lot lately for the repair work that we’re doing,” Johnson added. “We’re doing repairs on homes that are owner occupied where there was some kind of reason why insurance wouldn’t cover it, or the person didn’t have insurance. And so we have been able to go through there, get consent from the homeowner and do the work with funding from Yes! Communities [the owners of Pavilion Estates], United Way, Kalamazoo Community Foundation and Kalamazoo County. We’ve been able to do about $250,000 worth of repairs on homes in that park, with few eligibility requirements.”
In the time that Drew has spent in Pavilion Estates, immediately after the tornado and through to today, one of the things that has impressed him has been how close-knit the community really is and how much they truly look out for one another. “During the tornado, everybody warned each other because there wasn’t a siren nearby or at least a lot of people didn’t hear a siren. Once everybody knew what was happening, they went to a McDonald’s that let them in the basement. That’s how everybody was safe during the storm, that’s why nobody died.”
CURF’s 2024 Impact at a Glance
