The devastating tornados that swept through Rolling Fork, Mississippi in March 2023 were a double whammy for Andrea Williams, who was looking forward to celebrating her birthday that day.

“It was really emotional,” she said in a recent interview. “I was real sad. So much that you’ve accomplished, just to wake up and feel that loss… it was a disastrous night.”

Williams' home was completely destroyed, and as a renter who hadn’t lived in the area long, she assumed all was lost.

But 18 months later, just a few days before Christmas, Williams' story took an extraordinary twist. The mobile home donated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of the storm became hers to own, thanks to a unique collaboration between FEMA, local nonprofits, and several kind souls with ties to this poor corner of the deep south.

“I’m ecstatic,” Williams said, moments after receiving the keys. She works at a grocery store, helping customers load their bags into their cars. In the past, she said, if she had ever considered homeownership, she dismissed the idea as something out of reach. “This is a turning point and a start.”

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'Severe storms, straight-line winds, and tornadoes'

Rolling Fork, population 1,883, sits in the western part of the state, about ten miles from the Mississippi River. It has a median household income of about $34,000, according to Census data, less than half that of the United States as a whole. Only 9% of residents have a bachelor's degree or higher.

The day after the 2023 storms, Governor Tate Reeves requested an expedited major disaster declaration, which President Joe Biden granted the next day, March 26.

FEMA's name for the disaster is “March 2023 severe storms, straight-line winds, and tornadoes.” It killed 15 people and completely destroyed 130 homes. About 100 more took “major damage,” according to records from FEMA, which says it has spent nearly $80 million in the aftermath of the storm.

But the price tag to transform the life of someone like Williams is shockingly modest: roughly $6,600, which purchased from FEMA the home she’d already been living in for several months.

If the price tag was small, the fellowship of the group that made homeowners out of 20 Rolling Fork residents was mighty. FEMA declined to make any of its employees available to comment for this story, but several of the people involved with the effort remember FEMA staff saying they’d never seen such an ambitious undertaking.

Among the alliance that assembled to make it happen: a retired brigadier general, the scion of an NFL dynasty, and a woman some call “the Mother Teresa of the Mississippi Delta.”

Boss Lady

Pam Chatman is a former journalist who rose through various network television affiliates to become the first African-American news director in Mississippi. When Chatman retired, she decided to spend her time giving back to the community, and founded a nonprofit called Boss Lady Economic Planning and Development.

One of Boss Lady’s early initiatives was establishing a bus service between western Mississippi and well-paying jobs in Tennessee.

“What we were trying to do is break the cycle of poverty by giving people job opportunities through FedEx,” Chatman told USA TODAY. “These people are traveling 2 hours to Memphis to work at FedEx's hub. It's two hours going and two hours coming back. But we are making a difference for those families.”

Chatman lives an hour from Rolling Fork, but when the storm hit, her news-gathering spidey sense kicked in. Reading through posts on Facebook, she found anguished pleas for help from some people who were pinned underneath their homes, and called everyone she knew until someone was able to rescue the survivors.

Within a few months, Chatman joined a task force organized by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, a state affiliate of FEMA, which was trying to figure out how to house the storm’s survivors. Also on the task force was Keith Fulcher, president of the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi (CFNM).

Chatman and Fulcher knew each other before the tornado: noting her past efforts on everything from bus transportation to vaccinations, he calls her "the Mother Teresa of the Mississippi Delta."

"She wants to take care of the world," Fulcher told USA TODAY.

Working together in the aftermath of the 2023 storms cemented the relationship. CFNM made Boss Lady a grant as early as April to help survivors buy necessities, and over the next several months, the two organizations collaborated on various needs as they came up – utility bills, occasional hotel stays, and so on.

Then in July 2024 everything changed.

'There's nothing for renters'

Out of the blue, Chatman got a call from a woman who had been attending one of the various disaster recovery task force meetings in the area. The woman, whose name no one can now remember, said several of Rolling Fork's renters stood up at the meeting in tears.

"All of the resources that are coming to the county are going to people who own, and there's nothing for renters," the woman recalled the other residents saying. They had spent over a year in FEMA housing and the agency had informed them their time would soon be up. "Can't anybody help us?"

That unnamed concerned citizen "began cold-calling nonprofits," Fulcher recalled. Then, remembering "Boss Lady" on Facebook, she called Chatman.

"I called Keith and we all talked," Chatman remembered. "Keith said what can we do, and I said, why don’t we try to help the renters purchase their FEMA homes.”

FEMA has some experience with selling both its “travel trailers” – the very temporary structures that many people familiar with disaster relief may know – as well as its more permanent mobile homes – to survivors of a disaster if that person or family has no option for permanent housing, a spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY.

It’s a strategy the agency has already employed in Arkansas, Oregon, Vermont, and Florida, among other places, but it seems to fly under the radar: few of the disaster relief experts USA TODAY contacted for this story had any idea it existed.

“Some communities are starting to think about, how can this moment where we're meeting people where they are and recovering from disaster, also help them be better connected into the broader supports that they might be eligible for to support their longer-term economic stability,” said Sara McTarnaghan, who helps run the Climate and Communities Practice Area of the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank.

It's a “turn a crisis into an opportunity” kind of moment, McTarnaghan said. But the challenge is that it’s taking place at a time when resources are more constrained than ever, and those circumstances can last years.

“And for renters in particular, to stay in that community that whole time, they face a lot of barriers to doing that," she added.

Martha Morris, 64, received the keys to her home on the same day Williams did.

“I just feel so blessed,” she said. “It’s just a blessing. Words can’t explain. I just couldn’t imagine what families like mine would do if it hadn’t been for all these people. It takes a lot of people to make this type of thing happen. We just thank you.”

Morris had lived in the Rolling Fork community for years and said she adores her community. “Some people moved away,” she told USA TODAY “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

'I've been at Ground Zero'

When Pam Chatman and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi hit upon the idea of buying FEMA mobile homes for the Rolling Fork survivors, the next task was coming up with the money. Chatman and Fulcher began working their networks. One kind donor who stepped forward with $28,000 was Samuel Nichols, Jr., a retired brigadier general with the US Army.

A native of Biloxi, Mississippi, Nichols was a young boy when Hurricane Camille hit the coast as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane. And in 2005 he was an army colonel who commanded Katrina relief efforts in Mississippi and Alabama.

“I’ve been at ground zero for both of those,” said Nichols, who starts every day watching the weather report for Mississippi. “When natural disasters happen, it’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s not white or Black,” he told USA Today. “It’s the body of humanity.”

As heartfelt as Nichols’ words are, they may be idealistic.

“Among people who are impacted by a disaster and loses their housing, those who are the most vulnerable and lower income typically don't have any insurance, typically don't have the resources and typically don't even have the funds for transportation to go somewhere else,” said Debbie Arakel, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity California.

Arakel hadn’t heard of FEMA’s experience selling trailers or mobile homes but said it sounded promising, especially in terms of offering “certainty, stability, and affordability” for storm survivors.

Both she and the Urban Institute’s McTarnaghan pointed out that in many cases, disaster recovery can take years and years. Arakel knows first-hand that some residents of Paradise, California, are still rebuilding after the devastating 2018 fire. In comparison, the outcomes for the residents of Rolling Fork have come about “like lightning speed.”

“I just see this as such a great answer," she said.

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It takes a village

For CFNM's Fulcher, the Rolling Fork project wasn't just a chance to make people whole. "It's a place with generational poverty," he said. "They all rented, you know, they were low income, and now they've been handed keys and they're the owner of an asset. They can pass it on to their next generation."

The FEMA mobile homes have a value of $100,000, according to Fulcher and Chatman, so the roughly $6,600 paid per home was leveraged more than six times. While mobile home residents do have to pay a monthly fee to lease the "pad" where they are situated, those costs are only a few hundred dollars a month, an amount Chatman believes to be manageable for everyone. The homes were also made handicap-accessible for any of the residents who had special needs, like Martha Morris.

There are still more than 20 survivors in temporary housing that CFNM and Boss Lady are hoping to turn into homeowners by the end of 2024.

'Rolling Fork was king of the hill'

As fundamental as housing is, and as transformative as homeownership can be, a community that’s lost everything has needs on top of needs.

A special gift came early on in the process from another generous soul.

Archie Manning, patriarch of the family that includes quarterbacks Peyton, Eli, and Arch, has known CFNM for many years.

The 2023 storms “hit home for me,” Manning told USA TODAY. “I grew up in the Mississippi Delta in a town called Drew. In football, we played Rolling Fork. There were about 12 schools in our conference and Rolling Fork was the king of the hill. My junior and senior year they were the best team in my conference. In my senior year we were the only team that scored on them.”

In the aftermath of the tornado, Manning heard that Rolling Fork’s football facilities had been devastated and the team was trying to find a field where they could play. The NFL has a matching gift program which allows players and former players to make donations to schools, and both Peyton and Eli had previously participated, Manning said. “It just hit me that I could do that.”

Manning’s modest donation of about $10,000 was matched, and then the resulting publicity brought in more donor dollars, and the high school team was able to go back to playing. In fact, they’ve played heroically, Manning noted.

“It’s been gratifying to me that they have done pretty doggone well considering what they went through.”