Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Community members working together after the HPCC fires and floods

image credit : Kayt Peck

How Neighbors Helping Neighbors Responded to the HPCC Fires and Floods

Disaster recovery is often measured in dollars deployed and infrastructure rebuilt. Following the HPCC Fires and Floods, more than $5 billion flowed into response and recovery through FEMA and associated programs. Yet for many residents It felt like waiting—waiting for decisions, waiting for paperwork, waiting for someone to explain what came next.

Against this backdrop, Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) emerged as a vital, community- centered presence. Although NHN's operating budget was modest compared to the scale of federal disaster funding, an extraordinarily generous grant from the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) made sustained engagement possible over the last three years. Its impact was transformational, enabling what large systems often cannot provide: time, trust, and hope.

This gap between institutional capacity and community experience raises a central question: What sustains recovery when formal systems falter or feel inaccessible? The experience of Neighbors Helping Neighbors suggests that the answer lies not primarily in scale, but in partnership.

Partnerships That Met People Where They Were:

How Neighbors Helping Neighbors Centered Listening in LongTerm Recovery

Las Vegas, NM — In the years following the HPCC Fires and subsequent flooding, Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) found that recovery depended not only on resources, but on relationships. With the support of UMCOR, NHN cultivated a network of partnerships defined less by financial exchange and more by a shared commitment to meeting residents where they were in the recovery process—and listening to them as people, not as paperwork.

Partnership as Practice

Community celebration of successful partnership outcomes

Across all these collaborations, one principle remained constant: people came first. NHN's partnerships succeeded not because of the size of the budgets involved, but because they were rooted in listening, humility, and presence.

In a recovery landscape often dominated by forms and timelines, these partnerships offered something different—a reminder that healing begins when people are heard.

Residents as Partners

The most important partnerships Neighbors Helping Neighbors built were with residents themselves. Rather than approaching survivors as clients or beneficiaries, NHN invited community members into conversations, planning, and peer support—treating them as partners in recovery. This approach helped sustain engagement during a long and often frustrating process, ensuring residents felt seen, heard, and respected, even when progress moved slowly. “They didn't just tell us what to do or hand us a form. They listened. For the first time, it felt like someone understood what we were going through.” — HPCC Fire survivor

Partnership Stories

Convoy of Hope: Serving Side by Side

Convoy of Hope volunteers working alongside community members

Pictured : Restore our Colorful Colorado

NHN's partnership with Convoy of Hope, Rocky Mountain Menonnite Disaster Services, and Restore Our Colorful Colorado brought skilled volunteer teams into the community at key moments in the recovery timeline. These teams did more than complete construction or cleanup projects—they worked alongside residents, building trust through presence and consistency. For families navigating prolonged loss and uncertainty, that relational approach mattered as much as the labor itself.

Community Listening Sessions: Recovery Begins with Hearing

Community members gathered for a listening session

Cassidy Tawsee Garcia, PhD student of Geography, University of New Mexico partnered with NHN and hosted community listening sessions, creating space for residents to speak openly about their needs, frustrations, and hopes. These gatherings were intentionally nonbureaucratic. There were no intake forms or eligibility thresholds—just conversation. What NHN heard shaped everything from project prioritization to partnership development, ensuring recovery efforts reflected lived experience.

Bellow Forth: ReRooting Recovery in Place

image credit : Bellow Forth

Through its partnership with Bellow Forth, NHN helped residents reconnect to land and place after devastation. This collaboration focused on restoration, replanting, and stewardship, reinforcing the idea that recovery is not only about rebuilding structures, but about restoring relationships—to community, environment, and future.

Labor of Love

Labor of Love was a “crop-mob” volunteer campaign launched by Bellow Forth in response to needs of assistance brought up during the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Community Story Circles. A lot of folks needed help with basic labor around their homes and land after the fires - especially relating to debris removal, replanting and work for erosion control.

Over the course of two months, our volunteers helped nine families, planted over 400 trees, hauled trash, hauled soil, cleaned fences and built relationships with land and the folks in rural Northern New Mexico.

More information can be found at www.bellowforth.com

Bridging Systems Without Becoming One

Partners meeting with community organizations and government agencies

NHN also maintained formal working relationships with community foundations and government agencies, serving as a trusted intermediary rather than another layer of bureaucracy. These partnerships allowed NHN to translate systems into human terms and elevate resident voices into formal recovery conversations—without losing the relational focus that made the work effective.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors