Stacey Parvin, a board member for the Starkville Community Foundation, still remembers when a Christmas Eve fire in 2024 on Central Avenue left four families stranded.

While Parvin and the foundation coordinated with the local emergency management agency and collected donations to help the families stay in a hotel while they searched for new housing, it was a hectic, uncoordinated endeavor.

That’s why Parvin is excited to get the ball rolling on developing more strategic emergency response plans with the help of the CREATE Foundation’s new Northeast Mississippi Disaster Recovery Council.

“It was a month (before they found permanent housing), and Starkville is a hard place to find affordable housing, and it was a vulnerable population. So we reached out to all of our partners (and it was difficult),” Parvin said. “… So we’re really grateful that we’re starting to do this in a blue sky time, so that we know that we can do it better the next time a disaster hits.”

The CREATE Foundation held a press conference Wednesday to announce the creation of the group’s new council, which will help to work with the CREATE’s 17-county service area – including Lowndes, Oktibbeha and Clay – to develop local emergency response plans for disasters ranging from ice storms to flooding to large-scale fires.

The council has already begun working to help form committees for each county-based affiliate to develop emergency response plans after the impact of Winter Storm Fern in January.

“Most of our counties … that CREATE covers have experienced some kind of disaster or another, and we experienced one most recently that got a lot of people’s attention and was something we hadn’t seen in quite some time,” said Mike Clayborne, CREATE president. “And as we started looking at the response and what CREATE could do to help, certainly one thing that we were looking to do was trying to get some resources … to (the) counties.”

Randy Long, chair for the CREATE Foundation Board of Directors, said the organization felt like a more cohesive response effort moving forward would be necessary after seeing the devastation from Winter Storm Fern.

“We knew it was coming,” Long said of Winter Storm Fern. “We saw it several days ahead, but yet it’s hard to believe it really (came) so fast. … (There was a) need to have a way to effectively deal with the funds that became so generously available, and that’s what CREATE can do, and that’s what this long-range, long-term disaster recovery council can do to help coordinate this on the local level, and that will help keep these local-level agencies active and involved.”

Suzy Bowman, director of regional impact for CREATE, said the goal in creating the council and in hosting a disaster recovery training conference this week at the organization’s office in Tupelo is to develop a more proactive approach for affiliates who may not have had a committee or council previously.

Bowman said the goal for the council is to act as a push to keep affiliate councils active and ensure they are planning and coordinating with local and state emergency response agencies and organizations to have a plan for all kinds of disasters that could hit an area.

The CREATE Foundation contributed $100,000 to the creation of the council, and the Tennessee Valley Authority donated an additional $200,000.
Bowman said the council is still workshopping how it will use that funding, but one idea is to delegate emergency response-related grant funding for affiliates in need.

“That is going to help jumpstart the effort, and we’ve had some great conversations this week with the community members who have gone through the training of what that looks like,” Bowman said. “Does there need to be some local coordination of maybe stipends to help people activate these councils? I mean, somebody’s going to have to do the work at the local level.”

Clayborne said that prior to this development and training, only about half of the 17 affiliates had a disaster recovery committee or council created.

Parvin said prior to the conference, the Starkville Community Foundation did not have a disaster recovery council. The group plans to host a meeting by the end of the year to get the ball rolling on what those plans will look like and what it feels are the most important events to prepare for in Oktibbeha County, she said.

“I think before the holidays … in October, we plan to have one meeting at least,” Parvin said. “… That is our plan. Leaving here is to have at least one meeting to get everybody at the table and just start talking about what that would look like in Starkville.”

Josie Shumake, a board member with the Lowndes Community Foundation who attended the first two days of the conference, said she believes this kind of initiative and push was needed for LCF.

Previously, LCF had an ad hoc committee that gathered as needed, but Shumake said a more permanent and preventative solution will help to have actionable steps in place for responses going forward.

“What CREATE has done is making us aware that there’s a big gap, I think, in what we as a community … can do to prepare for the next disaster, which will come,” Shumake said. “… This is the first step, but it’s not the last step. It’s the beginning of a journey that’s going to make our community a lot safer in the sense that … we don’t have to make it up on the fly when there’s the next disaster. We can just go into … ‘This is what we do,’ and adjust.”