She offers free child care after disasters. It’s a lifeline as families rebuild their lives.

When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight. 

Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They later moved into an Airbnb, where they stayed for nearly a year. The months after the storm were a blur, she said — lots of phone calls with insurance and hands-on work to fix their home, and all of that while scrambling to care for the boys, who were two and five at the time. 

“We needed time to be childfree so we could work. We needed to be bringing money in so we could have our house back in order,” Crabtree, who works as a therapist, said. “The limited child care was really making it challenging. It was limiting my ability to see clients.”

So she got in contact with Silke Knebel.

 A single mom, Knebel founded the National Emergency Child Care Network a few months earlier to help other mothers who might need child care in an emergency. What constitutes an emergency is broadly defined in Knebel’s mind: It could be a disaster like Helene, It could be snowstorms, like the one that brought massive damage to a big slice of the northeast, or just the need for a few hours to recharge after a particularly stressful day. 

In the last decade, weather and climate-related disasters have caused damages worth over $200 billion and affected the availability of child care in the long and short term. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 damaged over 650 child care centers, permanently closing 52 facilities. The Maui wildfire in 2023 destroyed four of the nine child care programs that were available in the city of Lahaina. Last year, the Los Angeles wildfires affected over 500 child care providers, with Altadena losing 60% of its child care centers in the tragedy. 

Knebel’s desire to help others when a disaster strikes comes from her own experience as a single mom. In kindergarten, her eldest son was diagnosed with a mental health condition known as “conduct disorder,” which manifests as aggressive and behavioral issues.It soaked up a lot of Knebel’s emotional and physical energy. “I feel for other moms, because I had weekends where I cried all day and I needed that five or six hours of [care] from just somebody showing up at my door,” she said.  

Her nonprofit is designed to do exactly that — deploy to families in a crisis. The organization is staffed by volunteers who have undergone extensive background checks and are trained in trauma-informed care — “We don’t bring on 16-year-old Care.com babysitters,” Knebel said. The volunteers are typically deployed in pairs to families in need, at no cost.  Many of them are retired teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and mothers and grandmothers who simply want to help.

For Crabtree, they were a godsend. “The kids loved the people who came out and played with them,” she said. They would show up and have different games and toys and animal crackers and the kids were just so excited.” 

In the weeks and months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel connected over 50 families like Crabtree’s with child care volunteers. One mother had a sick and disabled husband at home  and when the storm hit, she was left to figure out how to do basic things like find water while taking care of her children and partner. Another, a mother of four, was worried that if she didn’t return to work soon, she wouldn’t be able to pay rent, but her child care center had been closed due to the storm. Then there was the family whose nanny’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Sometimes, the mothers who called — the callers were almost always moms —  were just exhausted or in desperate need of a few hours away from their kids to sort through the piles of paperwork, to call insurance adjustors, to figure out how to rebuild. 

The first person to call Knebel’s child care emergency hotline was, however, the manager of a local bank. One of his employees was struggling to find child care weeks after the storm. Employers “try to be accommodating and compassionate,” she said. “But after a while, they’re like, ‘Okay, you need to come to work.’ And that’s when the real burden and stress hits families, because the child care is still not open.” 

And it wasn’t the only employer she helped out. United Way of Asheville, an organization that provides disaster relief, requested volunteers to staff a pop-up child care for their employees. Also, an area school requested help for 40 teachers who all needed care for their own kids. 

At the same time that parents were struggling to find care, some 148 child care centers and home-based providers had been damaged by Helene — and no one knew how or when they would reopen.

The barriers to getting child care back up and running after a disaster are immense, says Susan Butler-Staub, a senior vice president at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization. “One of the biggest issues is finding a suitable environment,” she said. “If you’re a home-based provider and your home has been flooded or your home is gone, then can you find a temporary place that meets regulation?”

If a provider is able to stay in their location, there’s usually a long list of issues they have to deal with first. “With a flood, you’re going to be dealing with mold in the walls,” she said. In western North Carolina, where Helene hit, “they are still dealing with water quality issues, so you have to filter the water before you can give it to children.”

But even when facilities recover, paying for child care can become too much for families. Crabtree, who utilized child care volunteers mostly to assist while she rebuilt her house, said she could only afford to pay for child care when her extended family helped cover the cost. 

A few months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel was faced with another call to action: Catastrophic wildfires were sweeping through Los Angeles and families would need help in the aftermath 

Knebel’s organization promptly recruited and trained around 70 volunteers and connected with mothers like Briana Pozner, who had a 2-year-old and went into early labor with twins after the fires. While Pozner’s house wasn’t destroyed by the fire, it was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, forcing the family to move out for a few months. 

Pozner and her family had already been preparing for how life would change with twins before the fires struck. She had recently enrolled her son in preschool — but then the preschool burned down. “It was like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to get stability and figure out our son’s school.” 

In Los Angeles, the impact of the wildfires on child care was devastating. Cindy Esquivel, program manager at the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that provided small grants to child care providers recovering from the wildfires, said that many home-based providers were still struggling to reopen. In some cases, they lost their homes and their businesses in one fell swoop. 

Finding the money for them to rebuild has been difficult. Of the 136 grantees that Esquivel surveyed after the disaster, 40% did not have insurance. Many home-based providers also rent their homes and in the aftermath, rents skyrocketed in the region, making it difficult to find a suitable and affordable location. 

Private child care providers do not qualify for FEMA funding. They can apply to the Small Business Administration for low- interest loans, but the process for approval is long and bureaucratic. Instead, a lot of funding comes from foundations and grant-making organizations. States have also chipped in, but the amount available varies by state and is usually a drop in the bucket compared to need, say experts. It’s an industry that, in the best of times, is already underfunded and operating at capacity. 

A friend who had been volunteering with Knebel’s organization suggested that Pozner reach out and ask for assistance. Once the family were able to return home, “We had to get the whole house back in order with these little babies that I was breastfeeding.” The volunteers watched her newborns while Pozner and her husband unpacked and organized. 

Her son’s preschool eventually reopened, but it is now in its third location. Similar to North Carolina, it has been challenging for child care facilities and schools to find new homes. 

Knebel is only set up to offer help in California and North Carolina because that’s where she has volunteers. She plans to expand to other disaster prone states like Florida and Texas but needs to raise more funding to make that a reality. In the meantime, However, she gets calls from all over the country, for women experiencing all sorts of challenges. A few weeks ago, she heard from a woman in a domestic violence shelter who needed someone to watch her two children for a few hours. She has also fielded several calls from women at hospitals who need someone to watch their kids while they undergo surgery. Once, a grandmother whose daughter had just been incarcerated called, in need of someone to help watch her grandkids. 

Knebel wishes she could help everyone. “It isn’t really just disasters. It’s school shootings, divorces, it’s a medical crisis, just experiencing a car accident,” she said. 

Lately, she’s wondered how she can tap into the network of volunteers her organization trained in Los Angeles to help families who are afraid to send their kids to school because of ICE raids. In the last few days, she’s been emailing volunteers about the potential need for deployments if child care and schools closed in North Carolina, one of the states hit hard by the weekend’s winter storm. 

“We just want to be there when children and parents need us,” she said. “Especially now, when things are getting so doom and gloom.”