On March 6, 2026, Russ Altenburg (Program Director at The Leon Levine Foundation) spoke to the WNC Health Policy Initiative about the foundation's new Good Jobs WNC initiative. This data-driven competitive grant initiative will begin with WNC's 11 community colleges before expanding to other education-to-employment organizations across the state to provide vulnerable and underrepresented learners with access to high-ROI, living-wage careers. Its focus on WNC is intended to support post-Helene economic recovery while building a statewide Good Jobs framework.

A year after the storm, the WNC Health Policy Initiative, in partnership with the NC Center for Health and Wellness, has launched a study to explore how health system leaders navigated the challenges of Hurricane Helene: what worked, what didn’t, and what must change to strengthen our regional response in future crises. Through interviews and qualitative research, the team is gathering critical insights to shape smarter, more resilient practices for health organizations, communities, and governments across WNC. In this episode, our research team shares how this study was developed, why it matters, and what they hope to achieve.

The Western North Carolina Health Policy Initiative (HPI) has launched a new podcast series that takes a deep dive into a new WNC HPI research project exploring what we can learn about our region’s healthcare response in the days and weeks following Hurricane Helene’s devastating landfall across Western North Carolina on the evening of Sept 27, 2024.

This project is one of 21 Helene-focused research efforts supported by the North Carolina Collaboratory, and is driven by team members from across the North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness (NCCHW) and UNC Asheville’s Health Sciences department who are working to capture this critical piece of our region’s recent history.