MemphisCares funds deplete within hours of hotline opening
A storm lasting about 30 minutes struck the Memphis area on 22 August and produced a bow echo storm pattern — a series of rain showers and thunderstorms — that brought down trees and power lines across the city. The damage toll was reported at $18 million, with more than 100,000 households losing power. In the days that followed, daytime highs reached 91°F (32.8°C), and tens of thousands of residents remained without electricity.
Amber Sherman, a Memphis coordinator for Black Voters Matter, was among the east Memphis residents who lost power. She said her first concern was for neighbors who lacked preparation for an extended outage in the heat. “My main thought was that the power’s going to be out for a while and people aren’t prepared for that and it’s very hot outside,” Sherman said.
Sherman contacted her supervisor at Black Voters Matter and partner organizations to organize relief, checked on neighbors, helped with meal distributions, and used her social media platform to update residents on conditions. “I think a lot of times, people outside of Memphis don’t know what’s happening here, and I thought it was really important because of what was happening Gary, too,” Sherman said, referring to the recent outage in Gary, Indiana, where residents went without power for two weeks.
Derrick Tillman, a Memphis small business owner who runs Detailers Multi-Service, drove 85 miles to Oxford, Mississippi, to buy generators from Ace Hardware. About 15 generators — including some sourced from Jackson, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee — were distributed from his home. Tillman then drove across the city installing them for residents. “I was able to still operate, to just help people, because I wasn’t stressed out on my end, mentally or physically,” Tillman said. “We all stick together and make things happen and use our resources, most likely, we can take care of each other with no problem.”
Multiple organizations coordinated hot meal distributions and water distribution alongside the generators: the environmental justice organization Young, Gifted & Green; the restaurant and resource hub Da Sammich Spot; the Mid-South Environmental Justice Center; the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition; and the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, which had formed in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and had been fortified during Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis. Elders, pregnant women, and children were prioritized for donations. Some volunteers delivered groceries to families who were afraid to leave their homes due to their immigration status.
Richard Massey, a community organizer and environmental justice advocate, described the response as a sustained community effort. “I don’t think that there’s been a greater testament to the character of Memphis and Memphians than what we’ve seen,” Massey said. “Regular people pitched in, donated resources, pooled resources and prepared hot meals for the community for free. In addition to that, we also had two networks of generators flowing into the city from Mississippi and from Nashville, and we were able to reach capacity. It’s been an intensive, week-long effort across the board in every corner of Memphis.”
The day after the storm, three community cooling centers opened from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., and eventually additional locations — branch libraries, Memphis parks community centers, and Memphis parks senior centers — were made available for residents to cool off, charge devices, and receive food or water. Memphis Mayor Paul Young and Memphis City Council Chair Jana Swearengen-Washington announced MemphisCares, a partnership between the city, the city council, and United Way of the Mid-South to coordinate relief. Through the program, the city made up to $100,000 available to help residents replenish groceries and receive food assistance.
“For many Memphis families, days without power also meant losing groceries they simply can’t afford to replace,” Young said in a statement. “We know recovery looks different for every family. Through Memphis Cares, we’re working with City Council and United Way to get help to the Memphians who need it most.”
Residents were only able to begin calling the MemphisCares hotline on 31 August — more than a week after the storm hit. Within hours of the hotline’s opening, funds were depleted. Callers were directed to a recording that said, in part: “We have received more requests for assistance than funds available. The staff at United Way is currently processing the requests and will distribute assistance beginning tomorrow until all fundable requests have been met.”
The gap between the grassroots timeline and the official timeline was a recurring theme in residents’ accounts. Sherman framed the community response as the product of distrust built up over time. “Community is always going to keep each other safe, and we can’t depend on systems to do that because they’ve shown us time and time again that they won’t,” she said. “In this instance, where I, as a regular citizen, had to recruit people in Jackson, Mississippi and Nashville to drive generators up and help to set up food distributions because our government isn’t doing that.”
The outages also raised questions about how power is allocated in Memphis. xAI data centers in the city, including the largest data center in the United States, maintained power while residential customers went dark. In an Instagram video, Tennessee state Representative Justin J. Pearson, whose campaign volunteers canvassed the Hickory Hill neighborhood to check on residents and share resources, said: “Working-class Black and rural communities are bearing the brunt of fallout from extreme weather events and the pressure that our grids are facing from the AI data center boom.”
Massey drew a similar connection. “These AI datacenters are significant consumers of power. They demand significant amounts of electricity; they strain power grids, and they make power grids more susceptible to failure during periods of inclement weather,” Massey said. “That’s not to say that they were the prevailing cause. That wasn’t the case. But the fact that our public utility has prioritized these massive allotments of power and [accommodated] corporate expansion over the maintenance of the power grid that residents rely on speaks to a deeply structural issue. They are prioritizing the interests of corporations over people.”
The Memphis outage drew immediate comparison to Gary, Indiana, a majority-Black city that lost power for two weeks in a storm shortly before the Memphis event. Both storms came near the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Sherman said the parallel highlighted a consistent pattern. “Highlighting that this issue with infrastructure in Black cities is not a new problem, but a consistent problem that we really need to address,” she said.
As of 2 September, most Memphis residents had their power restored, though a small number remained without. With another heatwave forecast across much of the country — and “feels like” temperatures in Memphis reaching 100°F (37.8°C) — the US Department of Energy has warned of an increased risk of blackouts. Massey said the community response was a source of pride but also a warning. “It’s a sobering reminder that we have a lot of work to do to build out a more sustainable, resilient grid that’s able to endure periods of inclement weather like this,” he said.