When the Fourth of July flood tore through the Texas Hill Country, the disaster arrived with a violence few residents had imagined possible. Homes were ripped from foundations, businesses were demolished, parks disappeared under debris and mud and families suddenly found themselves navigating a future measured in uncertainty.
In the months since, the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country has emerged as one of the central forces in the region’s recovery — not simply by distributing money, but by building what Executive Director Austin Dickson calls a human-centered system for rebuilding lives.
“We have built a human-centered system in this community,” Dickson said. “The flood victim experiences it as people surrounding them, wanting to help, and having the ability to help them.”
The foundation’s work has stretched far beyond emergency relief.
It has helped house displaced families, funded mental health care, supported businesses, rebuilt parks, launched environmental restoration projects and coordinated with dozens of nonprofit and civic partners. The scale of the response has been extraordinary for a rural region: Dickson said the foundation has raised about $150 million for flood recovery efforts and has already granted more than half of it out the door.
A recovery built on data, not guesswork
In the chaotic weeks after the flood, the foundation resisted the temptation to simply hand out checks indiscriminately. Dickson said the organization’s philosophy was that philanthropy must be driven by demonstrated need.
The foundation launched the Rebuild Kerr registry and needs assessment, which became the backbone of its recovery strategy. As of June, 508 people were working with case managers through the system, while another 139 cases had already been closed because needs were met.
Impact as of May 28, 2026:
- $78 million granted
- to date
- 100+ nonprofit partners funded
- 1,500+ families supported
- 600+ small businesses assisted
- 30+ first responder groups provided resources
Housing
Housing quickly emerged as the most urgent problem survivors faced. Based on the assessment, the foundation dedicated roughly 30% of all funds raised to housing-related programs based on the results: out of 964 responses, 452 people said that they needed home repair or rebuild assistance.
Those programs evolved into a layered response:
temporary lodging through partnerships with Airbnb and local landlords,
rent assistance, down payment assistance for families purchasing new homes, home repair and reconstruction programs, and an unmet-needs fund for housing costs that fell outside traditional assistance programs.
As of May, 22 households had received down payment assistance, and the unmet-needs program had helped 181 people with an average payout of $5,436.
Rather than replacing local nonprofits, the foundation often chose to strengthen them.
For housing reconstruction, the organization partnered heavily with Habitat for Humanity. Dickson said the foundation has provided more than $5 million to help Habitat scale up staffing and operations so it could handle massive repair and reconstruction needs that extended beyond its traditional mission of serving low-income homeowners.
The housing pillar of the foundation’s vision consisted of 18 grantees with more than $31 million donated.
Mental health
The foundation brought in the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute to assess community needs, but also invested in local providers and outside specialists. Grants supported organizations such as New Hope Counseling Center, while outside groups including Childers Brumder Center and the Ecumenical Center expanded services in Kerr County schools and community facilities.
Dickson said the flood exposed gaps that existed long before the disaster.
“We don’t have a full-time psychiatrist in Kerr County,” he said. “So we had psychiatric needs here. The flood surfaced problems that our community has.”
As of printing date, the foundation donated over $4.5 million to 17 grantees.
Partnerships became the strategy
The foundation’s approach depended on collaboration. Dickson described a simple framework the organization used repeatedly:
Does the community already have the capacity to solve this problem?
Does a local organization exist but need to be scaled up?
Or does the community need outside expertise brought in?
That framework shaped partnerships across nearly every area of recovery.
Business recovery
The foundation worked with LiftFund, a San Antonio-based nonprofit lender, to support flood-affected businesses. Business aid proved complicated because charitable organizations face restrictions on directly funding private businesses, but Dickson said LiftFund provided a workable model for helping companies survive the economic shock.
Environmental recovery
The foundation relied on both local knowledge and outside expertise. Local organizations such as the Riverside Nature Center were flood victims themselves — the center reportedly had two feet of water inside its building — so the foundation helped them recover while also bringing in larger partners such as the San Antonio Botanical Garden for major restoration efforts.
One environmental assessment estimated that 52% of vegetation along the river had been lost. That figure helped justify a major reforestation initiative that now aims to plant tens of thousands of trees across the region as well as improve overall ecology health.
$3 million to the San Antonio Botanical Garden’s Texas Recovery for Ecological and Environmental Stability (TREES) Initiative to plant 50,000 native trees along the Guadalupe River
$1.51 million to the Hill Country Alliance to lead a basin-wide restoration strategy
$180,000 to the Upper Guadalupe River Authority to remove invasive species and improve watershed health
Rebuilding community, not just structures
One of the most striking aspects of the foundation’s strategy has been its insistence that recovery is not only about roofs and walls.
Dickson argued that parks, trails, trees and gathering places are part of the community’s emotional infrastructure.
“We have lost homes, businesses, but we have also lost public space, trees, habitat,” he said. “It’s all one thing. It’s all loss in the community.”
That philosophy led to major investments in public spaces:
River Trail restoration: The foundation funded replacement of the destroyed Camp Meeting Creek bridge, along with new benches, trash cans and pet waste stations along the trail system.
Louise Hays Park: A major grant helped fund a new splash pad, upgraded playground, renovated dog park, resurfaced parking lots and sidewalks, and native landscaping.
Guadalupe Park: The foundation contributed half of a $750,000 restoration project, with NBA teams funding the other half.
Lions Park in Center Point: A planning and engineering grant is helping that community reimagine a park that was essentially wiped away by the flood.
$9.2 million to rebuild Louise Hays Park, Guadalupe Park, and the Kerrville River Trail
Dickson said the goal was to help the Hill Country feel like itself again.
“If we rebuild everybody’s home and we did nothing about the park, it would have been a strategic mess,” he said.
Working alongside the long-term recovery group
As the immediate crisis stabilized, Kerr Together — the region’s long-term recovery group — became another key player in the rebuilding effort. Dickson described the relationship as complementary rather than competitive.
The foundation focused on charitable grantmaking and direct recovery programs, while Kerr Together took on broader community issues such as flood warning systems, infrastructure, roads and bridges and long-term planning.
Dickson said Kerr Together’s working groups helped shape some of the foundation’s priorities, especially environmental restoration. Experts associated with the long-term recovery group recommended projects such as river-basin planning and large-scale tree restoration, recommendations the foundation later incorporated into its grantmaking process.
A governance structure built for disaster
Managing tens of millions of dollars in donations required a new structure inside the foundation itself.
The organization created three major recovery funds:
Housing
Mental Health
Community and Culture (including business recovery, environmental projects and civic assets)
Each fund is overseen by a volunteer advisory council composed of local experts. Housing decisions, for example, involve bankers, a realtor, an appraiser, an insurance broker and other community leaders. Mental health decisions are guided by social workers, neuroscientists, clergy and licensed counselors.
Dickson said the structure allowed decisions to be both local and informed by expertise.
“It is local voice, and it’s expertise, and not just whoever’s around that gets to decide the stuff,” he said.
The councils make recommendations, while the foundation’s board of trustees retains final approval authority.
Preparing for the next disaster
Even as recovery continues, the foundation is already looking ahead.
Dickson revealed that the board recently set aside $10 million permanently for a readiness and recovery fund aimed at preparing the region for future disasters.
The fund could eventually support efforts such as:
flood insurance education,
home resilience upgrades,
senior safety improvements,
and broader disaster-preparedness programs.
Dickson cited research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation showing that every dollar spent on preparedness can save $13 in recovery costs.
“This has touched us forever,” he said of the flood’s impact on the region.
The story Dickson says matters most
For all the discussion of grants, committees and recovery strategy, Dickson said the foundation’s proudest achievement is something less visible.
He told the story of a woman living in an RV after the flood. Through the foundation’s network, she received temporary housing support, case management, RV stabilization assistance and help with property taxes. Yet she did not know which organization had done what.
She only knew that people had shown up to help her.
“Her experience in her own words was that she was just surrounded by people that cared,” Dickson said.
To him, that is the real measure of success.
“It would be very easy to just set up a storefront and write people checks and send them on their way,” he said. “That is not how we’re doing things in this community.”
Nearly a year after the flood, the Texas Hill Country is still rebuilding. Trees remain bent sideways along the riverbanks. Some families are still displaced. Construction cranes and work crews remain part of the daily landscape.
But, the recovery effort has also become a story about civic capacity — about what happens when local institutions, nonprofits, volunteers and donors build a coordinated response instead of a fragmented one.
Dickson believes that model may outlast the disaster itself.
“We will be in American history as one of the fastest disaster recoveries ever,” he said. “And not only are we the fastest recovery ever, but it’s my hope that they will say this was the most human-centered recovery ever.”
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