As told to Macey Shofroth | Photo by Duane Tinkey

When Jennifer Garside’s husband looked out their window the afternoon of May 21, 2024, there was barely enough wind to move the leaves. 

But just two blocks over, in their town of Greenfield, Iowa, an EF-4 tornado tore a destructive path that killed five people, injured more than 35 people and caused millions of dollars in damages. 

As the town began the rebuilding process, Garside decided to leave the job she’d had for 35 years to lead the Greater Greenfield Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports many projects throughout the town. Since the tornado, the foundation has been helping affected people through direct monetary support, options for mental health care, recreational opportunities for children and more. 

Garside has lived in Greenfield her entire life, and she felt called to give back to her tight-knit community. She shared with Fearless why she chose to take on this new role to help her town recover from one of the most devastating moments in its history. 

The following story has been formatted to be entirely in her words, and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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I’ve lived my whole life here. I grew up and went to school in the neighboring town. Sometimes, you never get away from your small town. Some people might find that a bad thing, but I never wanted to go anywhere else. This is my home and this is where I want to be. 

I had worked at FNB Bank all of my adult life. So when the tornado happened, and I felt called to do this recovery thing, it was really difficult. I had been at one place so long, and it wasn’t like I was looking to make a change. When you’ve been with that group of people for so long, they’re more than just your co-workers. They’re like your family, especially in a small town. 

I’ve always been community-minded. I’ve always been a part of a lot of different groups, which I think most people in a small town are. That’s what makes small towns go and to be able to continue to prosper. 

We were in a tornado warning most of that day. People who live in Iowa have been through lots of tornado watches and warnings. Something did feel different that day. It’s the first time I can ever remember that school got out early because of a potential tornado. We’re used to that for snow and ice and things like that, but that was weird. 

I was at the bank working and we were just getting ready to go home. I got home maybe about 5 minutes before it started. I live on the north side of town. My husband was looking out of the window and saying, “I don’t think it’s doing anything.” Our daughter lives just two blocks away and she was right in tornado alley. She and her family had all come home early. They were in the basement, and she was on the phone with my husband and said, “I don’t think we’re going to have a house.” At our house, we didn’t have so much as any wind or a leaf down. 

We got into his truck as soon as we could, and you really felt like you were in a movie. It was just surreal. All I could think of those first few days was the debris. I just thought, “We will never get rid of this debris.” 

We had to park a couple blocks away from my daughter’s house. You felt like you were in the “Twister” movie. There were mounds of debris everywhere and there was a very strong gas leak. There were power lines down. My daughter is a nurse. We got there within 5 minutes and she was already out triaging. My son-in-law works for our utilities company as an electrician, so he needed to get going right away, too. There were people laying in the street that were injured. So we got to our grandkids and each put one of them on our backs and carried them out. They were 4 and 5 at the time. It was just very surreal. 

My daughter and her family couldn’t live in their house, but they were lucky that they could rebuild. They moved in with us that night. You really find your blessings because the two houses right behind their lot were totally gone. The house beside them to the north that they share the property line with was totally gone. The three houses right across the street were totally gone. 

There’s still a lot of rebuilding going on. It takes a long time to get through the insurance processes and decide what you want to do. It’s been a huge stressor on people, because no matter what kind of insurance you had, no insurance makes you whole. That’s something we’re going to be dealing with down the road. You have people that are taking out of their 401(k)s. We heard from a lot of people that they were going to retire this year or next year, and they’re going to have to keep working. Or people who had been mortgage free and now they’ve had to take out a mortgage. The long-term impacts are more than just losing your house. We had a good friend who lost both of his parents. The other people that lost their lives – you’re in a small town, we knew all of them. 

The Greater Greenfield Community Foundation has been around since the early ’80s. It was set up by some local citizens that knew you needed a foundation to carry out projects. We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. I joined as a volunteer board member in the late ’90s. Someone would pass away and we were in their will, or someone wanted a small memorial bench but they didn’t know how to go about it. We had big projects, little projects and everything in between. 

We were given some money to build a new congregate meal center in the late ’90s. We did a YMCA, which is our fitness center now. We did the school, the new track and the stadium. As word got out, we just kept doing more and more projects. We were all volunteers and it was taking a lot of time. We do a lot of scholarships at the school. We have a community betterment grant. The last five to 10 years, I think we have 20-plus projects under us that are ongoing. 

When the tornado happened, that night we had various people reach out to us asking if we could take this on. We had an emergency board meeting by phone and decided yes, we will. We opened a tornado relief account. It got to be where we knew we were going to have to hire a director, because this wasn’t something that was going to go away. In the first 30 to 60 days, our email address that had maybe gotten an email a couple times a week received 6,000-plus emails. It was going to be more than a full-time job for somebody.

In July, I typed up my resignation letter and turned it in to the bank. I think they probably thought I was having some post-traumatic stress myself. They really tried to ask, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” I am a religious person, and I really felt like it was God or the universe calling me to do it. It seemed weird because I wasn’t looking to change jobs. I only had about 10 years until retirement. And I think some people were like, “What are you doing?” Because it was a huge change. My husband has owned a small business his whole adult life, so I’ve always been the one to carry the benefits. Leaving the bank, I had to go out and get it all on my own. 

I just felt the whole time it was right. We talked about it so much, and my husband said, “If you don’t do it now, you probably won’t do it.” I had the history with the foundation so I knew how things worked. That’s why the board offered the directorship to me. I was honored that they thought of me to be able to lead this. 

We talked to Chris Luhring, the city manager of Parkersburg. He’s been a great resource for us. Their tornado was over 15 years ago, and he gave us examples of things they’re still dealing with. He told us recovery isn’t a one-year, two-year, five-year deal. It’s a long-haul process. 

I knew this would be a huge lifestyle change, too. We were just surviving day to day last year. My daughter, son-in-law and two grandkids had moved in with us. My son-in-law was working around the clock for a long time for the utilities company, and we were just trying to take care of the little ones. My nephew had to move out of his house and my brother and sister-in-law owned the laundromat that was pretty well destroyed. My husband was working at my daughter’s all the time and trying to help my nephew and his brother out when he could. It was just a lot. 

For those couple months after the tornado, nobody was sleeping much. I was coming home from work, trying to help the grandkids or work at the house, and I was doing mostly foundation business. I was only getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night for a couple months. I knew health-wise, nobody could maintain that. I thought, “I just need to make a decision that’s best for our family, my health and the foundation, because the whole town is going to need ongoing support in a lot of different ways.” 

This was big for our residents, because nobody had ever been through this. Everybody needed a lot of help. There are a lot of organizations, but we tried to be that resource point in a lot of different ways. We made payments out to everybody who was impacted. We categorized it from those that lost their house entirely to the heavily damaged to minor damaged, but sometimes minor damage was even $80,000 to $90,000. There were medical bills because so many people were injured. 

We had groups reaching out to us, one of which was the Roy Carver Foundation. They had a grant and made an exception for us being out of their territory. Part of it was for youth programming. We were able to do a whole bunch of youth programming like free summer camps and all kinds of fun stuff last summer. One of the things Parkersburg said is to really make an impact on your youth, because they’re going to remember this one bad event. But if you can give them good things that came from it, like new playground equipment, that’s what’s going to stay with them. Sometimes we’ll do free summer movie days. We did free pool passes. 

The other half of the Roy Carver Foundation grant was specifically for medical bills. We’re hearing from people it was a godsend. They figured out their true out-of-pocket costs and we would come in and pay for some of those. They’ve already been injured or had children that were injured. They’ve lost their house and all their belongings. They have nowhere to live. Do they really need to worry about how they’re going to pay their medical bills? 

With the remaining money, we’re really concentrating on the mental health and we’ve started the Rise program. We did these community surveys right after the tornado and asked, “Were you impacted by the tornado? What level of damage did you have? What help do you think you’re going to need? Do you feel like you’re going to need mental health help?” 

Most people said yes to the mental health. But when we would put group things out there, nobody was willing to step up yet. Then we noticed a huge shift this spring when we had some tornado warnings and people started to be scared. I think they’d had enough time – last year they were just trying to survive, they didn’t feel like they had time to do any self care. The kids definitely were having post traumatic stress once storm season rolled around. April through now, we have gotten more requests for mental health support than we did all of last year. People are realizing that they need help and there’s nothing to be ashamed in that. We’re trying to remove the stigma with our Rise group. Some people don’t have insurance that covers therapy or maybe they only get two or three visits, so we’ve really tried to get the word out that we have funds that can take care of that out of pocket. 

Every Friday, we put out a community update. We would tell people about what we’re doing here to help, where to go and try to connect them with things happening in the community to get people engaged again. We’d mention something about mental health in there. We have a whole list of licensed therapists. We have a mental health service that comes here every Tuesday and meets with people. It doesn’t have to be related to the tornado. We will reimburse you as long as the therapist is licensed. We have lists of local services you can reach out to. We have a monthly community conversation, which is a supper where they talk about a different topic every month. Maybe therapy is not for everybody, but sometimes just talking out loud makes a person feel better. 

The year before the tornado, we inherited the old Presbyterian Church in town. They gave us an endowment that went with the building that could carry on their missions. This building has always had the personal hygiene, cleaning and baby supplies pantries. They’ve become even bigger after the tornado because we had a ton of people that were staying in hotels or campers and didn’t have room to store things. People who had never thought in their life that they would come to a pantry. We were open seven days a week for the first few months. Now we’re open five days a week or by appointment. 

It was huge. We would have giving weeks where we would contact everybody and say, “We have a check for you,” or “We have a gift card for you.” Around Christmas time, we gave everybody a check to help them out. We gave out gift cards, food boxes, turkeys and pork loins. We did “Restore Christmas” and gave out Christmas trees, decorations, stockings. A lot of people lost their winter coats and boots, and we’ve always done our winter gear program for kids or families that needed help. Last year we gave out hundreds of coats and boots and snow pants. This was just the place people would come. We had no idea what a blessing this building would be. 

I still tear up from time to time thinking about how terrifying it all was. But first and foremost, our family was OK. We can do anything now, because not everybody had that. Who cares if you only get 3 hours of sleep at night? We’re doing really good work here. I think that small town people just band together. Everybody was doing enormous things to help with the recovery. We had a big recovery committee and everybody had their niche, and it just all really fell together. 

We had many people here last summer and some people out of state. One of them had a huge food truck that was here a little over two weeks. When they were getting ready to leave, they said, “We go to disasters all over the U.S. and you are the best organized disaster we’ve ever seen. You are all pulling together and no one seems to be fighting and disagreeing.” I kind of held on to that. I hope everybody pays it forward, and I’m not just talking about people in Greenfield. A lot of people are still in the midst of dealing with things. I think that just in general, no matter where you are – small town, big city – there’s always a way that you can give back. I hope that we continue that.