Press & Media
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The Chrysalis Alliance
Founded by Emma M. Churchman LLC
The Chrysalis Alliance exists because trauma doesn’t wait for convenient timing - and neither do we.
Founded by nationally certified trauma chaplain, PhD candidate, and crisis response veteran Emma Churchman, The Chrysalis Alliance brings together practitioners, communities, and organizations ready to move beyond surviving and into transformation.
For media inquiries, speaking requests, or book orders: support@traumarecoverycertification.org📞 828.419.0940
In The News
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Rebuilding the Gathering Place Outlet
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Outlet: WLOS News 13
"We don't have a public gathering place right now in Gerton for our community. And that has had a significant impact on us mentally, emotionally and spiritually. "
In this local news segment, Emma Churchman speaks as both a Gerton resident and trauma recovery expert on the ongoing effort to replace the Upper Hickory Nut Gorge Community Center - a gathering place for nearly 300 people, destroyed in Helene's flooding and demolished in spring 2025. Nearly two years after the storm, volunteers are raising funds for a $300,000 open-air pavilion, with construction held up by an NCDOT bridge replacement still months away.
Churchman's words cut to the heart of what standard disaster recovery metrics miss: the loss of communal space is not a logistical inconvenience - it is a trauma wound that compounds over time. As the physical rebuilding stretches into its second year and the long tail of recovery settles in, this story illustrates why community infrastructure for gathering is as essential to healing as roads and bridges.
The Second Flood
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Outlet: Mountain Xpress
“If we don't rebuild people, if we don't create a standard of trauma recovery, then the second flood will keep taking what the first one started. ”
In this bylined opinion piece for Asheville's Mountain Xpress, Emma Churchman writes from her home in Gerton - where roads washed out again on May 25, 2026, reopening what Helene had already torn through.
The piece draws a sharp distinction between physical recovery, which has a checklist, and emotional and spiritual recovery, which has no shared standard at all. Drawing on a 2024 Stanford study showing that indirect deaths following hurricanes can reach 7,000–15,000 in the years after impact, she makes the case that disaster trauma is a public health crisis hiding in plain sight.
The article includes a grounding technique she teaches front-line disaster workers and closes with a direct call to action: communities cannot afford to keep rebuilding infrastructure while leaving people to process alone.
Post-Helene, The Buck Has to Stop Somewhere
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Outlet: Mountain Xpress
"We are exhausted because we have been doing the work of government ourselves, for two years (and for generations), on top of everything else."
Writing as both a Western North Carolina resident and trauma recovery practitioner, Emma Churchman examines what happens to communities when elected officials go silent after disaster. Twenty-two months post-Helene, she traces the accountability gap between federal dollars and the people who need them - and names what she sees not as a funding problem, but a representation problem.
The piece makes the case that institutional abandonment isn't just a political failure; it is a physiological one, accelerating the very harm that recovery is meant to reverse.
Community Highlights: Meet Emma Churchman
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Outlet: Voyage LA Magazine
“My story doesn't start in a boardroom. It starts in a crisis.”
In this Q&A profile from Voyage LA Magazine, Emma Churchman traces the origin of both Emma M. Churchman LLC and The Chrysalis Alliance to more than 25 years of showing up at the worst moments of people's lives - hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, and the quiet organizational crises that never make headlines but destroy people from the inside out.
What she kept finding, in corporate leaders and disaster survivors alike, was the same gap: plenty of resilience slogans, no real methodology. So she built one. The four-phase framework - Rescue, Recovery, Reconstruction, Evolution - emerged from field work with 50,000+ individuals and hundreds of organizations, and became the foundation for everything The Chrysalis Alliance does today.
Trauma Chaplain Offers Critical Guidance for Disaster Recovery
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Outlet: GracePoint Publishing
“When disaster strikes, communities need more than physical rebuilding - they need a clear pathway through the emotional wreckage.”
This nationally distributed press release, issued through GracePoint Publishing, spotlights Emma Churchman's work as a trauma chaplain and the core methodology introduced in her first book, The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene (GracePoint, 2025).
The release outlines her four-phase framework - Rescue, Recovery, Reconstruction, and Evolution - and makes the case that real-time trauma processing is not a soft skill but a survival strategy for leaders, organizations, and communities facing crisis.
Finding Hope in Hurricane Helene: A Journey to Recovery
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Outlet: The Successful Mind Podcast with David Neagle
“Her insights are revolutionary. She’s turned these observations into a comprehensive trauma recovery program that fills a massive gap in how we handle disasters.
~ David Neagle, Host
Emma joined bestselling author and business coach David Neagle on The Successful Mind Podcast to walk through her firsthand experience of Hurricane Helene in the mountains of Western North Carolina - including the 32-foot river surge that isolated 300 residents for weeks. She described the moment she became the emotional anchor at the local fire station and how those days in the field shaped her four-phase trauma recovery model. Neagle called her framework something no one in disaster response had documented before.
The conversation covers her book The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene (GracePoint, 2025) - not another disaster story, but a practical roadmap for any community facing overwhelming loss.
Featured Speaker: West Asheville, NC Volunteer Report
January 18–25, 2026
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Outlet: Mennonite Disaster Service
Emma was welcomed as a dinner guest at the Mennonite Disaster Service volunteer base in West Asheville during a week of active rebuilding across multiple Hurricane Helene recovery sites. Volunteers heard her recount the first days of the storm - a conversation that MDS field staff noted as a meaningful anchor for their ongoing work in the community.
The report also notes that Emma was a featured speaker at the MDS 75th Anniversary Celebration in 2025, a recognition of her sustained role in the long-term recovery of Western North Carolina.
Book Review: The Deep End of Hope
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Outlet: Mountain Xpress - "Smart Bets"
Asheville’s alt-weekly Mountain Xpress featured The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene in its arts and literature coverage, recognizing it as a “smart bet” - a book that earns its place on the shelf not through sentimentality but through honest documentation of what compound disaster and community resilience actually look like.
For a readership that lived through Helene themselves, the review carries particular weight.
As Seen In:
Media Resources
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Emma M. Churchman is available for media interviews, keynotes, and expert comment on:
Disaster response and community trauma recovery
Trauma-resilient leadership for organizations and executive teams
Post-traumatic growth as a business strategy
The long-term recovery of Western North Carolina post-Hurricane Helene
Credentials:
Nationally Certified Trauma Chaplain
MDiv · PhD Candidate in Conscious Business Ethics
25+ years crisis response and trauma recovery
Helped over 50,000 individuals and hundreds of organizations recover from trauma
Books:
Navigating the Deep End: Resilient Leadership in a Volatile World (GracePoint, 2026)
The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene (GracePoint, 2025)
Unshattered: Surviving My Mother's 123 Personalities and Transforming a Legacy of Abuse (GracePoint, 2025)
✓ 501(c)3 registered nonprofit | EIN: 42-1834781
✓ Based in Western North Carolina
✓ Aligned with FEMA national disaster management standards
✓ Aligned with NVOAD emotional and spiritual care guidelines