All Hands and Hearts: ‘Flash flooding typically doesn’t go for 20 miles’

Alix Seyfarth has responded to disasters on multiple continents. She called her boss on July 6, 2025 — two days after arriving in the Hill Country — and told him it was some of the worst damage she had ever seen.

“Flash flooding typically just doesn’t go for 20 miles, 25 miles,” she said Monday on The Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week. “But the scale here was just — you guys were here. It was hard to fathom.”

Seyfarth, a Boston native based in Austin who has worked with All Hands and Hearts for most of the past 12 years, appeared on the final day of Nonprofit Week to describe an organization that came to the Hill Country after the July 4, 2025, flood and never fully left. When the July 16, 2026, flood hit, a smaller long-term home repair team was still actively on the ground.

All Hands and Hearts is a global disaster relief nonprofit focused on resilience, emergency response, and education. In Kerr County, the team worked out of the Center Point and Hunt fire stations — mucking, gutting, sanitizing homes, and coordinating incoming volunteers.

Now, with the immediate crisis phase behind them, the organization’s focus has shifted toward structural mitigation: the science of making homes survive the next flood rather than just cleaning up after this one.

“How do we go from being a state that needs to respond to one that can educate its residents and provide resiliency measures ahead of time?” she said. “Different materials. Making sure outlets are up at four feet instead of two. Putting in a French drain so it doesn’t flood as much.”

The community’s recovery knowledge base has grown significantly since 2025. Seyfarth described residents who now know immediately what questions to ask — whether to pull up carpet, how to handle paneling, what to do with a concrete subfloor.

“People know what to do,” she said. “They started right away. They started asking the questions.”

The organization is working in close collaboration with Texas State University and San Antonio regional VOAD — Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters — networks to develop and share mitigation education more broadly.

For perspective on timelines, Seyfarth noted that All Hands and Hearts is still rebuilding schools in Nepal from the 2015 earthquake. They are still rebuilding homes in North Carolina from two years ago. Long-term recovery is measured in years, not months.

To support their continued presence in the Hill Country: allhandsandhearts.org/donate.