High Country Caregivers – High Country Caregivers

Families Change Tomorrows

The High Country Caregivers mission is to provide advocacy, support,
and education for kinship caregivers and their families.

Learn More

Donate Now

UPCOMING EVENTS

The 5th Annual Coaches Invitational

May 17th – 18th, 2026

learn more

A Night at Chetola

September 10th, 2026

learn more

Hurricane Helene Disaster Response

Picking Up The Pieces,

Making New Memories

On September 27, 2024, the NC High Country was devastated by Hurricane Helene. The storm impacted almost our entire service area, The Board, staff, and numerous volunteers and donors immediately responded by making sure our families were located and safe. The next steps included food, fuel, and supply deliveries. Generators, heaters, clothing, everything imaginable…

Because of our proprietary Kinship Navigation Model and the family tiering system we use, we knew immediately what families were at most risk, how we could find them with no cell service or power, and what to have with us when we showed up at whatever might have been left of their homes. All of our families survived the winter with most finally getting full power restored at the end of April 2025. Five fully displaced families are now in homes provided by generous donors like you, and our amazing community. We can’t thank you enough for your outpouring of love and support – without your continued support these families may never have recovered.

What exactly is Kinship Navigation?

Keeping Families Together, Creating Permanency

High Country Caregivers offers comprehensive whole-family care to empower caregivers who take on the responsibility of caring for a relative or friend’s child. We work to keep children out of foster care and group homes allowing them to remain with families that love them. Through a variety of programs and your support, High Country Caregivers works along side kinship caregivers to help them improve the lives of these children.

Learn More

Our Programs

We provide a supportive and empowering programs to support loving kinship families!

The Children’s Wishlist

Thanks to the generosity of two women who reside in Florida during the winters, and call the High Country home in the summer, The Children’s Wish List was created to help meet some of the unexpected needs surrogate parents face on a daily basis.

Read On

Coach Jerry & Margaret Moore Sports & Recreation Scholarship

Thanks to Matt & Lori Weatherman and Carolina Forest Products along with matching gifts at the 2024 Coach’s Invitation Golf Tournament, the “Coach Jerry & Margaret Moore Scholarship” was created to provide sports, recreation, and summer camp opportunities for HCC kinship youth as well as much needed respite for our caregivers.

Eyes in the Wild

“Eyes in the Wild” is a 9-month nature adventure program that allows HCC youth to participate in nature adventures throughout the Appalachian wilderness including therapeutic guided hiking and camping excursions.

Pathways to Success

“Pathways to Success” offers middle school and teen youth access to vocational and educational opportunities to learn marketable skills and financial literacy within a structured and welcoming community of support. The program seeks to empower HCC youth to research and seek available educational resources for their futures with access to schools, skills, careers, and potential employers.

RAPP Support Group Meetings

Our “Relatives as Parents Program” encourages and promotes the creation of stabilizing community and safety-net resources for grandparents and other relatives who have taken on the responsibility of parenting youth due to the absence of the parents.

Kinship Navigation

Our “Kinship Navigation” model uses a tiering process to determine specific risk levels and offers assistance to kinship caregivers based highest priority needs providing information for financial assistance, legal services, and other resources to provide kinship youth with stability and permanency in the caregiver’s home.

Play Me a Memory

Our “Play Me a Memory” program offers opportunities for persons with early memory loss (EML) to engage in meaningful social and recreational activities in a secure and supportive setting to maximize their cognitive and social abilities.

How You Can Help

We need your help to truly change the lives of the families that we support. Your donations, gifts, and volunteer services result in transformative experiences for broken families in the High Country of North Carolina.

Sponsor a Family

Make a Donation

Grant awards and donations from large organizations are our primary funding sources for community outreach programs and critical in helping High Country Caregivers pursue our mission. If you are interested, we invite you to learn more about becoming a partner.

Family for a Year Sponsorship

This is the average amount of money spent on a family per year and includes funding for legal fees, recreational sports fees, dance lessons, and more for the children. We provide Mother’s Day gifts and meals for the grandmothers.

Cost: $5,000

Child Counseling Sponsorship

The licensed family therapists we work with operate on a sliding scale and specialize in play therapy for children whom have experienced abuse. The money donated is at least matched by these therapists, if not more.

Cost: $2,500

Legal Fee Sponsorship

Children come to us in traumatic situations that have immediate legal needs. Our attorneys work to obtain custody orders so caregivers can enroll children in school, get medical care, and prevent parents from taking children back to high risk homes.

Cost: $3,000

Emergency Sponsorship

Grandparents many times receive children late at night. We then deliver formula, car seats, diapers, cribs, bunk beds, and other essential items to these families and sometimes have to help them find larger housing.

Cost: $1,500

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
LEO BUSCAGLIA, AUTHOR

Latest News & Updates

A part of High Country Caregiver’s core mission is provide resources to all of those we serve. To achieve part of that goal, we regularly add new content to this website within our news and blog section. We also provide a link below to download the latest digital edition of our newsletter.