 At Audiology Associates at Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. The Appalachian Pioneer Program is a non-profit organization that seeks to help residents of the Appalachian region who are facing obstacles that may seem otherwise insurmountable. Drawing from his own experiences with losing everything and starting over, the organization's founder, Austin Shuck, is now committed to helping those in similar situations however he can. Recently, his organization provided some financial relief for one resident and her family who had lost their home following major flooding in their area. So, in March, I was on vacation and I really had been out of the house at all in a couple of years essentially because of COVID and was really enjoying myself when I get news that there's been this crazy amount of flooding that has happened in Eastern Kentucky. And it's something to do with natural disaster. That's when it really hits home for me because in 2012 my house was hit by a tornado. And so because of this, this sense of helplessness that I had experienced myself when you lose everything, I knew that there were people in the areas around where I was from that would be feeling this and it's a horrible feeling. Having felt this sense of helplessness, I was like, I want to be there for people. And so we have done some work prior and had never really done any work for natural disaster, but we did a flood relief concert in March. And we had this really strenuous process of getting the non-profit official so we could give this money to this family. That way they wouldn't get extremely taxed on it, which would be ridiculous because we wanted to help them. But we gave it to Kathy Sawyer's and for a little backstory, her family's house was completely flooded and essentially all of the things and belongings that they had were damaged. And they didn't have flood insurance. I didn't actually find that out until we gave them the money the other day. So this was really, really needed. And following the flood, the husband was electrocuted while moving his car and had a massive heart attack and died. And the easiest part for my family was always that I had my family intact still. I had my mom, I had my dad, and I had my sister. And that made it so much easier to get through this tragedy that I couldn't imagine having to make it through. Kathy's daughter was about to go to college and having had this crazy transition happen in her life where she loses her dad and then her house is flooded and then having to go to college. And then Kathy having to support her daughter in college, having all this stuff just happened. It was just insane. And so initially the goal was to raise money to give multiple families a little bit of money. But after talking to a lot of people that have had some success with nonprofits and just helping people, they're like, you honestly make a much larger impact when you go after just one or two or three people as opposed to like last Christmas we did a Christmas project and that's still what we're going to do with the Christmas project. So we helped 12 families with that. And we gave 12 families $500. And so that was cool. But in this case it was like giving 12 families $500 that have experienced flood damage is going to be small potatoes essentially. We raised just over $7,000. We gave her a check for $6,550 and then we're giving her daughter a gift card because she's in college. For those interested in learning more about the Appalachian pioneer program, Shook says he can be found on multiple social media platforms. You can reach me at WhatTheShook301 essentially on all social media platforms that's on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, on Facebook. I am Austin Keith Shook. If you want to have me as your friend, if you want to follow my podcast on that, it's just WhatTheShook podcast. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joshua Sloan.