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For Katie Hill, it started with a little trinket she found at Goodwill that she thought might add a nice touch to the Winston-Salem house she’d recently moved into. But soon she was bringing home anything that caught her eye. Five years, four kids, four dogs, and two cats later, her home had become overwhelmed with stuff.
The situation got so bad that parts of the house started to fill her with dread. But where Hill saw a hopeless situation, the mothers of Hot Mess Express saw a mission.
The organization started in August 2021 when one mother saw another’s online post about struggling to maintain her home. They’ve been helping people clean house ever since, and are now a nonprofit that counts more than 1,600 volunteers nationally and 109 in the Triad.
‘Hot Mess Express’ Transforms Lives—One Swiffer at a Time
Work. Kids. Pets. It can all be overwhelming. What began as a small group of Triad women cleaning strangers’ homes for free has become a national movement.
“I feel very, very strongly that we all go through periods of our lives when we just need a little bit of help,” said Brittinie Tran, the organization’s president and board chair. “It’s normal. We’re not lazy. We’re not bad parents because we got behind on stuff. But we’ve been programmed to not ask for help.”
Have a news tip for our team? You can reach us at scoops@theassemblync.com.
Plane as Day
Last week’s deadly collision of a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in D.C. has highlighted concerns about the chronic shortage of air traffic controllers, including here in North Carolina.
Control towers at the state’s largest airports are short-handed, according to the latest Federal Aviation Administration data. Federally staffed air traffic control towers in North Carolina are operating at about 72 percent of industry benchmarks, which is on par with the rest of the country.
Staffing, said the National Air Traffic Controllers Association Southern Regional Vice President, Dan McCabe, is “among the shortest it’s been in 30 years,” even as airports like Charlotte Douglas International have gotten busier and busier. Reporter Johanna F. Still has more on the numbers here in N.C.
Welcome, BBI!
Some fun news for February: the Border Belt Independent is officially joining The Assembly’s network of newsrooms across the state.
BBI covers Bladen, Columbus, Robeson, and Scotland counties in southeastern North Carolina. They are certainly no strangers to our pages. We have worked with editor Sarah Nagem on stories about tribal recognition, a federal corruption probe, and rural voters. And reporter Ben Rappaport has written about race, development, and elections with us. BBI also recently added reporter Heidi Perez-Moreno to the team, who joined them from The Washington Post, where she worked in the features section.
Nagem will continue to edit BBI and Les High will remain its publisher. They will continue to publish at borderbelt.org and send their weekly newsletter, but you will also see more of their work featured in The Assembly. This partnership will allow us to deepen our reporting in the region, magnify the great work they’re doing down there, and strengthen the connection between our local newsrooms.
Our network now includes regional bureaus in Greensboro and Wilmington, as well as INDY Week in the Triangle and CityView in Fayetteville. If you want to help us continue to grow and reinforce our work around the state, consider becoming a subscriber today.
What We’re Reading
Gen Dead: UNC System schools are suspending general education and major-specific requirements for diversity, equity, and inclusion credits in response to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI executive order, Asheville Watchdog reports.
Holder My Beer: Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing challenge to the outcome of our state Supreme Court race, noting that what’s happening here “should concern all Americans.”
Cold: Axios looks at what the USAID funding freeze means for several big government contractors based in the Triangle.
A Message from Our Sponsor, Robinson Bradshaw
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