A Moral Vision for Community Health in Buncombe County
By Dr. Terry Threadwell
Buncombe County is a place of extraordinary beauty, creativity, and resilience — yet beneath our vibrant community lies a quieter crisis. Too many of our neighbors live without access to affordable health care, mental-health support, or the stability that allows a person to heal and flourish. When a community cannot meet the basic health needs of its people, it is not simply a policy failure; it is a wound in the social fabric itself.
I believe health is a moral issue. Mental health is a moral issue. Addiction, homelessness, and trauma are moral issues. They require not judgment, but courage — the courage to build a community that refuses to leave anyone behind.
Expanding Behavioral-Health Partnerships and Mobile Crisis Care
We know that emergency rooms and jails are not mental-health providers. They are stop-gaps, not solutions. Buncombe County must deepen its partnerships with behavioral-health organizations, expand mobile crisis units, and ensure that help reaches people where they are — not after their crisis has already spiraled.
Treatment should not depend on whether a person can drive, pay, or navigate bureaucracy. Compassion must travel.
Supporting Community-Based Recovery Over Criminalization
We must stop confusing illness with criminality. Addiction is a disease, and recovery is a journey. Punishment cannot heal trauma; shame cannot restore dignity.
Community-based recovery programs — led by peers, social workers, and faith communities — are proven to reduce relapse, strengthen families, and rebuild purpose. I will fight to expand these programs, fund them sustainably, and embed them in every corner of the county.
When we treat addiction as a health issue, we are not being “lenient.” We are being moral.
Integrating Mental Health with Housing and Employment
A person cannot recover without stability.
A person cannot heal while sleeping in a doorway.
A person cannot rebuild their life when every day is a fight to survive.
Mental-health care must be woven together with housing support, job training, childcare, and community mentoring. These are not separate issues — they are one human story.
When people have a home, a purpose, and someone who believes in them, healing becomes possible.
A Community That Carries the Weight Together
A compassionate community does not turn away from pain; it leans in.
It carries the weight.
It binds up wounds.
It restores dignity to those whom society has forgotten.
This is the vision I carry for Buncombe County — not just improved services, but a moral transformation in how we see one another. Health is not a commodity. It is a shared covenant.
We can heal our social fabric — thread by thread — by choosing compassion over convenience, justice over judgment, and community over indifference.
Because a county is strongest not when it measures what it builds, but when it measures who it refuses to abandon.
Terry Threadwell for Buncombe County Commissioner 