About the Founder, Cheryl Oakes Sutton

A former Knox County health department worker in social services is working to make it easier for people struggling to find help. Since 2017, she single-handedly compiled a 'Red Book' full of hundreds of resources, big and small.

"Pretty much anything the community might need help with, I can try to find them," Cheryl Sutton said. 

She said the concept of the book came during her time in social work.

"I had a lot of people coming in asking for different things. So I just started kind of keeping a little notebook and it was red, so everybody could find it," Sutton said.

Cheryl left the healthcare field due to physical and mental health problems that required her to start receiving disability benefits. However, she took her Red Book with her, and it's been her full-time pet project ever since.

"I spend at least an average of two hours a day digging," Sutton said. "So as I find stuff, I update it."

Sutton said a lot of what she does with the book is a reflection of some of the struggles she's lived through.

"A lot of the things were based on my needs, like for senior citizens or disabled people, or housing repairs and stuff like that. It's things that I faced that I needed help with," she said.

Both her physical and mental health has posed a challenge for Sutton. However, she remains steadfast in wanting to use that pain to make things better in the community.

"My motto — if you learn from the pain, it wasn't in vain. So, I try to make a lesson out of tragedies," she said. "If I need help with this, I'm not the only one. There's hundreds of other people out there that need the same kind of help."

That's why she keeps growing the Knox County Red Book of Resources so that others can find and access the resources available to them.

"The gratification for me, is just the people thanking me and being grateful that they found stuff," Sutton said.